‘Fly Girls’ is a soaring tale of 1920s female pilots

There’s a sad resonance and timeliness to “Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 265 pp., ★★★☆).

This is the true story of yet another chapter in American history where women were dismissed, diminished, denigrated and ignored simply because they were women.

Author Keith O’Brien, a former Boston Globe reporter and frequent NPR contributor, has brought these women back into the light with grace, sensitivity and a cinematic eye for detail that makes “Fly Girls” both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

It is the 1920s and ’30s, when air racing was all the rage. With up to 500,000 people on hand and big-money purses on the line, it was one of the most popular – and deadly – sports going, a competition where it wasn’t unusual to see the single-propeller, opencockpit entries crash and burn, consuming planes and contestants in grim but spectacular fashion.

The women wanted in. But it was a man’s world. Women had only secured the right to vote in 1920 and the idea that they might compete was considered “silly,” if it was considered at all.

Still, the women kept pushing, rewarded at first with their own race, derisively coined the “Powder Puff Derby” by none other than Will Rogers.

Undeterred, the female pilots organized and pushed some more until, in 1936, they were finally going head-tohead with the men in the biggest, most grueling race of all. And winning.

Most of us know just one of the five “Fly Girls,” Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, who famously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

But there were others. There was Ruth Nichols, a well-to-do young woman from New York chafing at the constraints of her privileged existence. Louise Thaden was selling coal in Wichita, Kansas, not long before she became one of just a dozen women in the U.S. to have a pilot’s license. Ruth Elder, a sometime actress from Anniston, Alabama, was already on her way to flying the Atlantic before anybody had ever heard of Earhart. And finally, there was Florence Klingensmith of North Dakota. She was, many believed, the finest female pilot of them all.

With “Fly Girls,” O’Brien has notched another victory in their honor.

Author Keith O’Brien