Aerofeminism in the Anthropocene: Aeronautics, Feminism, and Atmospheric Control in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora and Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream”

Extract

At the fin de siècle women were engaged in aeronautics (ballooning, aviation) on a scale never before seen (Wright). Connotations of social change and feminist liberation quickly attached themselves to this socio-technological development, the female aeronaut posing as a suffragette.¹ In their respective contexts, turn-of-the-century Ohio and Calcutta, self-aware female aeronauts such as “Carlotta, the Lady Aeronaut”, the most successful balloonist in late-nineteenth-century US, and ballonist Ram Chandra Chatterjee’s daughter, the first Indian woman to fly, embodied this new type of daredevil woman: the global New Flying Woman (an alternative to the much-researched British New Woman). I argue that this spectacular figure who carves out an environment of her own through aeronautical stunts inspires the feminist utopias of the period. In other words, I argue that authors of the feminist utopia at the global fin de siècle formulate their ideal world by extrapolating the female practice of aeronautics—an act of socio-technological liberation—into a world of eco-technological domestication: the regulation of the atmosphere through either cloud seeding or electrical charging. By feminist utopia,² I refer specifically to Ohio schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s novel Mizora: A Prophecy (1880–81) and Indian author and educator Rokeya Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). These works both stage the atmosphere as an arena for female emancipation, or even, a feminist environment. Despite this generic proclivity, however, research on the feminist utopia in a transhistorical (Bartkowski; Johns; Wånggren “Feminist Utopias”) or a fin de siècle-perspective (Beaumont “The New Woman in Nowhere”; The Spectre of Utopia 151–72) has neglected to account for it. To provide new insight into this subject, I aim to account for, analyze, and discuss the imaginative intersection between female aeronautics and atmospheric control through the concept of aerofeminism.³ I understand aerofeminism as a common denominator for Lane and Hossain’s utopian feminism because it summarizes how they generalized the emancipatory conquest of the female aeronauts at their time into a future or alternative feminist world where women control the fluctuations of the atmosphere, revealing thus the extrapolatory connection between conquest and control.