The Aviation Workforce is experiencing a significant influx of women into our industry. The first 100 years demographics of professionals in this field was heavily male. One’s progress from an entry level position up the airline, airport, consulting, government, OEM, repair station, training, weather, etc. organization chart can benefit from positive role models. The examples of possible career paths to emulate, or at least to learn from, are limited.

The Journal, edited by an amateur aviation historian, has featured more than two posts on this theme and the readers seemed to have appreciated them. Here’s two recent Journals:

• Lessons from Women in Aviation- past and present 
• Exceptional Female Aviation Role Models – International Women’s Day

A number of quotes help to explain the purpose of role models:

1. “Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating.” JOHN WOODEN

2. “But a role model in the flesh provides more than inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, yes, someone like me can do this.” SONIA SOTOMAYOR

3. “Being a role model is equal parts being who you actually are and what people hope you will be.” MERYL STREEP

4. “I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.” DENZEL WASHINGTON

That’s quite a variety of perspectives and they provide great insights.

Below is an article from Condé Nast and the author’s scope of hero hunt includes all of TRAVEL.

If you know a contemporary role model, please email me at sandy_murdock@yahoo.com and hopefully the Journal will be able to publish a 2024 list.

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Flying Solo: 11Women Who Made Travel History

Whether it was traveling unaccompanied, flying a plane, or soaring into space, ambitious women throughout history have been met with the word “no” time and time again. So, it’s remarkable that these 11 women—a small sampling, to be sure—became pioneers in travel, for years one of the most forbidden arenas of them all. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re taking a look at bold women—born of differing circumstances, and in different times—whose desires to cover new terrain, to break records, and, in many cases, touch the sky, drove their adventures forward, against all odds. Some said they couldn’t do it—nevertheless, they persisted. Editor’s note, February 23, 2021: A previous version incorrectly named the first documented woman to visit all the sovereign nations. This milestone was attributed to Dorothy Pine in 2005, after she visited 192 recognized countries.

BY BETSY BLUMENTHAL

March 8, 2017

• Jeanne Baret
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Jeanne Baret wasn’t a shy flower. Born in France’s Loire Valley in 1740, she roamed the fields looking for herbs to serve as medicine—she had been taught to be an “herb woman” by her family. Another lucky discovery in the valley? A naturalist and nobleman named Philibert Commerson, who shared a passion for botany and collecting plants (ah, true love). He hired her as a teacher, assistant, and aide; colleagues soon became lovers, and in 1766, Commerson was invited on a French expedition to discover new worlds as the mission’s naturalist-in-residence. Not one to be left behind, Baret came on board as his assistant—but as Jean, not Jeanne. She wrapped her chest in linen every day; never relieved herself in front of the crew; and carried around pistols for her safety. Eventually she was outed—but by the time she returned to France in 1775, she had already cemented her legacy by becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Biographers say she discovered a red flowering plant in Brazil, though it would be named after her ship captain, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. She finally got her due in 2012, when a few gracious biologists named a new species of plant—the fittingly colorful Solanum baretiae—for her.

Illustration by Austen Claire Clements

• Annie “Londonderry”
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… If you happened to be living in Boston in 1894, you might have caught an odd sight one late June day: Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian immigrant in her early 20s, swinging her leg over the frame of a 42-pound Columbia bicycle and preparing to make her maiden voyage around the world. Before an audience of 500 spectators, the young wife and mother of three set off on a journey through such far-flung locales as Marseilles, Jerusalem, Nagasaki, and Yemen. But why? According to one newspaper, it reportedly began with a bet “by two wealthy clubmen of Boston”: If Londonderry successfully circled the globe in 15 months, accruing proof of signature from various American consuls—and earning $5,000 (roughly $135,922 today)—along the way, she’d win $10,000. But, in the midst of the Women’s Suffrage movement, it was also an opportunity to quash Victorian assumptions that the ‘fairer sex’ lacked the physical and mental stamina for such a challenge—and the bike, a relatively new phenomenon that promised both physical and mental freedom for women, was just the way to do it. Londonderry completed her journey in Chicago on September 12, 1895—two whole weeks before the 15-month deadline—having made herself an international celebrity in the process. She also became an early pioneer of sports-related marketing, acting as a human billboard throughout her travels by sporting a slew of advertising slogans and placards for everything from perfume to milk. Even her name was a spot of savvy branding: ‘Londonderry’ was actually the result of a deal with her first sponsor, the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of Nashua, New Hampshire, which she’d struck the day she kicked her foot off the Boston pavement.

