May 9, 2011--Rosie the Pilot

Back in December, at age 86, Geraldine Doyle passed away. As a 17-year-old factory worker, she became the inspiration for an iconic World War II recruitment poster that evoked female power and independence under the slogan "We Can Do It!"

For millions of Americans throughout the decades since World War II, the brunette in the red and white polka-dot bandanna was remembered and celebrated as Rosie the Riveter.

Rosie's rolled-up sleeves and muscular flexed right arm came to represent the newfound strength of the 18 million women who worked during that war and later made her a figure of the feminist movement.

But the woman in the patriotic poster was never named Rosie, nor was she a riveter. All along it was Mrs. Doyle, who after graduating from high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, took a job in a metal factory.

Just recently, much less well known, but at least equally inspiring, Violet Cowden, 94, died. During the War, she and about 1,000 other women spend the duration ferrying newly manufactured warplanes to air bases around the country, towing targets for fighter pilots to shoot at, and instructing newly recruited airmen who would be assigned to combat duties in which the women pilots themselves were not allowed to participate.

Attached to the Army Air Force, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, were the first women to serve as U.S. military pilots, but with a difference--they were considered civil servants and not members of the military itself. They were "attached" to the service and were not a fully recognized part of it. And so, as civil servants, according to the linked obituary from the New York Times, they had to pay for their own food and lodging when they were on assignment. I assume that the 38 WASPs who died while piloting aircraft for the army at least had their funerals paid for. Though one never knows.

Vilot Clara Thurn was born in 1916 in a sod house in Bowdie, S.D., became a teacher, and before she could drive a car became a licensed pilot. When the war broke out she tried to sign up for the Civil Air Patrol but got no reply. Instead, she joined the Navy as a WAVE, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, because, as she put it later, she "liked their hats." Soon thereafter she heard about the WASPs' early incarnation, the Women's Flying Training Detachment, and enlisted, but not before making herself gain 8 pounds to get to the 100 that was required.

She flew hundreds of missions, if I can use that word for a civil servant attached to the Army Air Force, including ones in which the planes were so new that they had not been tested and, in her words, flying them was like "making footprints in soft virgin snow." She flew in all weather, seven days a week, often to airports with no visibility due to foul weather or because they had no runway lights. A few times a plane she was ferrying caught fire on landing and she managed to save not only herself but, as she recounted, her makeup!

After the war, like Rosie the Riveter, Violet and the surviving WASPs were dismissed so that their jobs could be turned over to returning veterans. She wanted to continue flying and approached Trans World Airlines, but they refused to hire her except to work behind a ticket counter. This was painful; and so after a short time, she moved on to get married, have a daughter, and become a partner in a California ceramics studio. She let her pilot's license lapse, but friends would take her up and turn the controls over to her.

Finally, in 2010, as past president of the WASP veterans group, Vilot Cowden, was among others invited to Washington to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of their service. At the time, she was one of fewer than 300 survivors.