PhilSCA celebrates the 2022 National Women’s Month!
“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.)
