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and she had a question for Neta: “Will you teach me to fly?”
    Neta received 75 cents per minute for teaching Amelia Earhart to fly the Canuck she had built. Six months later, Amelia bought a Kinner Airster, a plane that Neta had tested for designer Bert Kinner. By now, the two women were also friends, and Neta stopped charging for lessons. Neta was concerned about Amelia flying the Kinner, a lighter plane that was harder to control. But Amelia was determined. On her first and only lesson with the Kinner, Amelia crashed it. Neither woman was hurt, but it took time to repair the airplane.
    Neta married her boyfriend, William Southern, in 1921, and she wanted a baby. Early airplanes were dangerous, and many people died in the early days of aviation. Neta felt like she had to make a choice between flying and being a mother. Being a mother won. She traded her Canuck and lessons to fly it in August 1922 for a house and lot in Manhattan Beach and a $500 Liberty Bond. After the lessons, she never flew again. She didn’t even ride in an airplane for 55 more years. But she did have a son, William Curtiss Southern, named after his father and aviator Glenn Curtiss.
    Many years passed before Neta began lecturing and writing about her life as an early American aviator. Everyone wanted to meet the woman who taught Amelia Earhart to fly.
    LEARN MORE
    I Taught Amelia to Fly
by Neta Snook Southern (Vantage Press, 1974)
    â€œNeta Snook” on Ames Historical Society website, www.ameshistoricalsociety.org/exhibits/snook.htm
    â€œNeta Snook: Determined to Fly” on Iowa Pathways website (Iowa Public Television), www.iptv.org/iowapathways/mypath.cfm?ounid=ob_000185

PART II
The Golden Age of Flight
    W omen like Bessie Coleman and Harriet Quimby may have demonstrated that women were capable of flying, but the barriers to flying refused to fall. Flying was not considered a ladylike activity. Many women had trouble finding people to give them lessons; others had trouble getting their pilot’s licenses. Persistence was the key, and during the late 1920s it was beginning to pay off as more and more women took to the air.
    Flying was expensive—both the lessons and the cost of airplanes—so it’s no coincidence that many women pilots came from families with money. In 1928, a pilot’s license cost $500. This was at a time when the average person’s yearly income was $800.
    Other women, such as Bobbi Trout, earned their way from the beginning. Still, flying was too expensive to be a hobby for most people. Some paid for aviation through exhibition flying or barnstorming. Some companies sponsored women who participated in races or set records. The companies’ logos were featured on these pilots’ planes.
    Flying started as entertainment. At first, spectators were thrilled just to see people in the air. But as the number of pilotsincreased, air races became the way to draw crowds. Air races were the sports event of the day, attracting crowds of up to 150,000.
    Then, on August 18, 1929, Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. For the next several years, records were being set and broken quickly as pilots of both sexes pushed the limits of aviation.
    A strong string of firsts by women pilots took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the first US woman glider pilot, received the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal in 1934. She was the first female recipient, receiving the recognition for 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) of exploratory flying over five continents with her husband, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.
    Around the time Lindbergh went up, approximately 9,215 pilots were licensed, yet less than 1 percent of them were women. Many of those women pilots performed at exhibitions and set records. They weren’t allowed to enter competitions, such as the National Air Race, because men decided those races were too dangerous for women. Amelia Earhart and other female pilots