“She wasn’t planning on doing any more record-setting.”įor her last hurrah, she began by flying from Oakland, Calif., to Miami, where she announced that for her last flight, she would fly around the world. “She was planning on hanging up her spurs,” says Butler. So, at 39, Earhart thought she had just one more ambitious flight in her before she was ready to spend the rest of her life on the ground. Elliott, “believed strongly in education for women as one way out of the Depression, and that educated women could add a great deal to our economy,” says Susan Butler, author of East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. The school’s president at the time, Edward C.

Purdue University recruited her to run a career center of sorts for women, and she inspired many to switch from home economics to engineering and other jobs in the aviation industry. Her earthbound opportunities were expanding too. That same year, TIME described her as “easily the world’s No. Her publicity stunts were lucrative too in 1935, she got paid $10,000 (approximately $185,000 in today’s dollars) to become the first person to fly from Hawaii to the mainland U.S. She funded her flying as a writer and lecturer, and even designed her own woman’s clothing line.

(The duration of the first flight - 20 Hours, 40 Min - would become the title of her book on the subject.) The two would end up marrying in February of 1931, and he became her publicist and the backer of her historic May 21, 1932, flight - the trip that, for the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic Paris journey, made her the first woman to pilot solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. In June 1928, she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and then to fly back. Intrigued by Earhart - and her physical resemblance to Lindbergh - he invited her to be a passenger on a transatlantic flight. The publicity got the attention of George Palmer Putnam, publisher of Charles Lindbergh’s book We, who had been looking for a “Lady Lindbergh” to replicate the success of the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, TIME reported in 1928. She flew on her days off, becoming the only female member of a local pilots association and making headlines for doing a flying stunt to raise money for the settlement house where she worked. (She also volunteered there during the 1918 flu pandemic.) She took flying lessons in California and set a women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet in 1922, but wasn’t yet committed to a career as an “aviatrix.” Classes on health and medicine at Columbia University were followed by a period as a social worker in Boston. The native of landlocked Kansas had gotten hooked on flying while attending an airshow in the Toronto area, where she had moved to work as a nurse’s aide during World War I.

20 Hours, 40 Min by Amelia Earhart