• Raymonde de Laroche
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… It was thanks to aviation pioneer Charles Voisin, who co-developed the 1907 pusher biplane, that Baroness Raymonde de Laroche first set her sights on flight: Over dinner in 1909, Voisin suggested the aspiring actress learn to fly an airplane herself. Born Elise Raymonde Deroche to a plumber and his wife (Flight magazine had cheekily bestowed on her the title of “baroness,” which she then kept along with her adapted stage name), de Laroche soon began cutting her teeth at the French airfield at Camp de Châlons, about 90 miles east of Paris. Her wheels left the ground for the first time on October 22, 1909, and less than a year later, on March 8, 1910—now, fittingly, known as International Women’s Day—she became the first woman to receive a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Whether she was winning the Coupe Femina (a women’s-only aviation competition) in 1913 for a successful flight of more than four hours; participating as the sole woman in the 1910 Reims Air Meet (the second year of the world’s first air race); or setting the women’s altitude record in 1919 by ascending to 15,700 feet, de Laroche could always be found in her trademark flying attire—“a short skirt, long leather boots, a dark jersey, big leather gloves, a round cap and goggles.” Occasionally, de Laroche took her act around the world, performing for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and competing in Budapest as crowds no doubt ogled her airborne exploits with wonder. De Laroche was killed at age 36 in July 1919, when the aircraft she was piloting went into a dive upon landing at a French airfield—and though a statue commemorates her at Paris—Le Bourget Airport in France, her legacy persists in the female pilots she’s inspired ever since.

• Bessie Coleman
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Bessie Coleman persisted. Born to sharecropper parents in 1893, in Atlanta, Texas, she was raised by a mother who urged Coleman and her 12 siblings to strive for more. And strive, she did, walking several miles to attend school in a one-room shack, and saving up money working in cotton fields to attend college at the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University, now known as Langston Industrial College. The money dried up after just a year in school. She tried again a few years later, enrolling in beauty school in Chicago in 1915—but her lifelong admiration for the Wright brothers, compounded by the exciting stories of World World I pilots, would push her to quit. She wanted to fly. Yet despite her determination, both racial and gender bias kept her from enrolling in aviation school in the United States. She remained undeterred: Armed with the sage advice—and funding—of Chicago Defender owner Robert Abbott, who underwrote the cost of her trip with the money he made selling stories about her to his primarily black readership, she set her eyes on France. Coleman took French lessons at the Berlitz school in the Chicago loop, and decamped for Paris in 1920 at the age of 21, where she spent seven months learning to fly. She was awarded a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale—the first African American woman, and woman of Native American descent to do so—on June 15, 1921, and returned to the United States where her race and sex still blocked her from finding gainful employment. Instead, she made her living performing such outrageous aerial stunts as barrel rolls and loop-de-loops—“barnstorming,” as it was called—in air shows, earning her the moniker “Queen Bess.” Coleman died on April 20, 1926 at the age of 34 while on a practice run for an upcoming performance—but not before making her mark on history.

Amelia Earhart

• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Arguably one of the most famous women—and undoubtedly the most famous female pilot—in history, Amelia Earhart’s achievements are now familiar territory. In May 1932, she became the first woman (and the second person ever, after Charles Lindbergh) to fly nonstop solo across the Atlantic Ocean, turning her into an overnight international sensation. And she didn’t just revel in her 15 minutes of fame: Later that year, she made the first solo, nonstop flight by a woman across the United States, from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, setting both time and distance records for women, and in 1935, became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the continental United States. When she wasn’t tirelessly lobbying Congress for aviation legislation or writing about women’s issues for Cosmopolitan, Earhart somehow found time to design her own line of women’s clothing (which she initially produced with her own sewing machine) and a line of lightweight luggage for Orenstein Trunk, the proceeds of which she used to help fund her travels. But really, would we expect any less from the same woman who kept a scrapbook on women she admired, and bought her first airplane, a Kinner Airster, at the tender age of 25? Sadly, equal interest surrounds Earhart’s life and death: During an attempted circumnavigation of the globe in 1937 that required several long overwater journeys, Earhart and her companion went missing en route to Howland Island, a tiny drop in the Pacific Ocean where they were meant to refuel. Despite a massive search for the pair, no evidence of the disappearance was ever found, and they were declared lost at sea on July 19, 1937. An event that remains shrouded in mystery, for decades the prevailing theory was that her plane, having run out of fuel, crashed into the ocean; but since 1985, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has been conducting research expeditions to solve the mystery, and in 1998, floated the theory that Earhart may have actually died a castaway.

