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?
