Give the Women a Chance to Fly!

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 810, 2 November 1929, Page 20

Give the Women a Chance to Fly!

HE women being discriminated against in aviation? Is society pushing men forward and holding women back in the great modern conquest of the air? Miss Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic and perhaps best qualified to speak authoritatively on behalf of her sex, says emphatically that they are. Despite the fact that women are rapidly overcoming the inbred timidities which civilisation has imposed upon them, despite their widespread interest in flying and the future it holds for them, they are still bound by the chains of artificial difference between the sexes. She says:— "Women can qualify in the air as in any other sport. Their influence and approval are vital to the success of commercial aviation. Women and girls write to me by the thousands to learn the truth about aviation and what women's chances are. There is nothing in woman's make-up which would make her inferior to“a man as an air pilot. The only barrier to her swift success is her lack of opportunity to receive proper training. •‘Society has imposed unjust distinctions in the education of the sexes. Regardless of a woman's natural inclinations and talents, she has been assigned summarily to certain prescribed courses of study in public and private schools. Sewing and domestic science are made compulsory for schoolgirls whose propensities are wholly in the direction of things mechanical. Women have an abysmal ignorance of mechanics and engineering through no fault of their own. "However, the importance which mechanical labour-saving devices have assumed in the average American home is beginning to open the eyes of even the most helplessly feminine woman. She is beginning to realise that to keep in tune with the march of modern progress She must have some very definite mechanical knowledge. *

“She realises that it is important to her comfort, her efficiency as a worker and a buyer that she learn what makes the wheels go round. It is my firm belief that woman’s interest in aviation —backed up by the strong opinions of an air-minded generation of schoolgirls—will bring this question of unfair and unjust discrimination between the sexes as regards education with reference to vocational aptitude directly into the open and definitely burn away fallacious barriers. “Commercial aviation is a bustling industry, but at present it is making little or no effort to enable women to 9 secure the training and experience

required of an industrial pilot on one of the regular airways,” she said. “Sooner or later the hig air lines must enlist women's intelligent cooperation, because without them aviation cannot hope for success. One has only to study the history of the automobile industry to recoguise the truth of what I am saying. “Twenty years ago the idea that woman could learn to drive automobiles was considered preposterous. • The eternal bogies, feminine nerves and physical weakness, were advanced as final and conclusive arguments when all others failed. And strangely enough, today, in the face of superlative proof to the contrary, one sees these same threadbare, bromidic arguments solemnly dusted off and brought forth again to be used against women aviators. “I doubt if men will ever believe that there is :io such thing as feminine nerves as opposed to nerves of the masculine variety. Yet, if anything, virtually all of woman’s experience and training have been of the sort to give her nerves of iron. No man could endure for a half hour what is just part of a day’s work to a woman—cooking a dinner with one hand, rocking a cradle with the other, at the same time keeping a watchful eye on sonny and sister, who are probably very much underfoot. Certainly the performance of young business women in our great cities is a daily tribute to their ability to thrive under the tension of noise, big business and high-pressure work.” Born in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia Earhart lived there until she reached high school age. When (he United States entered the World War she was at Ogontz School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her sympathies were aroused by seeing four soldiers on crutches while she was visiting her sister in Toronto. She dropped school and started training under the Can-i adian Red Cross. Her first assign-! ment was at Spadina Military Hos- I pital. At the end of her hospital career 1

Miss Earhart. joined her father and mother in Los Angeles. It was in California that she first became actively interested in aviation. In 1920 she established the woman’s record for altitude. She holds the first international pilot's licence issued to a woman.

After some time in California, Miss Earhart decided to return to the East. She sold her plane for a car. After a summer at Harvard she joined her sister in teaching and doing settlement work in Boston. Her interest was soon reawakened in aviation and she became a member of the Boston chapter of the National Aeronautical Association and was ultimately made vice-president. After her return frontthe transatlantic trip she w-as made president—the first woman president of a body of the N.A.A. Until her epoch-making flight, Miss Earhart continued as a worker at Dennison House, Boston’s second oldest settlement.

At present Miss Earhart lives in New York. That is, when she is not flying about the country as assistant to the general traffic manager of Transcontinental Air Transport, with which organisation Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh is also associated. She is also aviation editor of a monthly magazine. It is characteristic of her that in her book, "20 Hrs. 40 Min,” which tells the intimate story of her flight across the Atlantic in the Friendship, that she should say time and time again throughout the narrative that the entire credit of the magnificent exploit should go to Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon, the men who piloted her. Not long ago Miss Earhart explored the bottom of the ocean off Block Island as a deep-sea diver. The first time she went down her diving suit leaked, but. nothing daunted, she made another try the next day. When she came up, afteA being down more than 20 minutes, she said: It is nothing at all. Plenty of women have been deeper and stayed longer.”