Amelia Earhart: The First Woman to Fly Across the Atlantic Alone

25 May 2010

Amelia Earhart with her Lockheed Vega airplane

MARY TILLOTSON: This is Mary Tillotson.

STEVE EMBER: And this is Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. Today, we tell about Amelia Earhart. She was one of America’s first female pilots.

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MARY TILLOTSON: Amelia Earhart was born in eighteen ninety-seven in the middle western state of Kansas. She was not a child of her times. Most American girls at the beginning of the twentieth century were taught to sit quietly and speak softly. They were not permitted to play ball or climb trees. Those activities were considered fun for boys. They were considered wrong for girls.

Amelia and her younger sister Muriel were lucky. Their parents believed all children needed physical activity to grow healthy and strong. So Amelia and Muriel were very active girls. They rode horses. They played baseball and basketball. They went fishing with their father. Other parents would not let their daughters play with Amelia and Muriel.

STEVE EMBER: The Earharts lived in a number of places in America’s Middle West when the girls were growing up. The family was living in Chicago, Illinois when Amelia completed high school in nineteen sixteen.

Amelia then prepared to enter a university. During a holiday, she visited her sister in Toronto, Canada. World War One had begun by then. And Amelia was shocked by the number of wounded soldiers sent home from the fighting in France. She decided she would be more useful as a nurse than as a student. So she joined the Red Cross.