A Quiet Revolution
By Lane Wallace
May 2008
 It was the simple, declarative tone of the statement that caught me. I’d volunteered to judge applications for the Ninety-Nines’ Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship Fund, so I was spending a Saturday reading applicant essays. Read 10 or 20 pilot essays over a couple of hours—all from creative, motivated and deserving candidates who have wonderful career ambitions—and both your eyesight and your ability to distinguish between them begin to blur. But then I opened the application of a college sophomore named Patricia, who said she wanted a scholarship to help her get a degree in Aeronautical Technology. Nothing all that unusual there. It was the reason she wanted the degree that stopped me. It was, she said, so she could pursue her dream to “fly fighter jets and serve my country.”
If the sentence had been part of a young man’s scholarship application, the dream would have sounded almost passé. Untold thousands of young men, over the past 70 years, have pursued a goal of serving their country and flying fighter planes. But for a young woman to list serving her country and being a fighter pilot as her career goal, as if it was a normal and everyday thing for a young woman to want to do? When did that happen?
It’s not like I’ve been in a cave the past 20 years. I know women are now allowed to fly fighter jets. Two are even current members of the Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration team. Women also command the space shuttle and do a whole lot of other things that used to be off-limits. It’s not the possibility of those things that stunned me. It’s the fact that somewhere in the process—at some time I couldn’t even put my finger on—young girls entering the world had evidently begun thinking of those accomplishments as normal, everyday things.
How could I even explain to a young woman like Patricia how remarkable her matter-of-fact attitude about her career possibilities is? How just 60 years ago, a woman named Barbara London, who was rated in almost every single airplane the military flew during World War II, was forbidden to fly any of them once the Air Force was formed, simply because she was a woman? That they let her wear her wings but never let her fly, even though she stayed in the service for another 20 years, hoping for the chance?
How 40 years ago, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon had to mask the fact that she was a woman in order to enter? How 35 years ago, newspaper classifieds still listed jobs for men and women in separate sections? That it was just 30 years ago that the Air Force graduated its first 10 women pilots—in any kind of plane? And that even when I learned to fly, women were still forbidden to fly fighter jets on combat missions?
More than likely, she’d respond the same way I did when my mother used to tell me about having a washing machine with a hand-cranked wringer on top, or an operator-directed telephone line. Which is to say, with some level of sideshow curiosity or interest, but no ability to relate.
Of course, that’s the goal of anyone who’s worked to expand the horizons of their race, gender, class or any other restricted group. That one day, their children—or their children’s children—won’t even quite believe them, that access was ever an unattainable pipe dream.
But when and how does that change occur? The one sure thing that can be said about change—whether it’s on a personal or societal level—is that it’s hard. Even when we want to change, resistance from inertia, habit or comfort with known patterns can be surprisingly strong. If it weren’t, we’d all quickly and easily dump our bad habits, alter our annoying personality characteristics, straighten out our emotional baggage and be in whatever physical shape we wanted to be.
It’s ironic, when you think about it. According to Darwin, adaptability and change are the very traits that allow us to survive. And yet we humans, in our lofty place at the top of the food chain, often resist change until it’s inevitable, or the alternatives become even more painful or uncomfortable to contemplate.
But the other thing that can be said about change is that when it does happen, it generally occurs in such small increments that it’s almost indiscernible until some big watershed event happens. Then we suddenly become aware of the sea change that was really developing all along. When, exactly, does winter turn to spring, or a baby develop the necessary motor skills to walk? Not in any single moment you can point to, even though there might be a particular moment when you notice the change has occurred.
So it is with societies, as well. Women were officially allowed to fly military aircraft starting in 1974 and fighter jets in combat roles starting in 1993. But that’s not when girls began to imagine those career options as normal, everyday events. And even those initial policy shifts didn’t just happen.
The entry of women into combat flying was certainly aided by the first Gulf War, where women distinguished themselves in combat arenas, even though they weren’t officially in combat units. But women wouldn’t have been in a position to prove themselves in those roles if it weren’t for the scores of women who came before them and moved the line just a little bit closer to the tipping point. Women like Barbara London. Women like London’s daughter Terry, who became the first woman pilot hired by Western Airlines by submitting her résumé repeatedly throughout the early 1970s, even though the airline kept telling her they weren’t hiring women. According to her mother, she’d reply that they’d have to eventually, and she wanted her résumé to be on top when they did. Women like Lucy Young, a naval officer who, in 1980, became the first woman to qualify in Naval Air Combat Maneuvering—and who persevered determinedly enough to finally win a slot as an ACM instructor. She never got to fly in a combat unit, but she and women like her moved the front line 10 yards further up the beach.
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