“Let’s Put On The Girls”
The Incomparable Jackie Cochran
March 13, 2021
“Girls in Aviation Day”
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[Editor’s Note: As today is “Girls in Aviation Day", and in honor of Women’s History Month, JDK is publishing this edition a day earlier than usual. Be sure to visit and support Women in Aviation International for more information and resources.]
I had my head in the clouds from a very young age.
When I wasn’t racing around my house with toy airplanes as a kid, I was learning about pilots and astronauts. Their names and exploits fueled my love of history and an unquenchable passion for the possible - the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Jimmy Thatch, James Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, and Neil Armstrong were the first biographies I devoured from kid-level history books. As I grew up, I learned about Eddie Rickenbacker and Yuri Gagarin and Richard Bong, and with the rest of the world raised my eyebrows and shook my head at the unpredictable Force of Nature that was Howard Hughes.
But the only woman pilot I ever heard about was Amelia Earhart. And all I really knew about her was that she had vanished without a trace. It was her mystery - not her flying - that I learned about, nothing more.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but that didn’t change until I was well into my thirties.
Yes, my thirties. After earning a Ph.D. in twentieth-century history and a lifelong obsession with aviation and aerospace; despite rigorous training that instilled in me respect for every area of historical inquiry, particularly women’s history; and despite being raised in a family - and surrounded by friends - who believed in gender and racial equality. Female pilots were never on my radar (forgive the pun) and exploring why I overlooked these powerhouses for so long remains an uncomfortable, though important, exercise for me.
The sad, larger, conclusion is that I never asked about female pilots or astronauts, even after all the excitement that accompanied Sally Ride’s first foray into space in 1983 (I was ten). While I had no trouble with the idea of women being pilots or astronauts, I had no idea how much of a historical struggle it had been for women to earn their seat in the cockpit.
I know I wasn’t alone. It’s only been in the last few decades that public attention and interest has developed around the history of women in aerospace, something that grew hand-in-hand (or wingtip to wingtip, if you will) with the rise of women’s history and other social history categories in the larger discipline.
Before those stories could be known, they had to be noticed. And before they could be noticed, someone had to care enough to notice. Noticing led to quests for information, research, writing and publishing. The trickle down from academia to mainstream education has been slow to follow. I missed most of that in my schooling.
What (or who) started to catch me up was Jackie Cochran.
Talk about a Force of Nature. If you didn’t know that her biography was true, you would think she was either a fictional swashbuckling movie character or early an comic book super hero.
I’ll only cover some of the highlights of her life here, but this article here can provide what I leave out. It’s a helluva list.
My interest, instead, is more about why she resonates with me (and with so many others) and what we can still learn from her in our own time, when women still make up less than 9% of all the pilots in the world (among other areas in aviation and aerospace where they remain vastly underrepresented).
In a nutshell, Jackie Cochran was one of the greatest pilots in history. Period.
Among her many flight accomplishments in no particular order; she was the first woman to break the sound barrier (and a close, deeply respected friend of the first man to do so, Chuck Yeager); she was the first woman to win the famed Bendix airplane race in the 1930s, and did so flying the notoriously dangerous “Gee Bee” race plane that she once called “an absolute killer”; created and ran the Women’s Air Service Pilots [WASP] program that tested and ferried American warplanes to various theaters of war during World War II; and became an outspoken advisor in NASA’s space program during the Mercury years. By the time she died in 1980, Cochran owned well over a dozen all-time aviation records and was one of the most distinguished pilots of all time.
Her personal accomplishments were no less impressive. She escaped a difficult, largely uneducated childhood in rural Florida, then worked her way up to self-sufficiency in various labor-heavy jobs before making a name for herself as the founder of a successful cosmetics company. Encouraged by the wealthy man she would later marry (as her second husband), she took up flying to draw more attention to her company, but quickly developed a deeper love for flying than anything (and, one could say, anyone) else. After she’d become a famed aviator, Cochran continued with her successful cosmetics business while hobnobbing with the elites of American society. She is also credited as the one who finally convinced Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for the American presidency in 1952.
