Amelia Earhart 2I recently saw the movie Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. While I thought the movie itself was just alright, the one thing that kept me engaged was Amelia’s devotion to her dreams of flying.

We all learned about Amelia Earhart in elementary school – the first woman to cross the Atlantic, the woman aviator who disappeared before completing her flight around the world – but this movie, and my subsequent research, made me realize that we only know a fraction of her story. For example, did you know that through her childhood Amelia kept a dream board in the form of a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields? Did you know that she worked a variety of jobs – photographer, truck driver and stenographer at the local telephone company – to save $1,000 for her first flying lessons? Or that her passion for flying was so deep that she rejected long-time love, George Putnam’s, engagement proposals six times before finally accepting…and even on her wedding day, she viewed marriage as “enduring all the confinements of an attractive cage”?

No, these are not the things we learned about Amelia. The textbooks never spoke of her father’s alcoholism, the scarcity of money to invest in her flying dreams, having to sit “like a sack of potatoes” in the passenger seat as Captain Stultz piloted the plane during her first trip across the Atlantic, or the harsh critics who questioned her limitations. What I’ve come to realize is that Amelia’s journey to legend status, though short-lived, was littered with obstacles and adversity. She wasn’t just a pretty face with a scarf and aviator glasses who happened to be a pilot, she was a woman with a deep passion whose accomplishments inspired a generation of women; a dream chaser…in every sense of the word.