• Ellen Church
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Ellen Church had great ambitions—she was both a licensed pilot and a registered nurse—but none of this helped at a time when airlines weren’t keen on hiring female pilots (the numbers are still stubbornly out of whack). So she did what most women have done at some point: she thought of a work-around. Church, then 26, approached officials at Boeing Air Transport (an early incarnation of United Airlines), and made the case for having women—nurses, specifically—up in the sky. Her argument? Women could ease passengers’ nerves and calm their fears (up to that point, most people had never been on an airplane). Perhaps in a genius use of reverse psychology, she famously said, “Don’t you think that it would be good psychology to have women up in the air? How is a man going to say he is afraid to fly when a woman is working on the plane?” The airline relented and Church was hired as chief stewardess, along with seven other women, on a three-month trial basis in 1930, when four women made the inaugural trip from San Francisco to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the remaining four, from Cheyenne to Chicago. And despite the overtly sexist mandates on their appearance—candidates had to be under 25 years old, no taller than 5 feet 4 inches, under 120 pounds, and most importantly, “pretty”—Church and her colleagues became more than just armchair psychologists: They took over many of the copilots’ tasks, including schlepping luggage, cleaning plane cabins, and helping to fuel the plane. While flight attendants may no longer be charged with bolting down seats (though diffusing air rage takes some heavy lifting) they remain an essential part of air travel to this day.

• Freya Stark
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Born in Paris in 1893, at the tail end of the Victorian era, Freya Stark led a singularly extraordinary life. Though she moved about England and Italy with her artist parents throughout her childhood, and never received a formal schooling, she was already a polyglot, fluent in French, German, and Italian, by the time she entered college. After working as a nurse during World War I, she returned to London to take courses at the School of Oriental Studies, and her unquenchable curiosity swept her to Lebanon in 1927—kicking off a life-long love affair with the then-mysterious Middle East. But it wasn’t until 1930 that Stark, by that point fluent in Persian (Farsi), would set out for Persia (modern-day Iran) with just a local guide and a mule, and come upon the fabled and remote Valley of the Assassins, making her the first Westerner to identify it on a map. According to Alexander Maitland, the authorized biographer of Middle East explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger (both a contemporary and a friend of Stark’s), Stark was “an immensely significant figure” and “one of the relatively rare women explorers” who had the “advantage over the men of being able to get very close terms with the women in Muslim societies,” in turn granting her a much more intimate understanding of the role of women. Stark continued on her travels, despite bouts of the measles and a history of heart trouble; and during World War II, was employed by the British Ministry of Information in Aden, Baghdad, Iraq, and Cairo, where she used her knowledge of the region and its people to counteract Nazi propaganda, meanwhile spearheading the anti-fascist Brotherhood of Freedom movement. Yet her greatest gift, perhaps, was the knowledge she left behind: A prodigious author, Stark wrote a whopping 24 travel books and autobiographies, along with eight volumes of letters, leaving a trail of fascinating information about her adventures in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen—places which are now difficult to experience firsthand.

• Valentina Tereshkova
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… It was clear from early on that Valentina Tereshkova was destined for the skies. Born in 1937 in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a small Russian village about 170 miles northeast of Moscow, she made her first parachute jump at just 22 with the help of a local aviation club. When she wasn’t working at a nearby textile factory, Tereshkova got her kicks skydiving, and it didn’t take her long to become a pro. Then considered a key skill for astronauts (who were ejected from their capsules upon reentry to the atmosphere, at around 20,000 feet), she was selected for the Soviet space program in 1962 during a time when the Soviet Union remained in a fierce space race with the U.S. (and desperately wanted to send a woman up first), and she was promptly added to the roster. Later that year, Tereshkova, along with three other women (two parachutists and one pilot), was cherry-picked to begin intensive cosmonaut (the Russian term for ‘astronaut’) training—but she was the only woman on board Vostok 6, (the second part of a dual-flight mission) when it was launched into space on June 16 of that year. She reentered the atmosphere on June 19, a little less than three days after her departure (48 orbits, to be precise), and entered history as the first woman in space.

