Amelia Earhart
Her most concrete single work is the flight that ended near Howland Island in 1937, a journey that closed both her career and her life. That endpoint, recorded as her place of death, is the sharpest fact the record offers about what she was doing in the final period of her life as an aircraft pilot and aviation pioneer.
Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison. She attended St. Paul Central High School and Hyde Park Academy High School before going on to study at Columbia University. Her working life covered a wide range of occupations: she was an aircraft pilot, a journalist, a memoirist, an aviation writer, a travel writer, and a women's rights activist. She worked in English across all of those roles, and she held United States citizenship throughout her life.
Her career brought her a substantial collection of honors. She received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Harmon Trophy, and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. The Gold Medal of the Society of Woman Geographers was awarded to her as well, and she received recognition from the California Hall of Fame, Women in Aviation International, and the Aviation Hall of Fame and Museum of New Jersey. She died in 1937, and after her death she was inducted into both the National Women's Hall of Fame and the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
Those two inductions reflect the two distinct threads that ran through her working years: one tied to women's achievement and one to aviation. She had moved across piloting, writing, and activism in roughly equal measure, which was an unusual combination for the era. The Gold Medal of the Society of Woman Geographers, sitting alongside the Distinguished Flying Cross, captures that duality as well as any single pair of facts can. Her place of death is recorded as Howland Island, and the year was 1937.
Quotes by Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart's insights on:
Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?
A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.
Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.
You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.
Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women and the creations of science. Although women have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them as to men.
Mostly, my flying has been solo, but the preparation for it wasn't. Without my husband's help and encouragement, I could not have attempted what I have. Ours has been a contented and reasonable partnership, he with his solo jobs and I with mine. But always with work and play together, conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.
Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.