A new searing biography of flying ace Amelia Earhart is raising serious questions whether she was a willing participant when she visited Maine airports in the 1930s.
The new take on Earhart is she was not the independent, trail-blazing feminist the media at the time claimed she was.
Rather, she was being exploited by her misogynist manager after he ditched his wife and married Earhart to use as his own personal PR tool.
That’s according to a controversial new book due for release Tuesday (July 15) “The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.”
“Their partnership supported her grand ambitions – but also pressed her into more and more treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight,” according to Amazon.
“It was astonishing how much time and effort I spent just debunking Earhart lore that had been repeated for generations,” author Laurie Gwen Shapiro writes in an introductory note about researching the book, “not to mention coming up against influential people who had a stake in hiding crucial facts.”
Earhart’s manager-turned-husband George Putnam, known as the “PT Barnum” of publishing, allegedly exploited her for his own personal and financial gains, including coaxing her to make nationwide airport visits – including several to Maine.
Just months after she became the first woman ever to solo across the Atlantic she visited Scarborough airport, in 1933. Earhart visited Bangor, Waterville and Augusta airports a year later, in 1934.
“Earhart visited Maine in 1933 and 1934 to promote an interest in flying to young girls and women, and to advertise commercial flying” according to MaineMemory.net.
As she was posing for pictures with Maine’s best PR practitioners, she was silently gritting her teeth – the same oversized teeth with wide gaps between them that Putnam ordered her to keep under cover by closing her mouth when she smiled.
“During her life, Earhart embraced women’s rights,” according to Wiki’s Earhart bio – which might be in store for a bit of a rewrite…
A group of female pilots in 2014 celebrated the 80th anniversary of Earhart’s 1934 Maine airport visits as a way to promote more women in the cockpit.
But that was 11 years before this week’s new blockbuster analysis of the orchestrated life the famous “feminist” flyer was leading.
