Getting the WASP program itself off the ground was a hard-won accomplishment against gender bias. It took more than a decade due to initial resistance from people in the military. In 1930 the War Department considered the idea, but chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps had called the idea of women pilots “utterly unfeasible”, because women were too “high strung”. As America moved towards war, however, this view softened. In 1939 America’s most famous female pilot, Jacqueline Cochran, wrote to then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to propose a women’s corps of pilots. By 1942 a women’s aviator program was finally launched.

Getting the WASP program itself off the ground was a hard-won accomplishment against gender bias. It took more than a decade due to initial resistance from people in the military. In 1930 the War Department considered the idea, but chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps had called the idea of women pilots “utterly unfeasible”, because women were too “high strung”. As America moved towards war, however, this view softened. In 1939 America’s most famous female pilot, Jacqueline Cochran, wrote to then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to propose a women’s corps of pilots. By 1942 a women’s aviator program was finally launched.

As many as 25,000 women volunteered for spots but recruiting requirements were even more stringent than they were for men – women had to already have earned a pilot’s license. Ultimately, only 1,830 volunteers were accepted into the program, of which 1,074 graduated. Recruits made their way from around the country, paying their own way, to a municipal airport in Houston, Texas and later to Avenger Field near Sweetwater where they underwent the same rigorous training as their male counterparts.