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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.13092
EAN num: 9780393312553
ISBN number: 0393312550
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 308
Printing Date: October 01, 1994
Publishing house: W. W. Norton & Company
Sale Popularity Level: 818303
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Amelia Earhart was very first reported missing on 2 July 1937. Despite the ongoing fascination with her disappearance, Susan Ware argues that key aspects of Amelia Earhart's life are still missing. This biography analyzes Earhart as part of the history of women and feminism. A heroine of her era, Earhart is a figure of inspiration for women today. While loving adventure, Earhart saw aviation as liberating for women. Ware also portrays Earhart as a central figure in the development of popular culture in the 20th century. With her husband, George Putnam, she learned how to use the media to promote herself in order to keep on flying. Consciously acting as a role model, she used her popularity to broaden horizons for women.
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Rated by buyers 
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The book is fine, except for her complaints on the attention given to her disappearance. Of course the disappearance is emphasized--she was FAR AND AWAY the most important American to disappear without a trace. The disappearance of an obscure judge (Judge Crater) and Jimmy Hoffa still produce books--why shouldn't there be even more about a more famous, more worthy American like Earhart.
Rated by buyers -
That Amelia Earhart disappeared under mysterious circumstances while on an around the world flight in 1937, insures her a prominent place in mankind's collective memory. The mystery of what really happened is still unknown sixty-six years later and what actually occurred most likely will never be resolved. Too much time has passed and any evidence likely is lost to the elements. That is not to say that people have given up the search. As recently as 2001 a book by Karen R. Burns, Randall S. Jacobson, Amelia Earhart's Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved, will likely not be the last.
There is more to her memory than the fact that she disappeared. She was one of the very first female pilots in America. She was the very first female to cross the Atlantic initially as a passenger and later alone. Amelia Earhart was only the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She emerged as a promoter of aviation in its early years and pursued a career based on her fame as a female aviation pioneer.
The sobriquet "Lady Lindy" underscores the comparison to Charles Lindbergh and his flight from New York to Paris in 1927. In one respect they were very different. "Lindbergh never reconciled himself to the demands of being a public figure, while Earhart accepted her public stature and made it work for her and women in general."(22) These two precepts, her gender and publicity, point to the core of Susan Ware's book, Still Missing, Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. That Earhart was a well-known female spokesperson and roll model in the 1930s contributed to the cause of feminism during a time between "suffrage activism and the revived feminism in the 1960s and 1970s."(13)
Amelia Earhart was a popular heroine. She served as an example for personal achievement. She was courageous and brave and she was a woman. It was a time when women's advancement was forged by personal achievement.
The accomplishments of women as disparate as Babe Didrikson, Gertrude Ederle, Katharine Hepburn, Dorothy Thompson, Martha Graham, Georgia O'Keeffe were widely reported as evidence of the ongoing advancement of the modern, post suffrage women. Individual achievements substituted for, and also sustained, the feminist momentum.(25)
There were long periods during which Amelia Earhart was not in the press, but she was active making speeches, writing and engaging in business promotions. Key to her marketability was her marriage to publisher George Palmer Putnam. Feminists view her relationship as a "modern marriage" with freedom for each to pursue their independence. Nonetheless, it appears he controlled many aspect of her life in promoting her to the public as the best female pilot. This was the key to her public image. From this everything followed. However, it brings into question her real independence despite her protestations to the contrary. Was she in fact as free and independent as she and author Ware claim? Ware acknowledges Putnam's proclivity for control, but doesn't attribute to him any limits to her freedom. Theirs was an acknowledged marriage of convenience and one wonders if she ever loved him at all. However this is not a problem with modern feminists and Earhart, as a spokeswoman, is more central to Ware's study.
Making a living in aviation in the late 1920s and 1930s was not easy. Her counterpart, Charles Lindbergh served as a consultant for Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT). It was advertised as the "Lindbergh Line." Amelia signed on with TAT as well but with the traffic department. In contrast to Lindbergh's substantive contribution to the corporation, her job was largely ceremonial. Later she worked for the Ludington Line, but this line was sold to Eastern Air Transport in 1933. Her job there was to overcome women's reticence to flying. Ironically "in order to get women into the air as passengers, she was forced to rely on traditional gender stereotypes that exaggerated the differences between men and women." (71)
Most women in flying became stewardesses. Women who wanted to be pilots were handicapped by "the two T's - tradition and training." (75) Childhood conditioning contributed to discrimination. The case of Helen Richey, a copilot for Central Airways, is instructive. Male pilot complaints encouraged the Aeronautics Bureau of the Department of Commerce to issue an advisory allowing female airline pilots to only fly in fair-weather. Richey resigned. "After Richey's resignation women were shut out of cockpits of scheduled airlines for the subsequent thirty years."(78)
Female ability was demonstrated during air races some of which were with men and women and others just for women. Amelia Earhart, with Helen Richey flying with her as copilot, came in fifth in the 1936 Bendix race. In 1937 Louis Thaden and copilot Blanche Noyes won over all the men! Competition among women led to new records. The Ninety-Nines, an organization ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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Susan Ware's biography of Amelia Earhart is engagingly written, never dull, and full of insights about how Earhart's life reflects the development of feminism in the United States. Anyone interested in women's biographies will find this book fascinating.
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