Charming? Fetching? Adorable? Don’t believe your eyes.

As Elsie Mackay qualified near London for her pilot’s license in 1920, The Times’s caption of this picture (Slide 1) made it sound as if aviation was just another caper in the breathless life of the naughty daughter of Lord Inchcape. Over her father’s objections, Mackay had married an actor and performed on the silent screen as Poppy Wyndham. Now, here she was, flirting with airplanes — almost literally.

Mackay couldn’t have been more serious about aviation, however. And she couldn’t have paid a higher price for her devotion. In March 1928, she set out to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, in the first plane to make the difficult trip westward, against prevailing winds. (Charles Lindbergh flew eastward.) Not long into their flight, Mackay and the pilot, W. G. R. Hinchliffe, a man, were lost off the coast of Ireland.

She was soon eclipsed in the public eye by Amelia Earhart (Slide 13), who made a successful west-to-east journey three months later. But Mackay’s presence in The Times’s photo archive, along with dozens of other female aviators, is a reminder of a remarkable period in the skies in the 1920s and 1930s.

Susan Butler, whose mother was a pioneering pilot, recounted this thrilling era in “East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart” (1997). Flying, she wrote, was still a magical experience for everyone.

To women, though, flying was something more. Still hemmed in by all sorts of restrictions, still valued for looks and decorative skills, still steered toward passive accomplishments, for women it was the ultimate escape: total freedom, total mastery — no interference. Total liberation. Women who became pilots won something additional along the way: respect.

Even noble failures were rewarded handsomely, as when Ruth Elder (Slide 2) and George W. Haldeman set out in October 1927 to cross the North Atlantic aboard the plane named “The American Girl” (Slide 3 and Slide 12), a Stinson Detroiter similar to the aircraft flown by Mackay and Hinchliffe. They were well across the sea, and Elder was nearing her goal of becoming the first woman to fly across the ocean, when the plane lost its oil. Haldeman did a masterly job of ditching it near the Azores, and the two were rescued by ship.

Back in New York, they were accorded a hero’s welcome, though Mayor Jimmy Walker apparently could not restrain himself from observing, “Pulchritude is no bar to courage.” He was not speaking of Haldeman.

While it may have been easier for women to break the rules before the rules were codified, it was never exactly easy. When Earhart urged women to think about aviation careers in 1934, Ms. Butler wrote, she cautioned the audience: “If and when you knock at the door, it might be well to bring an ax along; you may have to chop your way through.”