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NO GLAMOUR GIRLS NEED APPLY, a historical fiction novel, is inspired by the true story of a former World War II Curtiss-Wright Cadette-one of 600 "college girls" who made history 75 years ago this year.
The Cadettes were recruited at the height of the war by a giant aircraft company desperate for manpower to help pump out the fighter planes for the war. "No glamour girls need apply" was included in the company's first press release, to placate those company executives who were dubious about the ability of good-looking girls to do serious engineering. Just because they were needed didn't mean the Cadettes were welcome. Or that many thought the "girls" could master what had been, up to this point, the man's world of complex engineering. The Cadettes did master aeronautical engineering, and they contributed to America's ability to win the war through their engineering work on the P40 Warhawk. The main character of NO GLAMOUR GIRLS is based on a woman who left behind her art history studies at Wellesley College in 1943 to leap into this experimental wartime program. In February, 1943, she was one of 90 Curtiss-Wright Cadettes to arrive on the campus of the previously all-male campus of the venerable engineering school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, prompting the headline "Women Invade RPI Campus." Set on the World War II home front, my novel is an empowering story of one young woman’s fight—against her family’s and beau’s opposition, self-doubts, and society’s confining and prejudiced ideas about what women can and should do—for the opportunity to use her full talents to help the war effort. NO GLAMOUR GIRLS is an exploration of who gets to decide what drives us and of learning to believe in ourselves, when so much of the world doesn't. |
Wellesley College
The inspiration for No Glamour Girls Need Apply in her dorm room at Wellesley College. This picture was taken before the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed the course of her life dramatically.
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Life Magazine
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StoryCorps Interview,
In October, 2014, I interviewed Betty for StoryCorps, in Albany, NY. Betty's story had been selected as the winner of the Times-Union contest I had entered for the privilege of preserving her oral history in the Library of Congress.
www.timesunion.com/local/article/Genealogy-family-history-focus-of-Saturday-State-5815177.php |