Her personality matched her flying - without fear or second thought, speeding through life by the seat of her pants, and unpredictable to the extreme. She could be foul-mouthed and hot tempered, yet always paused to apply her makeup and fix her hair after flying so she could prove to the waiting press that a woman could be both a successful pilot AND feminine (contrary to the media - and nation at large - who insisted otherwise). She advocated fiercely that women could fly just as well - or better - than men, and set a standard and tone for the women who flew with her that they prove it with every hop. In each new endeavor, she faced dismissal and worse from many male pilots, yet used that as fuel to beat them in races, grueling missions, and aerial chutzpah.
She wasn’t without her contradictions or social difficulties; she made enemies. She worked hard to rewrite the known history of her troubled childhood. During World War II, she strong-armed the USAAF into giving her command of the WASP - by absorbing another similar organization of women ferry pilots into her own group. When scores of male USAAF pilots flatly refused to test fly the new but dangerous B-26 medium bomber in 1940 - 41, she called them all “sissies” and, after successfully putting the B-26 through its paces herself, told General Hap Arnold that if he wanted to get those male pilots in line, then “Let’s put on the girls.” It worked, yet increased resentment among male pilots for their female counterparts. She later said, “I’d have given my right eye to be an astronaut,” yet some deem her responsible for scuttling the “Mercury 13” project to introduce women astronauts into NASA. Competing so vigorously and successfully against a male-dominated industry, ironically, made her far more comfortable around men than women - she counted among her few female friends Amelia Earhart and Helen Maitland, the wife of the famed general Curtis LeMay. She also led with brash humor and bravado, as if she had to prove herself as “tough” a human being as she was a pilot. She was also known as a fiercely loyal friend who considered all people as equally capable of magnificent accomplishments, regardless of their gender.
Taken all together, everything about Jackie Cochran’s extraordinary life continues to strike me as remarkably, beautifully, and undeniably human.
It’s precisely her contradictions and vagaries that make her accomplishments all the more impressive. They underscore just how much strength and commitment and bravery she possessed that she rarely felt comfortable to show others. She never believed women were inferior to men, yet had to push herself to continually prove that truth over and over again; any mistake or failure could - and would, after she became famous - become public fodder for the widespread prejudices in the United States that insisted women weren’t cut out for the “men’s work” of flying. Absolute perfection was the unfair societal standard for women, though not for men. To gain acceptance among her male peers, she had to balance “acting” like them with holding onto her femininity, establishing a lifelong internal tension that had to have been beyond stressful. Perhaps she loved to fly so much because it relieved the weight of the demands that sat on her shoulders far too often.
Sadly, it’s a condition to which women in aviation and aerospace today can still relate - because those same pressures still exist.
Despite the recent increased public awareness of the accomplishments of Jackie Cochran and so many other legendary female aviation and aerospace pioneers - Bessie Coleman, Jacqueline Auriol, Amy Johnson, Harriet Quimby, Valentina Tereshkova, and Sally Ride, for starters - that has not translated into greater female representation in the skies and space.
In what comes as a surprise to most everyone I ever say this to, the overall percentage of women pilots and astronauts in the world today has not changed fundamentally from what it was in the 1980s. Yes - that’s now forty years ago. United Airlines currently leads US commercial carriers with the highest percentage of female pilots - at only 7.4%. The highest percentage in the world is currently held by Air India, with 11.2%. The percentages of women of color in global airlines is far, far lower.
Similarly low percentages still exist among the astronaut corps of nations around the world, among newer commercial space companies, and within the “support” industries of engineering and specialized manufacturing.
These disparities exist despite the steady increase in workforce demand in these industries over the past forty years, despite decades of widespread initiatives to bring women more fully into these fields, and despite increased public knowledge and acceptance of the past contributions of women to aviation and aerospace. There remains a distinct disconnect between all the efforts and the ultimate results.
The answer to raising those percentages, of course, remains elusive. Continued conversations, initiatives, and innovations in education, public policy, and social development are vital parts of finding that answer. History teaches us that the process of such change can be frustratingly, maddeningly, unfortunately slow.
