Amelia Earhart's prominence in American aviation during the 1930s
obscures a crucial point: she was but one of a closely knit community of
women pilots. Although the women were well known in the profession and
widely publicized in the press at the time, they are largely overlooked
today. Like Earhart, they wrote extensively about aviation and women's
causes, producing an absorbing record of the life of women fliers during
the emergence and peak of the Golden Age of Aviation (1925-1940).
Earhart and her contemporaries, however, were only the most recent in a
long line of women pilots whose activities reached back to the earliest
days of aviation. These women, too, wrote about aviation, speaking out
for new and progressive technology and its potential for the advancement
of the status of women. With those of their more recent counterparts,
their writings form a long, sustained text that documents the maturation
of the airplane, aviation, and women's growing desire for equality in
American society.
In Their Own Words takes up the writings of eight women pilots as
evidence of the ties between the growth of American aviation and the
changing role of women. Harriet Quimby (1875-1912), Ruth Law
(1887-1970), and the sisters Katherine and Marjorie Stinson (1893-1977;
1896-1975) came to prominence in the years between the Wright brothers
and World War I. Earhart (1897-1937), Louise Thaden (1905-1979), and
Ruth Nichols (1901-1960) were the voices of women in aviation during the
Golden Age of Aviation. Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), the only one
of the eight who legitimately can be called an artist, bridges the time
from her husband's 1927 flight through the World War II years and the
coming of the Space Age. Each of them confronts issues relating to the
developing technology and possibilities of aviation. Each speaks to the
importance of assimilating aviation into daily life. Each details the
part that women might-and should-play in advancing aviation. Each talks
about how aviation may enhance women's participation in contemporary
American society, making their works significant documents in the
history of American culture.
