The Women With Silver wings
My Own True Love is an aviation history bugg, which means I have tiptoed around the edges of the subject. It’s probably not surprising to any of you that the aviation stories that catch my imagination the most strongly are the ones where aviation history and women’s history overlap. I’m always delighted when a good book on the subject crosses my path. Case in point: The Women with Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II by pilot and historian Katherine Sharp Landdeck .
Landdeck. tells the thrilling, and sometimes heartbreaking, story of the female aviators who flew for the United States in World War II More than 1100 women served as pilots in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Despite initial doubts as to whether women could do the job, they successfully trained male pilots for military service, transported planes across country and served as test pilots. As the war drew to an end and male pilots came home, they were forced to give up the jobs they had done so well and immediately forgotten by the country they served. Landdeck tells their story with empathy and academic rigor.
Landdeck brings more than intellectual curiosity to the task. The WASP community welcomed her into their circle, as both a pilot and a historian. Drawing on interviews with surviving pilots and their unpublished letters and journals, she uses the personal stories of individual women—why they enlisted, where they learned to fly, and what happened to them after the war—to enrich her account of the creation, growth and dismantlement of the service.
The end result is an eye-opening account of the first American women to fly for their country–and their subsequent fight to be recognized for their role in history. The Women with Silver Wings will appeal to fans of women’s history, aviation enthusiasts, and WWII buffs.
Most of this review appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
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Today’s news from 1929: The tiny* but strategically important island of Heligoland, which commanded access to Hamburg and Bremen, revolted against German rule and tried to re-join Great Britain. Heligoland had been British until 1890, when Britain traded it to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar. Germany had turned the island into an important naval base and, more importantly, built a huge concrete sea wall to protect the island from storms. The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to demolish its fortifications. In Heligoland, that meant demolishing not only the naval base but the sea wall. The island was disintegrating a bit more with every storm. Surely, the islanders reasoned, Britain would jump at the chance for a strategic naval base , and build a sea wall as part of the fortifications. According to my girl Sigrid Schultz, the revolt began with hundreds of Heligoland’s 3400 inhabitants marching on the newspaper office while singing Britannia Rules the Waves “with gusto, in a broad German accent.”
The problem with learning history from the newspaper is that you don’t always find out what happened next. But my guess is that Britain took a pass.
*Roughly 1/5 of one square mile
New Discoveries of Ancient Women Warriors, or Old Bones Revisited
Earlier this week, a news item about the discovery of an ancient woman warrior appeared in my news feed.* Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://bit.ly/2N25WHJ.
The story will sound familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to this kind of thing in recent years:
Russian archaeologists discovered the remains in what is now Siberia in 1988. Dated from the early 6th century BCE, they were so well-preserved that is was possible to see the wart on the young warrior’s face. (And by young, I mean twelve or thirteen years old. Which probably didn’t seem as young to the ancient Scythians as it does to us.) But partial mummification had not preserved what are politely described as “secondary sexual characteristics”. Since the warrior was buried with a full array of weapons—an axe, a three-foot-long birch bow and a quiver full of arrows—the archaeologists deemed the remains to be male. Because thirty years ago, weapons were also considered a secondary sexual characteristic.
Recently, the archaeologists were given the opportunity have the remains subjected to paleogenetic analysis, what you and I know as DNA testing, which revealed the young warrior to be a girl. Holy Birka Woman, Batman!
This re-thinking of an existing discovery is not an isolated case in the three years since since discovery that the Birka man was, in fact, the Birka woman. Scholars are beginning to ask more complicated questions about gender and remains. And as a result, there have been several new discoveries as a result of using techniques of forensic anthropology to consider what we know about existing remains. (Here are a couple of links to stories that appeared in my feed in recent months: https://bit.ly/2KD7OFM and https://bit.ly/3eV8kN2)
I suspect that in coming years we are going to see more instances of possible women warriors as these technologies and new questions are applied to new discoveries and existing remains. At a minimum, we can no longer assume that sword means male, because that would be a phallus-y.**
*Google alerts are a wonderful thing.
**Sorry, but I’ve wanted to use that pun for at least two years now. Just groan and move on.
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Today’s news from 1928: Members of the League of Nations council were so distracted by women staff members who attended a session without stockings (a new and apparently shocking fashion) that they stopped working on an anti-war pact to pass a rule forbidding it.
Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic
When I started looking at the possibility of writing about Sigrid Schultz last April, what I knew about the Weimar Republic could be summed up in Peter Gay’s assertion in his classic Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider* that the Weimar spirit is embodied in “Gropius’ buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs.” **
To the extent that we think about the Weimar Republic at all, many of us see it through the lens of the Lost Generation. (Think Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which morphed into the musical Cabaret.) And in fact, Weimar Berlin was the darker counterpart of interwar Paris. It is the city of Expressionist art, Dada-ism, modernism, The Three Penny Opera, political satire, subversive cabaret, and sexual freedoms. With the (well-earned) reputation of being the most licentious city in Europe, Berlin drew an international community of artists, political dissidents, journalists, and intellectuals, not to mention stray members of the Lost Generation engaged in what a later generation would term “finding themselves. ”
But that is only one side of the story. And maybe not the most important one. It didn’t take me long to learn that the Weimar Republic in general and Weimar Berlin in particular were defined by more than sex, drugs, and cabaret. Born in revolution, it was a period of enormous social and political creativity. It was also a period marked by growing economic crisis, recurring political crises (internal and external), constant political intrigue, occasional political assassinations, attempted coups, labor unrest, and regular street violence between supporters of different political view points.
The Weimar republic only lasted from 1919 through 1933. It is easy to overlook it as pause between the two world wars. But the more I read about it, the more important it seems. I’ll keep you posted.
*I’m not going to review this one beyond saying that it is well worth reading if you want to know more about modernism and Weimar and you aren’t bothered by the application of Freudian theory to an entire culture. If you are looking for a broader picture, as I was (and am), I strongly recommend Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, which combines economic, political and social history in complex and thought-provoking ways. As you can see, another book stuffed full of sticky tabs, always a good measure of how useful I find a particular volume to be:
**I suspect that Marlene Dietrich’s songs are going to be the sound track for this book.