• Junko Tabei
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… No mountain was too high for Junko Tabei. The pint-sized Japanese mountaineer—all of five feet tall, and weighing in at 92 pounds—became the first woman to scale Mount Everest in May 1975, and later, to ascend the Seven Summits (the highest on every continent). She was also the first woman to reach the highest peaks in more than 70 countries, including Aconcagua in Argentina, and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Financing three years of training, plus the climb—all 29,029 feet of it—was no picnic. Tabei, then a mother of a young daughter, worked as an editor at a science magazine and taught English and piano lessons in her spare time, ultimately receiving a small amount of funding from the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon Television to help fund her travels. She also faced the challenge of planning an all-women expedition (six sherpas, not included)—unthinkable when, “back in 1970s Japan, it was still widely considered that men were the ones to work outside and women would stay at home,” Tabei told the Japan Times in 2012. There were sharper snags still: During the ascent on Everest, an avalanche buried her team’s camp about 9,000 feet from the summit, briefly knocking Taibei unconscious. But she came to and finished the climb regardless—pretty badass for a woman who started a climbing club for women after college, and was told she should be “raising children instead.” Tabei learned she had cancer in 2012, but kept at climbing anyway, leading high schoolers up the 12,388-foot Mount Fuji each summer—she even managed to make it halfway up in 2016, the year of her death, at age 77.

• Asnath Mahapa
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… Asnath Mahapa always knew she wanted to fly. But growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, a country that was legally segregated until 1994 (and with a father who vehemently disapproved), it often seemed impossible. Mahapa dabbled in other pursuits, taking an electrical engineering course at the University of Cape Town, but it just didn’t stick. So she signed up for flight school at the Progress Flight Academy in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and by 1998 she had received her private pilot’s license qualification. Did we mention she was just 22 years old? She earned her commercial pilot’s license in 1999, officially becoming the first black female pilot in the country. In a 2016 interview with CNN, Mahapa recalled that she was, “[t]he only woman in my class the whole time. I had to work very, very hard. I had to probably work ten times harder than the men that I was with in the classroom.” To help pave the way for other aspiring female pilots, Mahapa (who now flies for South African Airways) founded the African College of Aviation in 2012, offering training programs in night-rated training, as well as qualifications for both private and commercial pilot licenses. Despite the challenges, Mahapa has no regrets: “Ask any pilot, they’ll tell you, our view from our office is the best in the world, so why would you get bored doing a job like that?”

• Kate McCue
• They said she couldn’t do it, but… When a 12-year-old Kate McCue boarded a cruise ship with her parents for the first time in 1990, she wasn’t on the lookout for chocolate buffets and larger-than-life waterslides. In fact, she spent her time aboard envisioning what she might do as the ship’s social director—that is, until her father reportedly told her, “You can do anything you want, […] including drive the thing.” Shoot to 25 years later, in 2015, and the 37-year-old San Francisco native was living out her childhood fantasies as the first American woman to take the helm of a mega-cruise ship. She now uses her office aboard the 965-foot-long Celebrity Summit, a whopper of a cruise ship with capacity for 2,158 passengers and roughly 1,000 crew members that sails to Bermuda, New England, Canada and the Southern Caribbean, to test the cutting-edge programming she’d always dreamed of. She may not be the first-ever woman to command a mega-cruise ship—that would be Karin Stahre-Janson of Sweden, who was hired by Royal Caribbean in 2007—but there aren’t many American captains in the cruise industry at all, endowing the accomplishment with special significance. It’s little wonder McCue was the first to break the mold: In a 2016 interview with Traveler, the energetic captain said that, “I don’t like the stereotypes, but I love smashing them. People expect me to be a Goliath of a person. I love to show that you don’t have to squeeze into a mold to meet people’s expectations.”

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