“When something is excessive, it turns to its opposite. The excessive pressure forced upon me made me love freedom.”
— Lotfia ElNadi, from Take off from the Sand,
a biographical documentary.
Witches Hunting
Nazis dubbed them the “Night Witches” (“Nachthexen”)—and they were terrified of these highly skilled Soviet women pilots. This colorful name came about due to the way these fierce female flyers would stop their aircraft engines and silently swoop in before dropping their bombs; the “swooshing” sound as they passed overhead was said to resemble that of a witch’s broomstick. The Soviet Union was struggling mightily in 1941 to stop the Nazis’ advances. Stalin himself ordered the formation of three all-women air force units. One of the first volunteers was 19-year-old Nadezhda Popova, who would go on to become one of the most celebrated heroes of the Soviet Union; she flew 852 missions against the Germans in wobbly wooden biplanes and was shot down several times. Her unit, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment was equipped with obsolete two-seater Polikarpov PO-2 biplanes made of wood and cloth. As such, they weren’t very fast and were extremely unwieldy and hard to maneuver. These pilots had neither radios, guns, nor even parachutes, and they had to navigate using a stopwatch and a paper map. Too exposed to fly during the day, the Night Witches only flew under the cover of darkness. Their mission was to harass German positions and take out troop encampments, storage depots, and supply lines. They were extremely good at their job and were also noteworthy as the first women in the world to fly as military pilots.
“In winter when you’d look out to see your target better, you got frostbite, our feet froze in our boots, but we carried on flying. You had to focus on the target and think how you could hit it. There was no time to give way to emotions.”
– Nadezhda Popova
Eileen Collins – Rocket Woman:
First U.S. Space Shuttle Commander
Ever since she was a little girl, Eileen Collins wanted to be a pilot. She attended Corning Community College in New York, and then completed her B.A. in mathematics and economics at Syracuse University in 1978. After Syracuse, she was chosen along with three other women for Air Force pilot training at Oklahoma’s Vance Air Base; her class was one of the base’s first to include women. After earning her wings in 1979, she stayed on for three years as a T-38 Talon pilot instructor before being transferred to Travis Air Force Base in California, for cross-training in the C-141 Starlifter. She earned a master’s degree in operations research at Stanford in 1986, then a second master’s in space systems management from Webster University in 1989.
That same year, Collins was accepted at the competitive Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 1989, she became only the second woman to graduate as a test pilot. She rose to the rank of Colonel in the Air Force before being being selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 1990. In 1995, Collins became the first female astronaut to pilot a space shuttle mission, serving as second-in-command of the shuttle Discovery. She piloted a second mission on the space shuttle Atlantis in 1997. After having logged over 400 hours in space, she was chosen by NASA to command the space shuttle Columbia on a mission in 1999, and became the first astronaut ever to pilot any of the shuttles through a 360 degree pitch maneuver, as well as the first American woman ever to command a space shuttle. In 2006, Collins retired from NASA to pursue other interests and spend time with her family. Since her retirement, Collins has received numerous awards and honors, including induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and has made appearances as a commentator covering space shuttle flights for CNN.
“My daughter just thinks that all moms
fly the Space Shuttle.”
– Eileen Collins
Eco Awesome: Saving Mother Earth
Whether fighting to save gorillas in the mists of Africa or chaining themselves to trees to stop the logging of old growth forests, women have been at the forefront of the green revolution around the world. Indeed, the person said to be responsible for the birth of the modern environmental movement was a woman born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson.
Being an eco warrior often means putting your very life in danger. Judi Bari of Earth First nearly died when someone planted a bomb in her car after she got too successful in her campaign to save the redwoods of northern California, and hundreds of peasant women in India have looked down the barrel of a gun in their attempts to preserve the trees that maintain their climate and provide the essentials of life in rural villages.
Perhaps it is only natural that the nurturing power of women be directed back toward the source of all life—Mother Gaia. At the cusp of a new millennium, we face the continual extinction of species, the razing of precious rainforests—the “lungs” of the planet—and the scare of toxic oceans, thinning ozone, and global warming. Although governmental and corporate spin doctors deny the threat of an overheated planet, environmentalists work assiduously to ensure a healthy world for future generations. The dream of a better, healthy world is an issue that certainly affects every human being. The stories of these courageous women should inspire everyone to do what we can—recycle, reuse, reduce, get out of our cars, plant trees, garden, compost, and work together to protect the environment. This is one area in which we all have infinite opportunities to be sheroes and heroes every day, one small act at a time. This movement has grown to become the critical issue of our day. These eco-sheroes and preservationist pioneers are, literally, saving the world!
Rachel Carson: “The Natural World…Supports All Life”
World famous ecologist and science writer Rachel Carson turned nature writing on its head. Before she came along, notes Women Public Speakers in the United States, “the masculine orientation [to the subject] emphasized either the dominant, aggressive encounter of humanity with wild nature or the distancing of nature through scientific observation.” By creating a different, more feminine, relationship to nature, one which saw humans as part of the great web of life, separate only in our ability to destroy it; Rachel Carson not only produced the first widely read books on ecology, but laid the foundation for the entire modern environmental movement.
Rachel inherited her love of nature from her mother, Maria, a naturalist at heart, who took Rachel for long walks in woods and meadows. Born in 1907, Rachel was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania where the evidence of industry was never too far away. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania had changed a great deal from the sylvan woodlands named for colonial William Penn. Coal mines and strip mines had devastated some of the finest farmland. Chemical plants, steel mills, and hundreds of factories were belching pure evil into the air.
As she grew, Rachel’s love of nature took an unexpected turn toward oceanography, a budding science limited by technological issues for divers. The young girl was utterly fascinated by this particular biological science, and though she majored in English and loved to write, she heard the ocean’s siren song increasingly. While in college at Pennsylvania College for Women in the middle 1920s, she changed her major to biology,