EARHART, AMELIA

Amelia Earhart (July 24, 1897–July 1937) was an aviator and feminist who symbolized the excitement of early aviation and new roles for women to Depression-era Americans. Always a restless and independent spirit, Earhart (photograph overleap) took her first plane ride in 1921 and earned her license soon after. While working at a Boston settlement house in 1928, she jumped at the chance to be a passenger on a flight from Newfoundland to Wales, thus earning the distinction of being the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane. Instantly compared to Charles Lindbergh (to whom she bore an uncanny resemblance), Earhart found herself lionized as a popular heroine even though she had done none of the actual flying.

On May 20, 1932, Earhart claimed her place in aviation history by soloing the Atlantic in her bright red single-engine Lockheed Vega. She was the first woman and only the second person to do so since Lindbergh's 1927 flight. Once again she was front-page news nationwide, enabling her to promote her belief in the viability of commercial aviation and her equally fervid conviction that women could do anything they set their minds to. In 1937 she announced plans for a round-the-world flight in her new Lockheed Electra, accompanied only by navigator Fred Noonan. The first east-to-west attempt ended prematurely when she damaged her plane in Hawaii. On June 1 she set off in a west-to-east direction. On the hardest leg of the flight, from New Guinea to tiny Howland Island in the mid-Pacific, the plane disappeared. For weeks the country followed the story, but an extensive search turned up no evidence of the aviators' fate and they were presumed lost at sea. Amelia Earhart's last flight remains one of the twentieth century's greatest unsolved mysteries, but it should not deflect attention from her significance as a record-breaking aviator and a compelling symbol of women's emancipation.

See Also: GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL RELATIONS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; LINDBERGH, CHARLES.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Butler, Susan. East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. 1997.

Earhart, Amelia. The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation. 1932.

Earhart, Amelia. Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Mass.

Ware, Susan. Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. 1993.

SUSAN WARE