So you're saying we should give ber credit and pay attention to her because she admitted she doesn't deserve credit or attention? What?
My point is that there are many legitimate woman flight pioneers wbo weren't gifted an oversized (and basically bogus) reputation by virtue of being part of the gilded social class.
I'm suggesting that it's fine to pay attention to Earhart for other reasons, including the particulars of her media phenomenon, the audience appetite for it, and so on. And I don't think it's OK to incept a sort of unqualified counter-meme of "look here, a woman with fake achievements".
HN being curious about the particulars of her - factually - famous disappearance makes just as much sense as the once-a-year HN discussion of the Dyatlov Pass incident.
I do agree there's many other aviators worth talking about.
> And I don't think it's OK to incept a sort of unqualified counter-meme of "look here, a woman with fake achievements".
To her credit, she was very open about how little she had done and the fact that she was little more than an observer who was present (at least in some of her most noted stunts). She does have significant achievements as well, but these are greatly overstated. She was poor and ungifted pilot (by her own account) that happened to have the fortune to allow her to be idle and spend a lot of money to keep trying to become an adequate pilot (she required far more training than others by her own account), and who ended up getting herself and others killed in a stunt designed entirely to produce media attention.
You seem to want to frame this as an attempt to attack women. It is not. This is about class. The women who were great pilots, and who demonstrated that women can achieve and even out achieve top men are passed over again and again to pay even more attention to Earhart.
The counter meme is: Look, a person from the top social class with some real and some dubious achievements who completely eclipses contemporaries who were far more impressive (but less rich).
I do agree with you but I find it odd we are 20 paragraphs into this conversation and not a single mention of any other woman pilot besides Earhart. Who are the woman and shouldn't we be talking about them instead of spilling even more ink for Earhart?
I can't reply to pests directly due to thread depth limit, but:
Bessica Raiche built her own airplane out of piano strings and silk when she read about the Wright Brother's flight. She was the first American woman to fly solo. She is worth remembering for many reasons, the flying just makes her relevant to this discussion.
I think Bessica Raiche is a worthy person for young women to hear about. Frankly she is a worthy person for young men to hear about too, she inspires me. If you are ever in a position where you need to be to keep at something, I think remembering that a person built an airplane out of wire and bamboo poles and then flew it solo, crashed, and kept at it is hard to beat. If she did it today it would be remarkable, but she did it in 1910 when it was completely unreasonable to try. She was competent in multiple fields and a renaissance woman. She was able to achieve remarkable things, and more mundane things that were still remarkable given the time she lived.
"On October 13, 1910, Raiche was awarded a diamond-studded gold medal inscribed "First Woman Aviator in America" by Hudson Maxim of the Aeronautical Society of America".
"Bessica was a physician, one of the first women specialists in obstetrics and gynecology in the United States"
"Bessica served as president of the Orange County Medical Association"
Have you ever heard of her before? Her Wikipedia page is less than 1 page long and only has one section. Earhart's Wikipedia page is 64 pages long.
If you want to be remembered, it's better to be rich and connected than a remarkable and competent person.
I'm sick of Amelia Earhart, the rich poser who got herself killed through what is credibly believed to be willful negligence and incompetence with her own equipment (the negligence and incompetence with her equipment is well documented, we just don't know if that is what killed her because she was so far off course that she was never found). It's ironic that if she had been a better navigator it's likely that she would have a worse reputation, because she might have wrecked closer to where she was supposed to have been and they could have figured out what happened.
My point is that there are many legitimate woman flight pioneers wbo weren't gifted an oversized (and basically bogus) reputation by virtue of being part of the gilded social class.