The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
a garage on campus to house Amelia’s eye-popping car. Decades later, Helen described Amelia and commented on her automobile, which had been manufactured by the Auburn Automobile Company in Auburn, Indiana:
Those of us who lived in the only women’s residence hall at the time … were the luckiest of all. The opportunity to know her, even a little bit, is one of my most cherished memories. What was she like? What endeared her to all of us? … I always think of her as a beautiful woman—tall, willowy, and very graceful in movement. She could and did wear any kind of clothes with grace and ease, but I remember best in her everyday clothes that she wore on campus and round the hall at mealtime.
She was probably the first woman who ever wore slacks on the Purdue campus with impunity. I see her in my mind’s eye in impeccably tailored brown flannel slacks, a small figured “coordinated shirt, open at the collar, and a brightly colored handkerchief knotted around the throat. The shoes were soft brown leather, low-heeled. If it were cool, she wore a soft brown leather jacket. In those days, this was considered somewhat “mannish” attire, but Amelia came across as feminine and attractive. In fact, whether she was in a long evening dress or in this typical workday outfit, the word one heard was “glamorous.” It fitted perfectly. I’ve also thought, too, that the long, sleek grey Cord sports car that she drove enhanced this image. And flying, of course is still glamorous, even though we are apt to take it for granted.
The Auburn Automobile Company, with its stylish headquarters in northeastern Indiana, formed Cord Corporation in 1929. The Cord was marketed as a world-class car that provided performance and style. Clark Gable and Babe Ruth also owned Cords.
Amelia saw her role at Purdue as an exploration in professional needs and the development of new fields for women students. She was a proponent of matching a student’s natural skills with his or her course of study and profession, and she voiced her resolve to Purdue faculty. Amelia expressed her hope that the time would come when psychologists would determine a child’s bent at preschool age so as the child wouldn’t waste time studying and working in the “wrong direction.”
Though not a mother, Amelia sensed that in the heart of every child, the seed of their future germinated. This deep understanding may have come from her girlhood experiences. As a youngster, Amelia played in her backyard on a flying Dutchman, a leg-propelled merry-go-round; she zipped down steep, icy hills on a sled; and she built her own roller coaster—all in an attempt to satisfy a calling that summoned action steadfastly from her core.
Amelia was glad to be associated with Purdue. She said, “It is my kind of school, a technical school where all instruction has practicality, and where a progressive program for women is being started, too.” Amelia’s office was set up near Dorothy’s in the Office of the Dean of Women, which was “attractively furnished,” where she would meet female students for “heart-to-heart” career discussions.
Amelia sent out a questionnaire to women students to explore their post-scholastic plans. She wanted to help Purdue’s faculty to develop appropriate courses and to help the women clarify their thinking about goals. Student Miriam Beck described Amelia: “Tall, skinny, handsome, tousle-headed, smiling, the students were transported with delight, and even the most skeptical of older residents charmed.”
Purdue’s first annual career conference for female students was held in 1935, and Amelia spoke on the findings from her questionnaire. She began her talk by referring to a previous speaker’s remarks—negative words that women still hear in the twenty-first century. Amelia said, “Mrs. Woodhouse apologized last evening for ending her talk on ‘Why Women Fail in Business.’”
Amelia continued with some positive reflections from the questionnaire. She said that 92 percent of the women who answered planned to work after leaving college, and the reasons given for seeking employment were not economic necessity, as one might think during the Great Depression years, but to achieve professional success. The second most popular reason for working after college was to attain personal independence; and the third was economic necessity.
Amelia said, “These results are very interesting, since women as a whole have not had enough experience to know the joy of independent work as men know it. All too often women have had to bury what they had of the creative in routine tasks which have not brought them even the reward of a little spending money of their own.”
Amelia also learned that those women who did not have the experience of earning their own money voted more strongly for personal independence than those women who had earned money. Amelia said, “Working for pay gives a truer measurement of the individual outside the sympathetic circle of the home, a measurement women have been escaping a long, long time.”
In all likelihood, Dorothy and Helen sat in the audience as Amelia spoke at Purdue’s career conference. Amelia’s remarks foreshadow the career that was yet to be for Helen. In decades to come, Helen would conduct surveys, give speeches, and create strategies to help Purdue’s female students think about their lives and plan their career goals. Amelia said of her feedback:
The fifth question was, “If you were the wage earner and your husband ran the home, would you consider his work financially equivalent to yours?” Sixty-seven percent said yes, thirty-three percent said no.… I wonder if the wife would not soon think her husband had the easier task. Imagine yourself, every one of you who answered the question affirmatively coming home from a long day’s work and saying to your husband, “Well, my dear, what did you do today?” “Oh,” he would reply, “I washed the dishes, dusted, planned the meals, made a cake, and was just going to do some ironing, when Mr. Jones came by on his way to market. He asked me to go along, so I did, and bought some new towels. Then I called up Mary’s teacher and told her she was marking Mary too low in arithmetic. Then I fed Junior, and dinner’s ready now.”
The only estimate I have on the value of a housewife’s services, just as a housewife, mind you … is $500 a year.
Only 21 percent of Purdue’s women students planned to work after marriage in 1935. The reason given for not working was that it would interfere with managing the home. Amelia took the opportunity to pointedly address the reasoning behind the statistic to her captive audience of women: “Again, I know it is very hard to look ahead and see yourselves as married women of forty, with your children away at Purdue, your husband busy with his work, and you with no particular interest but the four walls of your home. My hope is that none of you who decide so positively that women should under no circumstances work after marriage will not be victims of your present outlook.”
Amelia ended her talk with a paragraph that rings familiar today and causes one to think the world is a slog for change: “A secondary answer to question ten was the large vote for the husband’s taking an equal part with the wife in running the home, if both were employed outside. This last reply may point a prophetic finger to what may be the ideal state, that is, when both husband and wife earn and are jointly responsible for the home (of course, with credit on the ledger for the wife who bears children).”
Helen was unaware of her destiny as she sat in the audience of the career conference listening to the brilliant, brave, prophetic Amelia Earhart. Helen would carry Amelia’s mantel into the twentieth century, urging Purdue’s women students to plan the full span of their lives and realize their potential, long after the aviatrix would be lost at sea.
WOMEN STUDENTS CAME TO KNOW Amelia personally during mealtimes in the Women’s Residence Hall. Her husband wrote in Soaring Wings of the fun she had “with a different group of girls sitting at her table each time.” The young women vied for dining spots close to their heroine, and they peppered her with questions. Putnam also noted, “She had a room in one of the halls, too, and was right among girls ‘where they lived,’ more senses than one.”
Dinner was a formal affair. Helen led the women, clad in their dresses and nylons, into the dining room, and a prayer was delivered in song. James R. Brown, a 1938 mechanical engineering graduate, worked in the dining room. Years later he said, “I still recall the first night, as it was my duty to start the singing. The waiters were stationed around the