Letter to Dr. Wiggam, circa 1932

Dear Dr. Wiggum: 

I venture this letter because you wear D. Se. after your name. Those letters imply an open mind and intellectual honesty besides mere knowledge.

After that beginning you can guess I am about to question one of your very interestingly written “Let’s-Explore-Your-Mind” opinions. I saw the answer referred to some time ago, but the issue raised is still a burning one, so I take pen in hand at this late date.

You inquire “ Do you think women should be allowed to pilot passenger planes?” your answer says “I do not think all women should be eliminated, but I think our experience with women automobile drivers proves beyond doubt that it would be simply ghastly folly to trust the average woman to pilot an airplane.”

My comment on that statement is that it would be just as true if you substituted man for woman. You realize pilots, male and female, undergo the same physical examinations, and the same flying and written tests to obtain similar licenses. Pilots are a selected group and while normal, are not average. I feel the implications in your statement is that average men would be safe but average women would not—and with that I cannot agree.

Second, you say “The best studies we have show that women, given the same type of machines as men and driving in all sorts of weather, have over twice as many accidents as men and the accidents cost twice as much.” In this you overlook differentiation in regard to training and experience. If one is comparing basic abilities one must consider all factors. Your statistics may be true but the implication may not be, i.e., that women are less skillful than men given the same opportunities.

To compare fairly one should add “women of equal training, experience and freedom from the sense of inferiority, tradition has bred into them.” I might guess that men making pies would ruin twice as many as women. However, I should not offer that as proof that men were fundamentally incapable under similar laboratory conditions of making pies as well as women.

I realize you are giving facts as they are tabulated today. What I object to is that your conclusion is not justified by these facts and is therefore not D. Se. “Women should be vastly more highly selected than men and subjected to much longer training, both for automobile and airplane piloting.” Do you mean selected for training or selected today from those who already drive cars? If the former, out of 10,000 men and 10,000 women selected from as similar groups as possible, probably more women would be passed as normal than men, i.e. could be counted on as good driver or pilot material. Biological literature shows that female numerically truer to the normal than males.

If the latter, then probably you are right as there are certainly fewer good women drivers than men—but there are also numerically fewer women who drive at all. So where are we? Is not the point really whether the proportion of good drivers among women (considering the total and the other factors I have mentioned) is greater or less or equal to that of men? To illustrate take the situation in regard to pilots. There are roughly 15,000 pilots, exclusive of the army and navy, in this country. Of that total 410 are women. 71 of these, or about 17%, hold the transport rating. Of the men about 600 are airline chief pilots or a proportion of 600/14500, roughly 4%. On that basis one should be able to draw 16 pilots, from among the ranks of women flyers capable of holding airline jobs. However, if such number were not available it might not be because women were as a whole less competent than men. For there are proportionately fewer women holding the higher licenses. That is, there are considerably more than 17% of the 14,500 male pilots transport licenses. This differentiation is due to many known causes such as a larger proportion of sportsmen flyers among women, greater difficulty is obtaining adequate instruction for women, fewer opportunities to earn while learning, plus the crushing barrier of tradition noted before. There may be unknown causes, too, I grant, but these should not be wielded as ghostly weapons in a scientific inquiry.

I have long been interested in comparative skills between the sexes. I have watched the flawless coordination of women champion divers and I have watched the control and precision of women factory hands as they do work no man does (whether this should be “can do” or not, I do not know) and I wonder why the creatures who can with training perform these diverse tasks, and a hundred others, so excellently, should be balked by a contraption with an engine and four wheels or one with an engine and a couple of wings.

Can it be that conclusions have been based on unscientific premises? I think so definitely. The medical profession is one of the greatest sinners, in this respect. Concerning women pilots they have made the most extraordinary pronouncements, repeating conclusions from pathology and from musty volumes of the past, when a woman was likely to have almost any time a “fit of the vapours”. Far too many M.D.s unconsciously contrive to think of women today as the same creatures with only the terminology of her frailities altered.

To protest their licenses a group of women flyers have volunteered to undergo any physical reaction tests examiners wish over a period of time, provided those tests are scientifically carried out with men controls. So far none have been made so difficult is it for women to gain a hearing as sample guinea pigs.

The most thorough tests of comparative skills (those carried out at Purdue and Columbia Universities) show no differentiation whatsoever between men’s and women’s fluctuation curves. Human beings differ from day to day in mental and muscular control but so far, the female, contrary to what commonly supposed, does not vary at one time more than the male. Is not this the crux of criticism of women’s abilities?

Does your article not imply some unnamed mysterious weakness possibly based on this? Nerves, glands, whatnot? An inherent never-to-be overcome lack.

I have written this book in order to ask that you do not have unnecessary boulders at women who are struggling against such heavy odds now. I think where an answer concerning them is left with the implications of the one which is disturbing me, you do so. Please help us with your knowledge and know thousands will be grateful even though they do not put words together to tell you so as I have done.

Amelia Earhart