Amelia Earhart was born in 1897, in Kansas, USA. Even as a child she didn’t behave in a conventionally ‘feminine’ way. She climbed trees and hunted rats with her rifle — but she wasn’t particularly interested in flying. She saw her first plane when she was 10, and wasn’t impressed at all. But she was very interested in newspaper reports about women who were successful in male-dominated professions, such as engineering, law and management. She cut them out and kept them. – During the First World War she worked as a nursing assistant in a military hospital, and later started to study medicine at university. Then, in 1920, Amelia’s life changed. She went to an aviation fair with her father and had a 10-minute flight in a plane. That was it. As soon as the plane left the ground, Amelia knew that she had to fly. So Amelia found herself a female flying teacher and started to learn to fly. She took all sorts of odd jobs to pay for the lessons, and also saved and borrowed enough money to buy a second-hand plane. It was bright yellow and she called it ‘Canary’. In 1922 she took ‘Canary’ up to a height of 14,000 feet, breaking the women’s altitude record.
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