East to the Dawn (64 page)

Elliott spoke about young people. His ideas were direct and basic: that government must take inventory of occupational facts relating to young people because the economic recovery of the country depended on harnessing their energy, that the young needed guidance to find the
direction and location of their goals. His speech over, he sat down and listened to the next person on the program—Mrs. Nicholas Brady, head of the Girl Scouts of America—stress the importance of the scouting program because it prepared women to become competent to manage their future household affairs. How women should prepare themselves to be good wives was exactly what he least wanted to hear. His mind began to wander; he intended to slip out, and would have, except for “this rather personable creature sitting on my right,” whom he decided to stay and listen to. It was Amelia. She spoke about the future of aeronautics and the part women were to play, of the need to pay attention to “young ideas” and the difficulty women were having in obtaining positions in the aviation industry—they were outnumbered forty to one by men, she said. What she did not say—but undoubtedly knew, for it was a painful fact that her friend Clara Studer, editor of
The 99 News,
was writing about—was that many women were giving up flying, vanquished by the Depression. The past year had seen a devastating decrease in female pilots: where there had been six hundred in 1933, now, in 1934, the number had dropped by almost half. So many just couldn't afford to keep up their licenses.

Elliott was impressed by everything about Amelia, from the way she looked to the words she spoke. In his eyes the most important immediate problem to be solved was how to effectively educate young women. He knew that to solve the problem, he had to bring new forces into play. He needed teachers who could be role models for his Purdue coeds, and he realized he was looking at the role model to end all role models. His first thought was that she would be perfect as a speaker at the upcoming vocational conference that the women at Purdue were organizing. The following day Helen Rogers Reid gave a luncheon and again, as Edward Elliott remembered it, “I had the very good fortune of being seated next to Amelia. During the luncheon I learned that she had an abiding interest in the problem of the education of women. Our ideas as to the nature of this problem and its solution fitted.” Elliott, determined to get her on his campus, arranged a dinner with Amelia and George at the Coffee House Club, a mid-Manhattan club frequented by the theatrical, publishing, and magazine movers of the city, one of George's favorite places. Surrounded by books and paintings, originals of sketches in
Vanity Fair,
a grand piano, and theatrical mementos, they talked, waited upon by club maître' d, Williams, “steward extraordinary,” according to George. After dinner Amelia and George sat on a couch beneath the club's Maxfield Parrish bulletin board, Amelia with her feet tucked up underneath her like a little girl. Edward Elliott, facing them in a chair, came to the point.

“We want you at Purdue,” he said, smiling wisely at Amelia.

“I'd like that,” she said as simply and as directly, “if it can be arranged. What would you think I should do?”

What, as Amelia brought up, could she, with no degree or qualifications for teaching, contribute? Elliott assured her that she could inspire women. He proposed that she make Purdue the center of her interests, that she work there to find the best way to properly prepare women for the modern world. The conversation continued for another two hours as he told her about Purdue and they sounded each other out. Almost immediately after they parted company, Elliott completed the essential phone calls, and Amelia rearranged her schedule. Three weeks later she was on the Purdue campus in Lafayette, Indiana, giving an address on “College and Careers” at the Conference on Women's Work and Opportunities organized by the Women's Self-Government Association of the college. As the featured speaker, she made her address at the luncheon in the ballroom the second day.

It was probably unclear to many interested educators what kind of collaboration Amelia and Edward Elliott had in mind. The initial assumption would have been that Purdue was beefing up its flying offerings—and that that was where Amelia would fit in to the curriculum. By then a growing number of colleges had flying clubs and gave aeronautical courses, including William and Mary, where Amelia spoke in 1932. Indeed, competition among colleges for aviation was becoming as keen as it was for conventional sports. There were now national intercollegiate meets that were hotly contested. But it wasn't aeronautics that Amelia was interested in teaching—then or ever, as Elliott grasped. She had a special message for young women. She was intrigued that Elliott believed that the effective education of young women was vital to the health of the country. She herself had heretofore concentrated on inspiring young college women—something in itself—but Elliott connected the effective employment of women to the economic well-being of the country. A few years before, she had told Barnard College students that the educational system as then constituted was based “on sex, not on aptitude,” that there were a great many boys who would be better off making pies and a great many girls who would be better off in manual training, and further, that the trick was to overcome prejudice and show ability.

She was becoming increasingly focused on identifying and lifting the barriers that held women back, as time and experience showed her just how intractable those barriers were for the vast majority of young women. The shift wasn't readily apparent; she was never rude, still accepted
speaking engagements at men's clubs, and hardly ever was overtly feminist. But she would now give neither time nor funds to aid even deserving men. So singleminded was she becoming that even when Marion Perkins asked her for money to fund studies for an unusually bright young boy at Denison House, she refused; she would in fact no longer give money to Denison House at all unless it was used “for
girls
in some way” as she wrote, underlining “girls” by way of emphasis. As Elliott would observe, “her primary interest in life was not in this career of adventure upon which she had embarked, but rather in an effort to find and make some additions to the solution to the problem of careers for women.” Now President Elliott was giving her the chance to push her message further.

