American Women and Flight Since 1940
by Deborah G. Douglas, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2004, $29.95.
Should women be pilots? Deborah G. Douglas poses this question in American Women and Flight Since 1940. The larger question follows: Should women not only be pilots but engineers, air traffic controllers, aviation executives, mechanics—in essence anything to which they set their minds in what many still believe is a men-only profession?
The final two chapters and the epilogue alone are worth the price of Douglas’ book. All told, this is the comprehensive story of women’s climb into the cockpits of today’s military combat aircraft and commercial jetliners, and a window on American society circa 2005.
Douglas’ first book, part of the Smithsonian series “United States Women in Aviation,” was written in the mid-1980s, when she was a National Air and Space Museum staff member, and published in 1991. Immediately thereafter came the drastic changes in women’s status in military aviation brought on by the Gulf War and its aftereffects.
Douglas, who now serves as curator of science and technology at MIT, points out: “In the 1990s women in aviation witnessed their greatest expansion of opportunities since World War II. From military to commercial aviation, from flying helicopters to Boeing 747s, from airport management to the Pentagon, the percentage of women (more than 20 percent) in the aviation workforce was larger than ever.”
This is an update of the 1991 book with added coverage on the strides women have made in aviation since 1990. The author notes that her original intention was superseded by a new goal as she continued her research: “Originally framed as a study about women, I came to recognize how much it had to say about men in aviation as well….I hope this volume will encourage readers to think more broadly about femininity and masculinity in American society.”
The 1,102 WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots) who earned their wings and flew in World War II answered for all time the question: Can women fly wartime missions? Strangely, while Americans still needed to resolve the answer to that question, Russian women were flying combat missions in day and night bombers, and even fighter aircraft, throughout the war. The WASPs’ role in aviation history is documented in both the 1991 and the 2004 volumes. But should women fly? For the past half-century, American women in aviation have been busy flying or participating in activities related to flight, but they have also been transforming our society. Still, “some [in our society] are frightened by the change that necessarily means women will be intentionally placed in harm’s way,” says Douglas. The world is changing rapidly—not just in aviation, though it seems to be a visible bellwether. Douglas is determined to tell it like it is.
Women military pilots have picked up the same slang as the male pilots with whom they fly. The same bravado and acronyms pepper their vocabulary. Douglas has an e-mail correspondent, a female F-16 pilot whose call sign is Kirby. An e-mail she received not long before American Women and Flight Since 1940 was published related Kirby’s story of a surface-to-air missile suppression mission, beginning, “So there I was…” and concluding with “It was a sortie with all the challenges we train for, except the threat of enemy aircraft. Just another day in the office with a view.”
The book’s gutsy epilogue includes Douglas’ interview with A-10 Warthog pilot Kim Campbell—whose call sign is “Killer Chick”—upon her return from combat assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. Then-Captain (now Major-select) Campbell spoke to a WASP gathering in Washington, D.C., in April 2005. Her tales of combat enthralled the older women who—but for the lapse of 60 years—might have performed those same feats.
Oveta Culp Hobby, the director of the Women’s Army Corps, told young women at the start of WWII that they had a “debt and a date—a debt to democracy and a date with destiny.” Never, says Douglas, has it seemed clearer that “American women in aviation have fulfilled that obligation. It is not just another day; it is an extraordinary moment in history. Ad inexplorata; toward the unknown.”
Originally published in the September 2006 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
