Commentary: Misogyny dies hard

Over the Labor Day weekend in 1933 Florence Klingensmith, a young aviator from Kragnes Township, Minnesota, arrived in Chicago. She was there to compete for the Phillips Trophy. It was $10,000 in prize money, but she would have to earn it. The air race was 12 laps over an 8-mile course around three pylons. Klingensmith was an experienced stunt pilot, but this was the first time she would compete against men. During the race she impressed everyone with the skill she showed going around the pylons, frequently banking her plane into a near vertical turn. But on the last lap, with Florence in the lead, the wing of her Gee Bee plane started to fall apart; the fabric shredded and the wing folded against the fuselage. Klingensmith fought the stick and got her plane away from the stands filled with spectators before it nosed into the ground. She died on impact, breaking almost every bone in her body. This, by itself, is horrifying, but what happened next is obscene.

In the investigation that followed her accident it was determined that Florence was probably on her period and should never have been allowed in the cockpit. Menstruating women were not allowed to fly. It was further determined that women only flew to get attention and lacked the judgment, strength and emotional stability to handle machinery. They simply didn’t understand how the mechanics of flight worked. To punctuate the contempt with which the men in charge of the air race treated Florence Klingensmith, they had her naked body wrapped in newspapers and shipped back to Kragnes Township in a cardboard box.

Three other Gee Bee aircraft had suffered the same mechanical failure that year, killing the male pilot every time, including the man who designed the plane. None of those men were blamed for the accidents. In their case it was attributed to simple bad luck.

I have recently finished reading the book “Fly Girls” by Keith O’Brien, and it talks about Florence and the other women who carved a niche for women in the Golden Age of flying, the decade from 1929-1939.

The book looks at the stark realities of aviation in its infancy. No regulations guiding the manufacturing of airplanes, fewer laws governing pilots and their training, rudimentary landing strips and a new science stumbling along with lots of errors and no margin for them. It is also a warm look at the humanity of the women who decided they, too, wanted to fly.

As it turns out, I was reading “Fly Girls” at the same time Vice President Kamala Harris was taking her place as the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States. You might think that these two events, happening almost 100 years apart, would not keep running into each other, but they do.

Prejudice is an insidious worm. It burrows under one’s skin and eats away at its host until you are so sick, and have been sick for so long, that you think how you feel is normal. When the prejudice is one of male superiority it leads to rules as blind and irrational as saying that women pilots may not fly when they are menstruating.

Sometimes that quiet prejudice becomes mixed with anger, fear or anger that comes from fear and that is the most dangerous kind. While most men are decent human beings, there are some men who see women only as subservient beings, deserving of dismissive, even violent behavior. When women challenge this misconception of male superiority, these angry, frightened, insecure men become overtly ugly, like the men who sent the body of Florence Klingensmith home wrapped like garbage.

Now we have a woman who is a candidate for president. The Republicans have decided to throw every tired complaint against her that any and every working woman has heard. She laughs too loud (women should be demure). She slept her way to the top (women outside the home are prone to base behavior). She is the result of diversity, equity and inclusion (women can’t possibly have the requisite skills to succeed). All these complaints are lies, and they tell us much more about the liars than they would probably like us to know.

We also have the Republican vice-presidential candidate on tape saying that childless women (like Amelia Earhart, perhaps) are unfit to lead. Evidently some Republicans, starting at the top of the ticket, think women have no function other than to be receptacles for male sperm. According to J.D. Vance, we women are chattel, useful only as breeding stock. Ladies, we had best be on guard against the people who gravitate to this thinking because the thing about breeding stock is that once they can no longer produce, they end up on the dinner table.

Mr. Vance, I am smarter than you. I have given more to this world than you, and I am so much more than breeding stock. I keep the faith.

Louise Butler is a retired educator and published author who lives in Edinburg. She writes for our Board of Contributors.