Mary Russell - The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

There were now a number of people in the States all sharing Amelia’s desire to promote women fliers but it was a difficult time of social change and the women, well aware of the dangers of projecting a feminine image that might be damaging to their reputation as serious pilots, carefully chose to dress without any show of female frippery. The press, reflecting the prejudices of the time, saw only the stereotype woman and not the individual, constantly referring to these early fliers as Petticoat Pilots, Ladybirds and Sweethearts of the Air. It was an uphill struggle and perhaps it was this continuing battle that finally led Amelia Earhart to make her momentous decision – she would fly solo across the Atlantic. It was five years since Charles Lindbergh had made his great flight across to Paris and since then, although a number of women pilots had tried the transatlantic flight, none had succeeded.

On 20 May 1932, flying a red Lockheed Vega, she set out from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on her long and lonely journey – not altogether sure why she was doing it. ‘To have a purpose,’ she wrote, ‘is sometimes a deadening thing.’

Things went wrong from the start. Within hours of take-off the altimeter failed. If she went too high she risked the wings icing up and if she flew too low she was blinded by sea fog. She flew on, trying to strike a balance between the two. In the dark Atlantic night, her engine was suddenly illuminated by an eerie blue light. Exhaust flames were beginning to lick out of a broken weld in the engine manifold. There was nothing she could do except watch with horror – and fly on, listening to the increasing noise the manifold made as it started to vibrate in a dangerous manner. On and on through the lonely night until, fifteen hours later, she landed in a boggy field in what she hoped was Ireland. It was. You’re in Derry, said Mr Gallagher, the farmer whose cows had been so startled by her noisy arrival.

Her earlier London critics remained unimpressed:

Miss Earhart is reported to have made the flight for no other reason than that she had long thought she could do it … Very probably, Miss Earhart would never have rested content until she had proved to her own satisfaction whether or not she was, if we may use the expression, man enough to do it. She has succeeded and we may congratulate her on her success. But her flight has added precisely nothing to the cause of aviation.

An American reporter was more generous in his praise:

… she isn’t a bit pretty but if you can be with her without being conscious of something quietly beautiful you are a peculiarly dull fellow and wholly insensitive. There is a charm there and a sense of perfect control over self and that delightful quality infrequently found in the workers of the world – a rare sense of humour.

Calm and undisturbed by the differing responses she seemed to generate, she smiled her way through the razzmatazz of civic welcomes and tickertape hysteria. She had done it, she said, just for the fun of it. Later she offered something more: ‘It was a self-justification, a proving to me and to anyone else interested that a woman with adequate experience could do it.’

With Putnam, she was now leading the life of a socialite, fêted wherever she went Soon, her face was as well known as her name for, although a non-smoker herself, she appeared in cigarette advertisements to help finance her many flying projects. These advertisements produced a spate of criticism as did her uncompromising stand on feminism but, with her usual single-minded commitment, she refused to allow herself to be distracted.

Her solo transatlantic flight had been a vindication of all the women fliers before her who had set out to do the same and perished in the attempt, and she exulted in her achievement: ‘There is no telling now,’ she wrote, ‘where the limitations to feminine activities, if any, will be henceforth.’

Sadly, she encountered her final limits when her plane disappeared mysteriously in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly round the world.

In the year that Amelia Earhart agonized over her decision to enter the ‘attractive cage’ of marriage, a very different young woman set out to make another famous solo flight.

Born in Hull in 1903 – an auspicious year for a flier – Amy Johnson was five years younger than her American counterpart. After taking an Arts degree from Sheffield University she found life in the north of England unexciting and moved to London where she took a job in the silks department of a large store, earning £5 a week. Amy Johnson’s life till then had been taken up with the ephemera of the 1920s: jazz, college rags and a love affair that lasted through her twenties. Despite the three hundred love letters – skittish and innocently provocative – which she wrote during that time, the affair ended dismally; by then, however, she had discovered another passion: flying.

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