East to the Dawn (65 page)

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.

But Condon knew that public opinion would be on Helen's side—and that if he fired her, his airline would get a black eye and lose business. So instead of firing her, he had her spending her time giving speeches at luncheon clubs, posing for publicity photos, giving tours of the Allegheny airport—and very, very occasionally flying. By the end of August she had made fewer than a dozen round trips between Washington and Detroit, when the number should have been over a hundred. And she was always on call. Frustrated and bored, as August drew to a close, Helen finally resigned.

Amelia and Helen were good friends. Amelia often stayed with Helen as she crisscrossed the country lecturing. Once she even left her car in her care. Now Amelia was angry, even angrier than Helen, at Condon's shoddy treatment of her. She had been very proud of her friend's achievement, had gone so far as to publicly say that the daily flights Helen Richey was making as co-pilot on Central Airlines' run from Detroit to Washington were doing more to further women's place in aviation and were more significant than her own recent Pacific flight.

Now she looked for a forum—a platform—that would command attention for her objections. She didn't want to call a press conference, however—that was not her style. In the end, she accomplished her aim with great delicacy: she wrote a letter to a women's group in Hawaii that had raised money to erect a marker in Oahu to commemorate the airfield she had taken off from on her flight to Oakland suggesting that if they had any money left over, they should set up a fund to help women break down barriers and attain their rightful place in aviation. She carefully explained in the letter what had just happened: that Helen had been fired because the Airline Pilots Association refused to take her in, “not because of lack of ability—all her co-workers admitted she was okay as to flying—but because she was a female. The result of this action was that the Department of Commerce refused to let her fly passengers in bad weather, so the poor girl could not do her part at all and had to resign.”

The result was all she hoped. The Pan American press bureau got
hold of the letter and published it, and Amelia's remarks were heard around the world. By November 7 the story was front-page news. Department of Commerce officials, sorely pressed, acted surprised and insisted they hadn't even heard of Helen's resignation. “The only thought was that it was too much of a physical job in rough weather,” said Fred Neely, chief of the department's aeronautical information section. “It was not an order, not an attachment to her transport license. It was just an informal suggestion made to the airlines,” thereby admitting complicity. The Airline Pilots Association admitted innocently that it was true that Helen had been turned down because membership was restricted to men but that “it had been suggested that Helen re-apply for membership at their next meeting, but she had not done so.” Condon weighed in with “Miss Richey's father called me shortly before Labor Day and said his daughter's health was poor. He said she wanted to resign so she could go to California to rest. We agreed to release her, of course.”

Then Alice Paul, the famous suffragette who had picketed the White House in Woodrow Wilson's time, took up the cause. “Certainly Miss Earhart herself has demonstrated the fallacy of that old idea of women's physical inferiority which we meet on a thousand fronts every day.” That comment, too, hit the front pages.

Said Helen, “Miss Earhart has told the story better than I could.”

A number of newspapers sought out comments from Ruth Nichols and Ruth Haviland, both of whom held transport licenses, and used them out of context so that the women seemed to imply that females didn't have the requisite strength, when what they said was that muscular energy was indeed necessary. Ruth Nichols, in fact, was unequivocal about Helen. “I thought that it was outrageous,” she fumed from the hospital where she was recovering from another crash. “High discrimination.... There is no reason why she could not be a co-pilot.”

Clara Studer, editor of the
The 99 News,
took some grim satisfaction in the fact that it took the Pilots Association eight months to get rid of Helen. Apparently it was this event that led Amelia to back the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If prejudice extended even into government agencies, there really was no other choice.