On 31 Dec 2004 21:35:55 -0800, "Robert M. Gary"
wrote in .com::

I was just watching a documentry on Earhart. The documentry said that
most of her fellow pilots "did not consider her to be an exceptional
airman, but she was a good showman". I'd never heard that before,
interesting.

I got the feeling that her willingness to place herself at risk for
fame was exploited by many the chief of which was her husband, George
Palmer Putmum. As an airman, she appeared to be sincerely dedicated
to "air mindedness," and genuinely willing to apply all of her not
insubstantial intellectual faculties and spirit to flying. There's
little doubt that she was a champion of women's issues, and saw
herself as a torch bearer in that movement. But like many of her
fellow aviatrix' of the time, her bravado exceeded here piloting
skills.

Reading of these early aviatrix', one soon finds a common thread of
tough assertiveness, confident self-reliance, mean technical prowess
and seemingly wanton disregard for self preservation in a world
dominated by condescending men. Amy Johnson embarked on a solo flight
from England to Australia at 23 with little more than 100 hours flight
time in her log book, and regularly damaged her Gipsy Moth upon a
majority her landings, without a thought of it diminishing her stature
as an airman. Beryl Markham pointed her Percival Vega Gull westward
in her solo flight "wrong way" across the Atlantic on what amounted to
a bar-bet dare. Many of these ladies found aviation a popular vehicle
to part the tyrannical cloak of protective subservience under which
they found themselves smothered by male parochialism. None the less,
their successes captured the world's attention and undeniably
demonstrated female equality with men at a time when it was needed to
publicly advance that movement.