Which makes it no less imperative to continue to push for it - not only in the name of increased equity and equality, but also for the broader benefit of the aviation / aerospace industries, the global economy, and humanity as a whole. By doing so, each of us honors those who worked for such change in the past, and sets the course and opportunities for those who will work for such change in the future. That’s part of being human, just as we each pass on our own accomplishments and stories down to our children for the benefit of our families and communities. These are all interrelated, and require continued and consistent effort.
For now, that means continually retelling Jackie’s story to more and more people - women and men; retelling all the stories of women in aviation and aerospace that are known and yet to be written; to use these stories to both inspire and guide women into the industry; for the industry itself to reevaluate its priorities and practices to incorporate more women into their workforces; for educational entities and nonprofits to embrace more quality research and innovative ideas to make their programs for efficient and effective; and, above all, each of us taking on the slow, steady, challenging work of changing minds - one person at a time.
It is only a matter of time - if we choose to take on the challenge.
My own contribution as a historian is to tell stories such as Jackie’s to any who will listen, and as a writer by including Jackie Cochran as a character in my alternate history novel, Krelle’s Inferno. Expanding the nonfiction history of female aviators into the worlds of historical fiction only introduces more people to such women, which leads to interest in knowing more about what they were really like.
In such ways, history is expanded and enriched by adding more voices to it. It’s telling the truth of our collective pasts more completely and honestly - which is the entire point.
I am doing what I can do with what I know, while always seeking to know more.
What can you do? First, figure out what you know - and don’t know. For example, did you recognize the names of the women I listed above as readily as the men I listed at the beginning of this post? If not, go ahead and start there.
If you do a quick Google search, finding “top ten” lists of the “best” female aviators of all time is easy, and the same names tend to appear in every one. Tellingly, similar lists of the “top ten” male pilots are much more varied and debated, as there are exponentially more of them to move up and down that “all time” list - literally thousands more. For an industry and history that are barely a century old, that discrepancy says more than thousands of pages of words can ever do.
And yet, ironically, if women pilots and astronauts someday (hopefully sooner than in another hundred years) numbered so many as to create similar “top ten” debates among thousands of options, it would honor Jackie Cochran and her female contemporaries by manifesting what they’d always believed and practiced - that good pilots are determined not by human gender, but by human skill.
Which would be, in the end, a way to point humanity towards larger equality, opportunity, and accomplishment of the kind that aviation and aerospace has always inspired in people of all ages, races, and gender identities from its earliest days.
In short, it’s the proof that what we deem impossible can indeed be made possible, then made into reality. Then we dream again on top of that new reality.
That is how the stories of women like Jackie Cochran can help women today and tomorrow take their equal, rightful place in the larger human story.
We each can help write that story, by first helping them fly in it today and tomorrow - built on yesterday.
Just like Jackie wanted.
So let’s Get ‘Em - and Keep ‘Em - Flying.
Chins Up, Everyone - so you can get a good look at them as they bust all our barriers.
**If you would like to learn more about Jackie Cochran, she wrote two autobiographies that are worth reading. As her role with the WASP is her most famous legacy, reading the various books by Sarah Byrn Rickman should be your starting point for learning more. If you’d like to help young girls find the inspiration and develop the tools for careers in aviation and aerospace, be sure to check out and support Airway Science for Kids, a Portland, OR based nonprofit that works with underserved youth of all kinds to develop life and career pathways in aviation and aerospace.**
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Thanks for reading this Special Early Edition of My Sunday Post.
Here are some important updates from my past week:
Soul Book of the Week: I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers by Tim Madigan (a re-read!)
Book On My Nightstand: A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman
Best Show / Movie I Watched: For All Mankind, Season 2 (Apple TV) Geeeeeeeeez it’s good so far…
Strongest Earworm Song: “World Turning” by Fleetwood Mac
Longest Walk / Run of the Week: 5.86 mile walk / 19 mile ride (Thursday)
Favorite Hangout T-Shirt of the Week: This one. Unleash the KRAKEN!
Coolest Thing of the Week: My Monday podcast and Facebook Live.
Thing I Now Know That I Didn’t Last Week: That I am (again!) allergic to milk.
Most Helpful Perspective / Advice of the Week: “We can’t think our way out of exhaustion”
Current Wanderlust List: 1) A baseball game. Any game. 2) A warm beach. Any beach. 3) Japan
