4. Aviation Editor
By the autumn of 1928, after Amelia had returned to New York and concluded her first cross-country flight, she had survived seven crack-ups in as many years of flying. But she looked back upon the solo trip with great satisfaction: it was the first time a woman had made a transcontinental flight, alone, east to west, and west to east.
The press had closely followed her adventures across the country and when she was resettled in New York, she was flooded with business offers of all kinds, many of them having nothing to do with aviation. Simply because she was a news figure, she had the opportunity to join many advertising agencies and to take part in other enterprises for which she had no qualifications.
She had at least two offers to write for the magazines: one was from McCall’s; the other from Cosmopolitan. Because AE had endorsed a cigarette advertisement, McCall’s reluctantly withdrew its contract; the magazine did not at that time carry any advertising for cigarettes, and apparently did not approve of women smoking. Ray Long, president and editor of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, wanted Amelia to join his staff as aviation editor. Amelia did not deliberate for very long. Realizing the opportunity she would have to reach many readers because of the enormous circulation of the magazine and the rare chance she was getting to write every month about what she knew and liked best, she accepted. She had now established herself permanently with her one great love—aviation.
Working for Cosmopolitan, Amelia divided her time equally between writing articles and answering letters. Letters poured in from everywhere and from everyone. Men, women, boys, girls; teachers, mechanics, laborers; inventor, realtor, office boy: all had questions and problems they wanted answered and solved. Some said:
“Do you know the name of a good school of aviation?”
“Why is the monoplane faster than the biplane?”
“I have quarreled with my boy friend and have decided to take up aviation. Please tell me how.”
“Do you know Colonel Lindbergh?”
“I want to fly, but my mother won’t let me.”
Many of the letters AE answered in the magazine. She cautioned the young girl who had quarreled with her boy friend and advised her against taking up flying: no one should take up flying with what appeared to be thoughts of suicide! She cajoled a youngster and told him to bide his time; the day would come when he could start flying lessons without parental approval. Yes, she did know Colonel Lindbergh and his wife, but she had not yet had the opportunity to know them well.
AE enjoyed the queries from her readers, but one complaint from the younger ones made her chafe with irritation: restraining parents. “Why not now?” she would say to the mother who refused to let her daughter fly until she was sixteen, and she continued to ask it of any parent who had established an arbitrary age somewhere in the future.
She began the Cosmopolitan articles with the November, 1928, issue. They continued somewhat erratically until one year later. Amelia sat at her typewriter and pounded out her thoughts and feelings about flying. Her own sex was often her target for the month: “Try Flying Yourself,” “Here Is How Fannie Hurst Could Learn to Fly,” “Is It Safe for You to Fly?” “Shall You Let Your Daughter Fly?” “Why Are Women Afraid to Fly?”
In the same issues other counterpointing writers sounded their convictions: “I Don’t Want to Be a Mother,” “I Wish I Were a Man,” “Could You be a Platonic Friend?” “Clinging Vine? Ha!” “I Have My Rights, Too.”
This was only part of the exciting 1920’s in America. The postwar period of the disillusioned lost generation, the new place of women in society, the Freudian explanations for behavior, prohibition, the automobile, the worship of speed, the idolization of heroes: out of such an era Amelia Earhart came and conquered.
“I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in an enthusiastic introduction of AE to his Cosmopolitan readers. In a day when young women went from “gin-guzzling to calculated harlotry, here,” he said, was a “wistful slip of a girl” who would be a “highly moral reaction from the inflamed tendencies and appetites which have aroused so much alarm. Amelia,” he concluded, “has become a symbol of a new womanhood—a symbol, I predict, that will be emulously patterned after by thousands of young girls in their quest for the Ideal.”
Every woman’s goal at the time was the slender, boyish figure, the flattened breasts, the close-cropped boyish bob, the long, youthful waist. In Amelia every woman found her image, cleanly liberated in the speed of solo record-breaking flight. Here was a woman who could satisfy in an acceptable way the cravings of any woman blocked at home, of any housewife chained to a husband, home, and children.
She was a product of her times and a reaction to them, too caught up in them to realize they were driving her to impossible achievement. For the present, however, she was having a gloriously good time doing what she wanted to do for “the fun of it.” And what she was doing was well within her capabilities.
In the spring of 1929 Amelia sold the little Avro Avian and purchased a used Lockheed Vega—a high-wing monoplane with Whirlwind engine. She itched to test it out. California beckoned again, not for a visit this time, but for the chance to enter a race.