Under Amelia’s Wings

In Book Two of the “Ginny Ross” series, 16-sixteen-year old Ginny from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, arrives in August 1936 at Lafayette, Indiana, to attend Purdue University. Accepted into Engineering, she hopes to graduate in four years with a degree and a pilot’s licence.

Ginny’s letter of acceptance states that the president of Purdue has a mandate to attract more women students and has hired Amelia Earhart as a part-time career counsellor for women and an aviation advisor. Because Ginny’s acquainted with the famous aviator, Earhart’s presence is part of Purdue’s attraction for her.

The Harbour Grace airstrip was a popular take-off point for aviators setting out on transatlantic flights in the 1930s. Those who have read Stemp’s first novel, Amelia and Me, ( https://umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol20/no4/ameliaandme.html ) will know how Ginny, inspired by reading of Miss Earhart’s achievements, persuaded her Uncle Harry, who worked at the airstrip, to teach her the basics of flying. She wrote to Earhart for advice about becoming a pilot and ran away from home to see her at her home in Rye, New York. When Earhart comes to Harbour Grace to take off for her first solo transatlantic flight, she convinces Ginny’s mother that flying is for women as well as men.

Familiarity with the first novel is not necessary to appreciate Under Amelia’s Wing, a stand-alone novel. Amelia and Me was as much about Ginny’s Newfoundland life and her struggles with her harsh mother as about Earhart, and similarly, Under Amelia’s Wing is primarily about Ginny’s struggles with a misogynist professor, with Amelia being an inspirational but not an interventionist figure.

Ginny’s first friend at Purdue is Mabel, an Indiana farm girl starting out in Home Economics. She tells Ginny that her uncle, who works at the university, is paying her way. Most of the young women in Ginny’s residence are also Home Ec. students from the Midwest, and they are surprised to find in their midst a girl from faraway Newfoundland, one bent on a non-traditional course of study. When Ginny and Mabel visit the university airport, Ginny makes another friend, a student named Matt Baker who is working on an engine that won’t start. Ginny’s suggestion of a new float makes it function. She also meets Captain Aretz who invites her back to show him more of her mechanical skills and who takes her on a flight above the campus.

Author Heather Stemp does a good job of foreshadowing the uphill battle that Ginny faces with Professor Jones. Girls in the residence say, “Wait until you meet him.” Matt tells her she knows a lot about engines and wonders what Professor Jones will think about that. The registrar looks dubious when Ginny registers for Mechanical Engineering, telling her that she has a month to change her mind before she’s stuck with her choice.

It turns out that Professor Jones is Mabel’s uncle. “In spite of what you’re hearing, Uncle Malcolm is a kind man,” Mabel says, but Professor Jones turns out to be a nightmare. Ginny’s struggles with this hostile, belittling professor provide dramatic tension and suspense and also sound a warning note to young women readers planning to enter non-traditional occupations. He isolates her at the back of the classroom, implies that she can’t keep up, and accuses her, when she’s sharing her notes, of writing love messages to her classmate. He ignores her when she wants to answer questions in class. On group projects, where she’s the most knowledgeable student in the group, Professor Jones calls on one of the boys to present their findings to the class. He publicly berates her for skipping his class to attend a conference on women’s work opportunities although the dean gave blanket permission to all students to attend it.

Although most of the young men in the class echo the Mechanical Engineering professor’s tone, Jamie Baker and Ed Elliott, who turns out to be the president’s son, acknowledge the professor’s cruelty and hope the university policy of attracting more women will force him to change his attitude. Gradually, Ginny builds a support network that includes Matt and Jamie Baker, Ed and some other boys, and several male professors who are impressed by her work. Eventually, when she has to appeal to the university authorities about the end of semester mark that Professor Jones has given her, she is allowed to write another exam, one set by him but marked by another professor, and Ginny emerges with the highest marks in the class. During her second semester with Professor Jones, Ginny’s supportive male professors find excuses to drop in on his classes to deter him from lashing out at her.

Readers will be glad that Ginny sought justice instead of dropping out or switching fields. In this respect, she seems a very 21st century heroine. One wonders, though, if a young woman of the 1930s, from an underprivileged parochial background, far from home in a foreign country would have the courage to defend herself or if, in real life she would have been too intimidated.

It is interesting, too, that boys and men, not girls and women, are Ginny’s strongest supporters. In doing housework in her kindly Physics professor’s household during the Christmas break, Ginny finds a friend in his wife, but, although Mrs. Abernathy is warm and motherly, she’s just a faculty wife, with no power and in poor health. Mrs. Abernathy’s function in the novel is as an example of a bright woman of yesteryear who never got the opportunity for higher education. After Ginny’s successful appeal to the university authorities, Mabel finds tangible evidence that her uncle behaved dishonestly in marking Ginny’s examination. If this discovery had been positioned earlier in the novel, the two girls could have gone to see the president together in an example of one woman helping another woman.

By the time Ginny’s situation with Professor Jones reaches a crisis, Amelia Earhart has left Purdue. Although Ginny has been thrilled by her presence, they’ve actually seen little of each other except at public gatherings. Knowing Earhart raises Ginny’s status among her peers, and, when Earhart invites her to accompany her to luncheon with the president’s family, she gives Ginny a chance to impress the most powerful man on campus, a helpful connection when the marks situation with Professor Jones flares up. Apart from that, Earhart’s duties at Purdue permit few one-to-one encounters. When Earhart leaves the university for an “opportunity [she] can’t refuse,” they have a moment for a private farewell during which Earhart tells Ginny: “You can do this.” She adds that she, too, is often scared and doesn’t have all the answers. “Anyone who steps outside her accepted role must expect criticism”, she says, which is true enough but amounts to saying, "Toughen up." The title, Under Amelia’s Wing, conveys images of both an aircraft wing and a mother bird’s wing, but Amelia doesn’t play a nurturing role in Ginny’s life.

Amelia Earhart, (1895-1937) as seen through Ginny’s eyes, is not the complex person that she was in real life. Readers whose interest is piqued by Stemp’s novels might want to read one of Earhart’s many biographies. Born into a well-to-do Kansas family, Earhart was home-schooled by her mother and a governess and enjoyed outdoor activity and access to a large family library. After graduating from a Chicago high school, she spent one year at Columbia University but quit to pursue flying. George Putnam, a publisher, publicist and eventually her husband, co-sponsored her first transatlantic flight in which she was accompanied by another pilot and co-pilot. This flight made her a celebrity; she was much in demand for lucrative endorsements of a range of products including fashions and luggage. Her fame increased after her 1928 flight across the North American continent, and again when she made her solo transatlantic flight in 1932.

After leaving Purdue, Earhart writes to Ginny explaining that the “opportunity” she mentioned is a round-the-world equatorial flight. When this news becomes public, the girls in the residence are excited and trace Earhart’s route on a map. In late June, 1937, Ginny is with her friends at the Abernathys when they hear on the radio that Amelia’s plane has disappeared in the South Pacific. Despite Ginny’s grief, she pursues her dream and achieves some of her ambitions. The story then leaps in time to the beginning of the Second World War which will require men and women both to take on occupations and challenges that they never imagined doing. As a graduate and a pilot, Ginny is ready to play a wartime role. Stay tuned for Book Three.