Amelia Earhart is one of the most influential and driven women to ever take to the skies. She grew up doing what she wanted to do in life and she lived her adulthood the same way. Despite the fact that the flying business was dominated by men, she was not discouraged. Not only did Amelia Earhart go against the social norm of being a female professional, she took on a career that only 16 other women had entered before.
Perhaps her goals of equality came from her parents. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was the daughter of a wealthy judge. Despite being raised in what should have been an affluent household, she was not afforded many luxuries because her father wasn’t extremely successful. He ended up taking the best paying job that he could, which was being a lawyer for a railroad company. Due to a demanding job and an unhappy marriage, he fell into alcohol addiction, which ultimately contributed to the loss of his job. This instability at home may have prompted Amelia to decide at an early age that she needed to become
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She was given a fifty-thousand dollar budget to establish a “flying laboratory” in a twin-engine plane. She had the seats removed and extra fuel tanks installed so that it could fly very long distances.
With her new plane, she decided to try something that no one else had ever done: fly around the world. A team was put together, and on March 17, 1937 she took off from Oakland, California heading for Hawaii. She landed in Honolulu 15 hours later. She fueled up and attempted to take off for Howland Island on March 20, 1937. The plane was loaded with fuel and lurched on the attempted take off, causing the landing gear to collapse and a wing to tear open. The plane and crew had to return to California for repairs. Two months later, the crew tried again. This time, they decided to fly east from