It took until the following May before Elliott worked out something more specific. Then, in a letter dated May 18, he outlined his plans for creating a department for the study of careers for women:

He offered her a salary of two thousand dollars a year—at a time when the Indiana legislature had reduced Purdue's funding by twenty percent. With a minimum of deliberation Amelia accepted the offer.

It was a huge challenge. Neither the university staff nor the engineering students themselves were nearly as committed as their president. To the contrary, there was active opposition to the idea. The same year Elliott set out to hire Amelia, 1934, the Purdue personnel department secured 84 jobs for graduating men and arranged for the industry representatives who came on campus to recruit 38 more. In contrast personnel found only four jobs for women that year and arranged for zero industry representatives to visit the campus to recruit women. The next year the department found
96 jobs, and industry reps provided 73 more for graduating men. The numbers for graduating women were the same as the previous year: four and zero. The contrast is particularly striking because over ninety percent of Purdue women worked after they graduated; only three percent listed themselves as housewives.

Unfortunately the jobs these female graduates secured, as Amelia readily found out, were overwhelmingly in home economics—because that was what Purdue traditionally trained them for. There were usually a few women in the freshman class who enrolled in engineering, a pitifully small group of eight or ten, but by the end of their junior year all had usually quit—overwhelmed, “counseled” out by their male professors, and made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome by the male students. Amelia wanted to change that. She wanted to break down the boundary lines between the schools as a way of breaking down the condescending attitude of the professors and the male students towards the coeds. “Today it is almost as if the subjects themselves had sex, so firm is the line drawn between what girls and boys study,” she observed.

What Amelia left unsaid was that the male faculty sexualized their courses as a way of making them off limits to women. It was a highly effective tactic, for if women were discouraged from studying engineering, they wouldn't learn that it was as much within their grasp as any other discipline. The subtle, pervasive push on the part of the professors to keep the girls in home economics and out of agriculture and engineering worked like a charm.

In a way it was understandable. In January 1935 there were still several million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 on relief. With jobs so hard to find, it didn't help, many conservative men felt, for women to start competing for the plums.

Complicating the problem for Amelia was that the head of the School of Chemical Engineering and the head of the School of Civil Engineering had been there for twenty-five and thirty years respectively. They were of the same mindset as the Yale students who, just a few years previously, had paraded behind a banner bearing the inscription, “Marry Them Early; Tell Them Nothing, Treat Them Rough.” Professor Peffer, professor of chemical engineering, didn't think girls should even be visible—he called his staff together one morning to tell them how upset he was to behold one of his best students holding hands with a girl “for all to see.” Even A. A. Potter, the engineering professor considered by contemporaries to be “the most kindly dean of all,” was also unalterably opposed. Nor did time blunt his opposition. When he was interviewed at ninety-four, he stated that he still believed
Purdue had been wrong to hire Amelia because “she was a very courageous woman, but very poorly educated. After a woman was educated, she thought they should fix typewriters and washing machines. She thought an engineer was a mechanic. She was not a help in improving education.”

Not surprisingly, a number of the Purdue faculty wives followed the mindset of their husbands and were “mortified” by a report that one afternoon Amelia had strolled into the village in slacks, unescorted, mounted a stool at Bartlett's Drugstore, and ordered a soft drink. A rumor was floated that Amelia had been seen smoking. That summer Fortune magazine pontificated, “The fact is that the Woman's Movement started because women, for the first time in history, were bored to death.” Amelia and President Elliott were fighting an uphill battle.

Amelia gave afternoon talks for day- and part-time coeds and the girls who lived in sorority houses in the Memorial Union, the campus meeting place where the students gathered to snack and socialize. There, in a large, closed-off area on the second floor that was so informally furnished it resembled a living room, Amelia, usually perched on the grand piano, swinging her legs a bit, talked and answered questions. Most of the students kept coming back for more.

Study whatever you want, was her message; don't let the world push you around. The discussions—for there was always discussion and a good deal of interaction after her talk—encouraged such thinking. It took courage and commitment for a young woman to transfer from home economics to engineering, and it took money, which meant that besides running the gauntlet of professors and male students, the girls also had the herculean task of convincing their families that such a course was wise.

Don't get married right away Amelia hammered. Graduate, then have a career, then get married. “You're going with that senior,” she would say. “When you graduate be sure you go on and have a career; don't get married as soon as you get out of school.” She irritated many of male Purdue students with that message, and with her “outspoken” ideas. And they were not at all bashful in saying so. As glamorous a role model as she appeared to the students (and most were surprised at how much more feminine she looked in person than in the newsreels), in her well-tailored brown slacks, small figured matching shirt, and brightly colored scarf knotted at the throat, or attired in evening dress addressing a dinner meeting looking gracefully feminine,
she was a definite threat to the men: a superstar advocating independence.