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yellow car – a first-time experience for many of them. While making progress as a social worker, she also distinguished herself in aviation, becoming vice president of the Boston chapter of the American Aeronautical Society. Beyond pilots and flying enthusiasts, people in Boston were learning Earhart’s name from the newspaper columns she wrote to promote flying. Her two jobs came together when she flew over Boston to drop leaflets to advertise a fundraising effort for Denison House.
    In 1924, Earhart became engaged to Sam Chapman, a chemical engineer at the Boston Edison Company and onetime boarder in her parents’ house. Like most young American men at the time, he assumed that any woman he chose to marry would make a home for him, start a family with him, and consider her role as homemaker to be an honorable and sufficient career.
    The couple had been dating for two years. He was tall and thin with dark brown hair and kind eyes. They became engaged, but Earhart never truly expected to give up any of her independence. It took a little while for Sam to understand that Amelia was never going to fill the role he cast for her. He eventually understood that their romance was becoming mainly epistolary.
Exploiting Lindbergh’s Triumph
    Aviation became a national obsession in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, doing what no other pilot had ever done. Lindbergh’s flight had been meant to promote air transport as a fast, affordable, and reliable service for airmail. But the wild publicity that ensued got the business community thinking about passenger airlines and the future of air commerce in general.
    Should another man repeat Lindbergh’s feat, it would not be enough of a spectacle to hit the publicity jackpot. But what if a woman, an aviatrix, were to attempt an ocean crossing in a plane? What a story!
    And, of course, in the summer of 1927, rumors were already floating that the next transatlantic flight would include a woman. Since no firm plan had been announced, speculation grew in scope and sometimes in credibility. That summer, Thea Rasche, a well-known woman flyer from Germany, started showing up in competitions and airshows in the United States.
    The young blond flyer instantly had a regular presence in the news. Rumors circulated that she planned to fly the Atlantic with Lindbergh. They were taken so seriously that Rasche had to issue a denial.
    That summer, American audiences experienced horror when they saw her plane go into a nosedive at an air show. Rasche survived, saving her plane and her life, by landing in the Hudson near Poughkeepsie.
    The press and the public saw the accident as evidence that women weren’t fit to fly. In fact, the fault was in the aircraft, which knowledgeable aviators appreciated.
    With that experience behind her, Rasche made a far more serious nosedive when the very same mechanical failure happened again, in September of that year in an airshow at Dennison field near Boston. Once again Rasche was able to pull out of a dive; this time she survived by choosing a crash landing in a marshy area next to the field. Amelia Earhart was in the audience.
    Seizing the moment, Earhart helped herself to a plane belonging to the field and successfully distracted – and calmed – the crowd by going through her own air maneuvers as an improvised stunt flying demonstration. Later detractors cited Amelia’s actions as opportunistic self-promotion. But such critics missed the much more significant point: Earhart hoped most of all to obviate the criticism of women pilots. She appreciated what Rasche had to do and admired her fellow aviator.
    Not wanting to upset her mother, Earhart took pains not to let on that she was even thinking of playing a part in planning a transatlantic adventure. Amy swore her sister to silence, as well.
    In some circles, the people who imagined the excitement of a woman pilot’s success story had