Strong Women

The mysterious disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart has always fascinated us. She was bold and brave, a risk taker. The first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. And on July 2, 1937, she boarded her plane with navigator Fred Noonan, intending to fly around the globe.  She was never seen again.

Under their category of Weird News, the Huffington Post noted a new book proposes that Earhart was spying on the Japanese for the United States. It reports that she was shot down, taken as a prisoner of war, and then released at the end of the war. Strangely it purports that she lived until 1982 under the name of Irene Craigmile Bolam.

I wondered about this new look at the history of Earhart. Is it good or bad for her reputation?

As an informal scholar of Ancient Rome, I’ve always been suspicious of who writes history. The ancient Roman writers, all male, wrote about women as an exercise of teaching others a lesson. Women whom they thought were “good” were exonerated and women who they were thought were “bad” were disparaged. Today scholars are taking another look at Ancient Rome, and now they see women in a more balanced way.

Is this new theory good for Earhart and her reputation?

If Earhart served as a spy (and although there is apparently no documentation that supports this theory), I can understand it.  The world was ramping up to war in 1937, and China and Japan were already fighting. Certainly someone with Earhart’s ability could gather information for the United States.

If Earhart was captured by the Japanese and survived as a prisoner-of-war, then she had strength and fortitude and luck. I would admire her for all of those things.

I cannot understand why she would assume another name and live the rest of her life incognito. It’s almost as if being a risk-taking aviator was not who she was. That she would give up doing all the bold things she once did, as if they weren’t part of who she was. It would suggest that she was somehow “broken.”

It doesn’t make sense to me. And it doesn’t help her reputation.

“What I did was very normal. I would have done it for anyone.”
~ Augusta Chiwy

Augusta Chiwy died on August 23rd. Never heard of her? She was one of the many unsung heroes of World War II. Ms. Chiwy was mentioned only in passing in Stephen Ambrose’s bestselling book Band of Brothers as a black nurse from the Congo. Yet hers is a story of remarkable courage.

After reading Ambrose’s book, another historian, Martin King, dug deeper into the facts about Ms. Chiwy and wrote The Forgotten Nurse. Ms. Chiwy, who was born in the Congo and studied nursing in Belgium, was visiting her father in Bastogne, Belgium in December, 1944. Americans had control of the city, while the German front was several miles away. Then the Germans advanced, and the town of Bastogne became in the middle of what would become the longest and bloodiest battle of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge.

Running after bodies

Dr. John Prior came to her father’s house, asking for help retrieving wounded men from the front lines. With his ambulance driver killed, Dr. Prior said, and he had no one left to ask. She volunteered to work at the first-aid station and when her clothing became bloody, she traded them for an Army uniform. Wearing the uniform meant that if she was captured, she would have been put to death.

The front line of the battle was just outside her town. Along with Dr. Prior and two other litter-bearers, she took an Army truck to the field where the Germans were shelling the field. Under heavy fire, Ms. Chiwy ran out on the field, trying to retrieve bodies.

On Christmas Eve of the year at the aid station, Dr. Prior was about to make a champagne toast when a German bomber dropped a 500-pound shell that landed next door. Two dozen U.S. soldiers were killed as well as a Ms. Chiwy’s friend. She herself was blown through the wall. Nevertheless, she got up and helped the wounded.

After Mr. King wrote his book, Ms. Chiwy was awarded the Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service. She was also knighted by the king of Belgium. According to the New York Times article, Ms. Chiwy said at the Brussels award ceremony. “What I did was very normal. I would have done if for anyone. We are all children of God.”

We’re lucky that Ms. Chiwy’s story was not overlooked and forgotten. How many others have shown similar courage, but no one knows their name?

“I am not afraid… I was born to do this.”
~ Joan of Arc

I read women’s biographies. It doesn’t matter what era. The trials seem to be the same for every woman from Sally Ride to Joan of Arc. Both of these women, separated by 600 years, had the same struggle to be able to do what they wanted to do. For Sally, it was to be on the crew of the previously all male NASA flying club. For Joan, it was banishing the enemy English from French land. Both women had to convince men to step out of the way.

I get lessons, too, for how to act. I am reading Kathryn Harrison‘s recent biography Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. Joan, a girl from Lorraine, has to convince the Daphne that she needed knights to ride out to a town under siege by the English. First she has to get the provisions and the army into the starving town, then she has to turn and address the English, letting the enemy know there’s a new threat.

Joan goes bold. She takes a stand that I liken to animals when they puff themselves up to seem bigger. After all, she’s only a 14-year-old with no battle experience. Why should they pay attention to her? But she takes an aggressive tone with them, and to add to her authority, invokes God as her supporter.

Bringing it home

For seven or eight years, the renters next door to us have gradually, bit by bit, added farm animals to their city lot as well as ramshackle sheds and tons of yard debris. We have endured this, even though it’s visible from our second story, but when the smell of the outdoor fire became so constant and overwhelming, we had had enough. We had to act to get the city code inspector.

We don’t know what the neighbors will do, whether they will follow the city code or take out their revenge on us. What I do know from Joan of Arc is that sometimes when there’s a wrong, you have to act boldly. Become big.

It worked for Joan of Arc, and it works for me too.