The Perils of Flying Solo: Amelia Earhart and Feminist Individualism

Another account of the transatlantic flight of America’s most famous female aviator? New evidence on that Lockheed Electra and its missing pilot? Another biography of a woman whose life-story has already been told by herself and numerous others? Hardly. Instead Susan Ware has created a new portrait of the celebrated Amelia Earhart by approaching her subject from multiple angles with cameras fitted with feminist lens and wide-angle vision. The feminist lens, as Ware herself acknowledges, does not substantially change the details or the outcome of Earhart’s life. Rather it shifts the field of focus, illuminating new aspects of Earhart’s life and career such as her importance as a feminist in the interwar period when a mass-based movement had atrophied. Similarly, the wide-angled vision allows the subject to be seen against the rich landscape of the 1920s and 1930s replete with such new flora as the aviation industry, mass media and merchandising, popular heroes and popular culture.

There are trade-offs inherent in such an approach. Gone is the richly textured, cohesive account of an individual life that one associates with more traditional biographies. But then Earhart’s life and career are hardly the stuff of such multivolume studies. Although she began her work-life as a nurse and settlement house worker, her years as an aviator spanned barely a decade. The much-touted flight across the Atlantic in which she was actually a passenger (although the first woman to be one) occurred in 1928. (She later flew the Atlantic as pilot.) The round-the-world flight, which probably cost the pilot her life somewhere in the Pacific, took place when she was only forty.

Not only were the celebrity years brief, but in certain respects unrevealing of the woman herself. The spectacular flights were richly documented by the press, which found her a much more cooperative figure than Charles Lindberg. Earhart also added to the documentation with her magazine columns in Cosmopolitan and especially the instant books so painfully ground out at her husband’s request (who was also her manager). But the drudgery of having to write in order to keep the superstar status and income that allowed her to fly left little time for the personal letters that might have illuminated the inner life of the public person. Consequently, one of America’s best known women remains something of an enigma even in conventional studies where biographical detail is less sparse than in Ware’s account.

The advantage of the thematic, interpretive, approach that Ware employs is the opportunity it provides the biographer for extended reflections on key topics to which the life of the subject provides entree. When the choice of topics is informed and the handling of them sure, as is generally the case here, the result can be illuminating. The challenge, however, is how to keep the individual in focus while digressing extensively on other topics — a problem that the author never satisfactorily resolves. Discussion of modern marriage and the demands of celebrity status keep Earhart clearly in the picture. In the chapter on aviation, focus on Earhart and other early women aviators shifts to gender discrimination in the more mature airline industry. Indeed, the biographical subject all but disappears in a discussion of popular heroines and popular culture which is itself a separate chapter. The frustration occasioned by the interruption of the life-story is usually offset by the insight and perspective Ware brings to these various topics, primary among them Earhart’s impact on her own society and, most important, her feminism.

That Earhart belongs in the pantheon of interwar heroines whose lives were lived according to a feminist script was evident at the time of her marriage to George Putnam, a volatile, abrasive, ambitious man whose promotional zeal had much to do with making his second wife a public figure. The skittish bride’s concerns about the impact of...