by Susan Butler
“We want you at Purdue,” he said, smiling wisely at Amelia.
“I’d like that,” she said as simply and as directly, “if it can be arranged. What would you think I should do?”
What, as Amelia brought up, could she, with no degree or qualifications for teaching, contribute? Elliott assured her that she could inspire women. He proposed that she make Purdue the center of her interests, that she work there to find the best way to properly prepare women for the modern world. The conversation continued for another two hours as he told her about Purdue and they sounded each other out. Almost immediately after they parted company, Elliott completed the essential phone calls, and Amelia rearranged her schedule. Three weeks later she was on the Purdue campus in Lafayette, Indiana, giving an address on “College and Careers” at the Conference on Women’s Work and Opportunities organized by the Women’s Self-Government Association of the college. As the featured speaker, she made her address at the luncheon in the ballroom the second day.
It was probably unclear to many interested educators what kind of collaboration Amelia and Edward Elliott had in mind. The initial assumption would have been that Purdue was beefing up its flying offerings—and that that was where Amelia would fit in to the curriculum. By then a growing number of colleges had flying clubs and gave aeronautical courses, including William and Mary, where Amelia spoke in 1932. Indeed, competition among colleges for aviation was becoming as keen as it was for conventional sports. There were now national intercollegiate meets that were hotly contested. But it wasn’t aeronautics that Amelia was interested in teaching—then or ever, as Elliott grasped. She had a special message for young women. She was intrigued that Elliott believed that the effective education of young women was vital to the health of the country. She herself had heretofore concentrated on inspiring young college women—something in itself—but Elliott connected the effective employment of women to the economic well-being of the country. A few years before, she had told Barnard College students that the educational system as then constituted was based “on sex, not on aptitude,” that there were a great many boys who would be better off making pies and a great many girls who would be better off in manual training, and further, that the trick was to overcome prejudice and show ability.
She was becoming increasingly focused on identifying and lifting the barriers that held women back, as time and experience showed her just how intractable those barriers were for the vast majority of young women. The shift wasn’t readily apparent; she was never rude, still accepted speaking engagements at men’s clubs, and hardly ever was overtly feminist. But she would now give neither time nor funds to aid even deserving men. So singleminded was she becoming that even when Marion Perkins asked her for money to fund studies for an unusually bright young boy at Denison House, she refused; she would in fact no longer give money to Denison House at all unless it was used “for girls in some way” as she wrote, underlining “girls” by way of emphasis. As Elliott would observe, “her primary interest in life was not in this career of adventure upon which she had embarked, but rather in an effort to find and make some additions to the solution to the problem of careers for women.” Now President Elliott was giving her the chance to push her message further.
It took until the following May before Elliott worked out something more specific. Then, in a letter dated May 18, he outlined his plans for creating a department for the study of careers for women:
The department would be energized by people who had been successful in their careers. Miss Earhart would be the first appointee to this new center, and could serve as either Department Head or nonresident professor or lecturer on careers for women. She need only spend two weeks out of each semester at the University, giving addresses, classes, or conferences.
Miss Earhart would also be free to advise university officials on constructive modifications in the various programs, and also help in selecting other professors for the new program. Her campus schedule would be worked around her other professional duties, and she would also be chief consultant for the University work in aeronautical engineering.
He offered her a salary of two thousand dollars a year—at a time when the Indiana legislature had reduced Purdue’s funding by twenty percent. With a minimum of deliberation Amelia accepted the offer.
It was a huge challenge. Neither the university staff nor the engineering students themselves were nearly as committed as their president. To the contrary, there was active opposition to the idea. The same year Elliott set out to hire Amelia, 1934, the Purdue personnel department secured 84 jobs for graduating men and arranged for the industry representatives who came on campus to recruit 38 more. In contrast personnel found only four jobs for women that year and arranged for zero industry representatives to visit the campus to recruit women. The next year the department found 96 jobs, and industry reps provided 73 more for graduating men. The numbers for graduating women were the same as the previous year: four and zero. The contrast is particularly striking because over ninety percent of Purdue women worked after they graduated; only three percent listed themselves as housewives.
Unfortunately the jobs these female graduates secured, as Amelia readily found out, were overwhelmingly in home economics—because that was what Purdue traditionally trained them for. There were usually a few women in the freshman class who enrolled in engineering, a pitifully small group of eight or ten, but by the end of their junior year all had usually quit—overwhelmed, “counseled” out by their male professors, and made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome by the male students. Amelia wanted to change that. She wanted to break down the boundary lines between the schools as a way of breaking down the condescending attitude of the professors and the male students towards the coeds. “Today it is almost as if the subjects themselves had sex, so firm is the line drawn between what girls and boys study,” she observed.
What Amelia left unsaid was that the male faculty sexualized their courses as a way of making them off limits to women. It was a highly effective tactic, for if women were discouraged from studying engineering, they wouldn’t learn that it was as much within their grasp as any other discipline. The subtle, pervasive push on the part of the professors to keep the girls in home economics and out of agriculture and engineering worked like a charm.
