“The WASP service to our nation at a critical time in the history of the entire free world is remarkable in its own right”.
Col. Eileen Collins
“There is no reason why the aeroplane should not open up a fruitful occupation for women”.
Harriet Quimby
The triumph of aerial locomotion will be the work of women.
L’Aéro magazine, 67th edition, 9 December 1909.
Flying does not rely so much on strength, as on physical and mental co-ordination.
Raymonde de Laroche, first lady to solo an airplane and world’s first licensed female pilot, 1910. Quoted in The Intrepid First Lady of Flight, Flying magazine, March 1957.
Because she has retained the primitive faculty of seeing with full retina; enforced modesty and flirting have caused this;
because she has scattered attention instead of concentration; this is invaluable to an aviator who must notice many things at once;
because she has the faculty of intuition—that quality of the mind which can take in a number of causes simultaneously and induce a conclusion—an essential in aviation;
because her specific gravity is less than man’s;
because she needs less oxygen and therefore can better meet the suffocating rush of air; altitude effects her less than it does man;
because her sneezes, in man an actual spasm, have been controlled by ages of polite repression,
because she feels more quickly warning atmospheric changes;
because she loves to speed.
Professor Rudolph Hensingmüller, a list of reasons why women are better pilots than men, published in 1911 and immediately ridiculed. Newspaper clipping in the Matilde Moisant biographical file, National Air and Space Museum, cited in the 1978 Smithsonian book United States Women in Aviation through World War I.
