Amelia Earhart by Doris L. Rich

Author:Doris L. Rich [Rich, Doris L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-382-6
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2013-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

At the next stop in Portland, a reporter overheard a woman who saw Amelia at the train station say, “Why—she’s quite a beautiful person!” and another newsman wrote that her pictures, which suggested a “masculine nature,” were misleading. He also claimed, “She likes to keep long hours, she likes to meet people and she isn’t a tomboy.” Flying was just a hobby for her, he wrote, her real job was making a home for her husband. Amelia’s interviewer was so impressed by her femininity he could not hear the feminist speaking to him.

The sum of her statements in Portland is a familiar one today: 1) modern science has cut back on household drudgery; 2) a woman could run a home and have a career; and 3) if she did, her husband should share household and child-raising duties. As for women doing the same work as men, perhaps they could. If they were made equal under the law and given the opportunity they would soon find out. There were still no women pilots on scheduled airlines, partly because of prejudice but also because they lacked experience, she said. Army and Navy training was not open to them; they had to pay for their instruction and flight time. They could not afford the hours of experience needed by the airlines to assure the safety of passengers.†

At her next stop, in Seattle, Amelia added a new proposal to her program for the emancipation of women. “Draft women!” she declared, a strange proposition to be made by an avowed pacifist and one that is still controversial a half century later. “If women were drafted,” she claimed, “I think it would be an effective means of ending war. They would learn how horrible it is.”

In Vancouver the next day she expounded on this theme. Individual aptitude, rather than sex, should determine the possibility of women becoming wartime flyers. In the event of casualties, “So far as sex is concerned, women are no more valuable than men.”

Amelia gave these opinions in interviews but her lectures were limited to a description of her Atlantic crossing, the advantages of commercial aviation, and twenty-five hundred feet of newsreel film. For each lecture she was paid three hundred dollars, half the price of a new Buick. Between February 1 and 7 she gave a total of eight, in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, earning twenty-four hundred dollars in a single week. G. P., who was Paramount Pictures’ New York chief story advisor, met her in Los Angeles and took her to lunch at Paramount Studios. The next day Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons published the “rumor” that Miss Earhart might act as adviser on a coming Paramount aviation film.

The June edition of Screenland magazine carried a story on Amelia; she was photographed with Gary Cooper, allegedly going over reels from his latest film in which he played the role of a flight officer. It is doubtful Amelia did any advising. But G. P. saw to it that she

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