In a way it was understandable. In January 1935 there were still several million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 on relief. With jobs so hard to find, it didn’t help, many conservative men felt, for women to start competing for the plums.
Complicating the problem for Amelia was that the head of the School of Chemical Engineering and the head of the School of Civil Engineering had been there for twenty-five and thirty years respectively. They were of the same mindset as the Yale students who, just a few years previously, had paraded behind a banner bearing the inscription, “Marry Them Early; Tell Them Nothing, Treat Them Rough.” Professor Peffer, professor of chemical engineering, didn’t think girls should even be visible—he called his staff together one morning to tell them how upset he was to behold one of his best students holding hands with a girl “for all to see.” Even A. A. Potter, the engineering professor considered by contemporaries to be “the most kindly dean of all,” was also unalterably opposed. Nor did time blunt his opposition. When he was interviewed at ninety-four, he stated that he still believed Purdue had been wrong to hire Amelia because “she was a very courageous woman, but very poorly educated. After a woman was educated, she thought they should fix typewriters and washing machines. She thought an engineer was a mechanic. She was not a help in improving education.”
Not surprisingly, a number of the Purdue faculty wives followed the mindset of their husbands and were “mortified” by a report that one afternoon Amelia had strolled into the village in slacks, unescorted, mounted a stool at Bartlett’s Drugstore, and ordered a soft drink. A rumor was floated that Amelia had been seen smoking. That summer Fortune magazine pontificated, “The fact is that the Woman’s Movement started
because women, for the first time in history, were bored to death.” Amelia and President Elliott were fighting an uphill battle.
Amelia gave afternoon talks for day- and part-time coeds and the girls who lived in sorority houses in the Memorial Union, the campus meeting place where the students gathered to snack and socialize. There, in a large, closed-off area on the second floor that was so informally furnished it resembled a living room, Amelia, usually perched on the grand piano, swinging her legs a bit, talked and answered questions. Most of the students kept coming back for more.
Study whatever you want, was her message; don’t let the world push you around. The discussions—for there was always discussion and a good deal of interaction after her talk—encouraged such thinking. It took courage and commitment for a young woman to transfer from home economics to engineering, and it took money, which meant that besides running the gauntlet of professors and male students, the girls also had the herculean task of convincing their families that such a course was wise.
Don’t get married right away Amelia hammered. Graduate, then have a career, then get married. “You’re going with that senior,” she would say. “When you graduate be sure you go on and have a career; don’t get married as soon as you get out of school.” She irritated many of male Purdue students with that message, and with her “outspoken” ideas. And they were not at all bashful in saying so. As glamorous a role model as she appeared to the students (and most were surprised at how much more feminine she looked in person than in the newsreels), in her well-tailored brown slacks, small figured matching shirt, and brightly colored scarf knotted at the throat, or attired in evening dress addressing a dinner meeting looking gracefully feminine, she was a definite threat to the men: a superstar advocating independence.
Many divorces are caused by the complete dependence of the female. At first there is the strong sexual attraction that sometimes masquerades as love. Everything goes well until the first financial crisis jars the man’s confidence and threatens the woman’s security. The woman can’t help. All she can be is dependent, because that is what she has been trained to be. Instead of standing beside the man, giving him encouragement by contributing her own efforts, she becomes accusatory and sullen and the sex drive that passed for love is no longer enough to satisfy either of them. If we begin to think and respond as capable human beings able to deal with and even enjoy the challenges of life, then we surely will have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies.
Besides her talks with students she circulated a questionnaire among them, from which she learned that their goals were her goals, too: 92 percent wanted careers. It encouraged her, “crystallized” her thinking.
A prestigious men’s senior student honorary group was annoyed enough to request a face-to-face meeting with Amelia to complain about the advice and counsel she was giving. She asked them why they objected. “It’s hard enough to get the girls to marry us as it is” was their reply. On the other hand, the male students who were working their way through Purdue by waiting on tables during banquets and dinners, presumably from lower-class homes where women worked, had an entirely different view. After a small dinner for twelve that included Amelia and President Elliott, after she had finished her buttermilk and everyone else had finished their coffee, she walked into the kitchen and introduced herself to each of the three male waiters. She “chatted with us for several minutes, and left all of us feeling much—well, greater than before and extremely flattered to think she took the time to do that.”
The coeds normally vied for the privilege of sitting at the head table presided over by Helen Schleman, director of the hall; they tried even harder when Amelia was on campus, for she ate there too. By this time Amelia was a confirmed buttermilk drinker, and that became the favorite drink in South Hall. After dinner Amelia and Helen Schleman and as many girls as could fit would go into Schleman’s suite and continue the conversation.
