Balloonomania belles : daredevil divas who first took to the sky / Sharon Wright.

"[This book] reveals the show stopping stories of the female pioneers of balloon flight. More than a century before the first aeroplane women were heading for the heavens in crazy, inspired contraptions that could bring death or glory and all too often, both. Women were in the vanguard of the 'Balloonomania' craze that took hold in the eighteenth and nneteenth centuries and swept across Europe then the world. Their exploits were a vital element of our first voyages into the sky. When women endured second-class status on the ground they managed to join the thrilling human quest for spectacle and discovery among the clouds. From the first perilous ascents in the 1780s, women never looked back ... or down. For 125 years they enjoyed a series of comic, tragic and heroic adventures. They were actresses, writers, heiresses, scientists, explorers, showgirls and suffragettes in the glorious golden age of ballooning - before war clouds and aeroplanes changed the skies forever. Who were these women who took to the sky when it was such an incredibly dangerous and scandalous thing to do?"--Book jacket.