Why are we more interested in what happened to her than in what she accomplished?
And why when I think about what she'd see in 1980, do I realize that there are still so few female pilots? I think she'd be amazed by the progress we'd made, the obvious sleekness of the machines, the safety of flying and appalled at how sexist the industry still is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAP9IBnYlm4&feature=related
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Most often it's male authors who write about her disappearance, and female authors who are more interested in her life than the disappearance. I guess it's just harder to identify with a person of the opposite gender.
ReplyDeleteI too have wondered why there's still relatively few women pilots. As a percentage of the total pilot population, we're still at about 6% -- which is no more than in the 1930's. I don't know whether it has more to do with economics or with girls not being educated to think that flying a plane is a normal thing for a woman to do.
It's really perplexing. I did an interview with Eileen Collins once for a magazine piece. She spoke about her enthusiasm for flying, and how that drove her to become an astronaut. It seems natural, women do so many adventurous things, they compete with men on almost level playing fields and yet this still remains off limits.
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