After the Schleman sessions the girls, by then dressed in pajamas and bathrobes, followed Amelia into her suite, held rap sessions sitting on her bed, or sprawled on the floor. The college had had no regular dormitory rooms for five of the girls and had put them in a first-floor guest room; initially unhappy with their lot because they were cut off from the rest of the students, they now found, living next door to Amelia, they had a relationship with her that the others didn’t have and felt privileged. “We were indeed fortunate,” recalled Marian Fitzgerald, who remembered that they would purposely leave their suite door open to entice her to come in and visit. “She was very outgoing.”
At the same time as she was espousing feminine independence, she was giving, by example, a lesson in how to handle married life. George phoned every evening. “But George would always call,” remembered Audria Soles, sometimes even during dinner. “Now George,” Amelia would say, “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ll try to be back by [such and such a date,] but I’m not sure. I’ll be home as soon as I can finish.” At least once he was so lonely, he sent her roses. Once when she missed his evening phone call, she sent him a telegram, “SEE YOU SOON.”
At the beginning of September 1935, just before Amelia started at Purdue, the glass ceiling came crashing down on all airwomen. Helen Richey, the first woman to secure a job as a pilot on a scheduled airline, was pressured into resigning.
Richey was intelligent, young, pretty, and a brilliant flier—an unbeatable combination that quickly brought her to the top of the flying world. Born in 1909 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in love with flying, she took lessons when she was twenty and after only six hours of instruction got her license. At twenty-one she had a limited commercial license that enabled her to take passengers sightseeing and fly charters in her own plane, a four-passenger Bird given to her by her parents. At twenty-four she had a full transport license. In 1933 she and Frances Marsalis set a new women’s endurance record by remaining in the air ten days. The following year she won the featured event at the Women’s National Air Meet, coming in first in the fifty-mile closed-course race around pylons.
After that she was famous. Her goal in life was to become a regular airline pilot flying air mail and passengers, so in December 1934, when Central Airlines, a new airline serving Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, started up—so near her she didn’t even have to move—she promptly applied and was accepted for the position of co-pilot. All the Ninety-Nines shared in her excitement.
James D. Condon, Central Airlines’ aggressive president, had just underbid Pennsylvania Airlines for the contract to carry mail and was looking for ways to increase passenger traffic. He thought that hiring a female pilot would be a perfect way to publicize his new company. And Helen was the perfect female: she had a superb record, having flown more than a hundred thousand miles in the air with never a scratch, and was photogenic, modest, responsible. All of the line’s twelve-passenger Ford trimotors plying the Washington to Detroit route required two pilots. She would be flying every other day.
Helen’s first flight was on December 31. It was everything it should have been—uneventful, fun, and well covered by the reporters and photographers waiting at the fields, who watched her make neat three-point landings and were favorably impressed. Virtually every newspaper in the nation did a piece on her. “Helen Richey today has conquered the last masculine stronghold of aviation, the cockpit of a passenger airliner,” exulted a Cleveland newspaper in a typical headline. The magazines followed suit. Time wrote about “Miss and Mail” on January 14; Air Woman’s “Reason to be Proud” was in their January issue; Collier’s “Ladybird” appeared March 30; McCall’s “She Flies Like a Man” appeared in June. She was sought after to do testimonials for coffee, for motor oil, and for various other products. The public couldn’t get enough of her.
Edna Gardner Whyte, a navy nurse as well as a fine pilot, had been waiting years to fly for an airline—and when she heard about Helen, she too applied to Central Airlines for the position of co-pilot. She was “rejected flatly” to
her acute discomfort. Another pilot, Johanna Burse, suffered the same fate. It was apparent that one woman pilot was as much as Central would stomach. Before long it became apparent that one woman pilot was one too many.
Women had flown passengers before. Edith Folz had been co-pilot on a special trip for West Coast Air Transport in 1930. Ruth Nichols had flown as a reserve (nonscheduled) pilot from Jackson Heights, Long Island, to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932 for the New York and New England Airways inaugural flight. In 1934 Amelia had been instrumental in arranging for Amy Mollison to be the co-pilot on a TWA flight to the West Coast. But there was a significant distinction: Edith Folz had been co-pilot on just one special trip, as was Amy Mollison; nor was Ruth Nichols a “regular” pilot on a scheduled airline. Helen Richey was different—the first woman hired to fly a regular mail and passenger route. And it raised hackles all over the male flying world. They came down on her—hard. The Airline Pilots Association summarily turned down her application for membership and on January 22 sent the Department of Commerce a strong letter detailing their reasons: that the idea was preposterous, that it was dangerous because women didn’t have the physical strength to handle an airliner in bad weather, and finally, the real reason: “If the practice of hiring women to pilot airliners continued, where would that leave the men?” Leaving nothing to chance, the Airline Pilots said they would call a strike if Helen continued flying. James Condon, faced with losing his pilots, backed off and lamely told Department of Commerce officials (and the Pilots Association) that he had hired Helen “purely for publicity purposes” with the intention of firing her after a week or two.
