I have a question for all the women out there in light of today being International Womens' Day

[Hekate]

19. Newspaper "want ads" were clear on the subject. Very clear. When I was in high school...

...it was understood in my family that we would get summer jobs, and I worked through college, so I was well-inculcated in society's expectations and limitations by the time I graduated HS in '65.

Someone else brought up airline pilots. Not a career ambition of mine, but still. I remember at one time (probably in the 1970s) reading that one of the reasons women were having SUCH a hard time breaking into the commercial airline piloting field was that all the men had achieved so many hours in military service starting in WW II, so the men were miles ahead. That's why women couldn't get hired: no military service. Oh, and size. Then the struggle began to get women into the Air Force as pilots.

Fast forward decades, when one of my mother's dearest friends died, essentially of old age. The whole time I'd known her, she'd been a secretary. At her memorial service I read some things in her scrapbook and had to pick my jaw off the floor. That little woman had been a WW II pilot of military aircraft.

How? You may well ask. Well, while Rosie the Riveter was building aircraft, Penny the Pilot was ferrying the planes across the US continent to military bases, where they were then flown across the ocean into battle by men. Manly men.

It made me furious to learn that. I had no idea, not only about Eileen, but about all the other women who flew military aircraft before I was born, and the lies of omission we were taught as history.