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Amelia Earhart Search Forum => News, Views, Books, Archival Data & Interviews on AE => Topic started by: Ric Gillespie on October 26, 2009, 09:35:58 PM

Title: Was Amelia ahead of her time?
Post by: Ric Gillespie on October 26, 2009, 09:35:58 PM
Mira Nair, producer/director of Amelia has been quoted as saying that "Amelia Earhart was ahead of her time, and would still be ahead of her time today."  Earhart, however, was very much in tune with, and a product of, her time.  She was a member of the generation born in the Gay 90s and reared in the Gilded Age. The Great War left them shattered and disillusioned. Victorian values were rejected as outdated and oppressive. This was the era of the Flapper, the Charleston, Prohibition and bathtub gin.  The sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll of the 60s and 70s were a replay of the sex, booze, and jazz of the 20s and 30s.

Seen in context, Earhart's views on women's rights, sexual freedom, religious skepticism, and belief in the paranormal were typical of her time.  In fact, in a 1936 letter she specifically cautioned her mother to stay in step with the times, "Please don't down the Roosevelt administration.  It's all right to be reactionary inside but it is out of step with the times to sound off about the chosen people who have inherited or grabbed the earth. ...I believe the experiments carried on today point to a new social order when governments will be the voice of the proletariat far more than democracy ever can be."

Radical? Yes, but very much of her time, not ahead of it.

Ric