The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II

Recently, I stood in an airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, and looked up. I was wondering what it would have been like to take off from there in a small plane, flying into the dust of West Texas and the chaos of World War II, as my grandmother had. The land around me had the palette of a well-used watercolor set and the topography of a paper towel: gray and brown, flat forever. It is dry all year round, except when it suddenly pours. The wide, featureless landscape makes for big, blustery winds and difficult orientation. Also, it is famous for its rattlesnakes.

During World War II, Sweetwater’s Avenger Field was the primary home of a program that trained women to fly military planes. They were called Women Airforce Service Pilots—WASPs—and they were the solution to a high-stakes problem: The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly. From 1942 to 1944, these women volunteers engaged in just about every aspect of military flight operations except combat—ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots—so that the men would be free to fight in Europe and the Pacific. More than 25,000 women applied to the program, fewer than 2,000 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training.

By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying. But during the war, they were classified as civil servants, no different in the eyes of the government from the female federal employees who typed memos or cooked on bases. After the war, they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits, and kept out of both the military and commercial cockpits. For decades, the WASPs lobbied to be recognized as service members. Today, they are still largely unknown. Soon, they will all be gone.

Patricia Perry, my Grandma Pat, was born in 1921, an only child. She grew up in Auburn, a small town in Northern California’s Sierra foothills. This was farm country—stone fruit and grapes—and when she was in high school, Pat learned to fly a friend’s parents’ crop duster. She was high-achieving, sheltered, patriotic, and eager to please—always, according to my mom, “trying to be the son her father never had as well as the daughter her mother insisted on.” In 1941, she moved two hours southwest to study political science at UC Berkeley. Instead of joining a sorority, she lived in the International House, where she was surrounded by students from all over the world, including many who had fled the war in Europe.

After graduation, she’d planned to attend law school at Berkeley, where she would have been one of just a few women, but deferred her admission to join the WASPs. She met the criteria: 5 foot 4 or taller, at least 21 years of age, high-school diploma, extensive flying experience. On July 5, 1943, when Pat was 21, she began her training in Sweetwater. She had never left California before.

With a few exceptions, the women at Avenger Field were white, but they came from a variety of backgrounds and professions—one was a Broadway actor—and from all over the country. Some were still essentially children; others were in their 30s, married with a family, or widowed by a husband who had already been killed in the war. The wealthier among them had learned to fly for fun when aviation became an expensive diversion in the years between the world wars. Hundreds had gone through the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which had been founded a few years earlier to train men to fly and occasionally accepted women. Pat, like many of her fellow WASPs, had felt called to service. A large number just really loved to fly, and looked for any opportunity to do it.

Before she joined the program, Marion Schorr Brown was making $90 a month as a schoolteacher and spending $6 an hour for flight time. Nell Stevenson Bright took her first recreational flight at the age of 8, when her father paid a dollar for her to ride in a World War I biplane, and never stopped thinking about being in the air after that. Cornelia Fort was an airplane fanatic and a flight instructor who happened to have been flying with a student over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when she was 22. She saw the bombs exploding in the sky, and then she emergency-landed her plane as Japanese military aircraft rained bullets down on the tarmac. Ten months later, she became the second woman to sign up for what would become the WASP program.

The women paid their own way to Texas. They were told to pack light, and to buy life insurance. Once they got there, they were given men’s flight suits; in photographs, they look like children playing dress-up, heavy fabric pooled at their feet. They covered lodging costs themselves, $1.65 a day. The windows on their barracks were painted black, for modesty. They trained for four to seven months, learning physics, Morse code, and military law, and accumulating hundreds of flight hours: everything male pilots learned, except gunnery and formation flying. (They also learned how to examine their cockpits for rattlesnakes.) Every morning, they did calisthenics in bobby socks as military planes flew loud and low overhead. In the evenings, they wrote letters home, played Ping-Pong in the rec hall, and produced a newspaper, The Avenger.

In Sweetwater, locals received them with some suspicion, at least until program leaders encouraged them all to go to church, even the Jewish ones. In the country at large, to the extent that the public was aware of the WASPs, the general attitude seems to have been one of amused gratitude. A cover story about the program in Life magazine—headline: “Girl Pilots”—called the women “very serious about their chance to fly for the Army at Avenger Field, even when it means giving up nail polish, beauty parlors, and dates for a regimented 22 ½ weeks.”

After training, the women received a pair of silver wings and a few days off. Then they scattered to their next assignment: Schorr Brown to Detroit, Stevenson Bright to El Paso, Fort and Pat to different parts of Southern California, the rest to airfields and Army bases around the country. There, they taught male cadets how to fly; moved supplies between factories and bases; flew paperwork, planes, and pilots wherever they needed to go; and generally engaged in what the pilot Jacqueline Cochran, one of the program’s founders, was fond of calling “aerial dishwashing”—the tedious stuff, work no one else wanted.

[Read: Night Witches, the Soviet female fighter pilots of World War II]

Each WASP was typically one of only a handful of women among hundreds or thousands of men on base, and the historical record suggests that they were treated, at best, like zoo animals. An unspoken but widely understood part of the job description, Pat recalled, was to entertain their male counterparts: She packed a ball gown in her luggage along with her flight suit. The women were skipped over for certain flying assignments, evaluated more harshly than the men, and reportedly told by one base commander that both they and the planes could easily be replaced. For a while, many were grounded during their period. Rumors of sabotage by male pilots spread. Cochran was said—but never confirmed—to have found traces of sugar in the engine of a plane that had crashed and killed a WASP.

Even under the best conditions, the flying itself was difficult and dangerous. The planes were tiny, many of the cockpits completely open to the air. (In Sweetwater, I saw four of them, dinky little tin-can-looking things, and I thought about how I require a glass of wine and a Xanax to get on a 737.) They had rudimentary instruments and no radar or GPS—often, the women would navigate by sticking their head out the window. Schorr Brown once accidentally got so close to the Statue of Liberty while flying from Montreal to Newark that it “scared the living daylights out of her.” Not at all infrequently, a WASP’s assignment was to test a plane for airworthiness, or to transport a damaged one to be repaired, or to tow a target over a practice area while not-fully-trained men on the ground did their best to shoot at it with machine guns. Women were allowed to opt out of this last duty, but no one did.

On March 21, 1943, Cornelia Fort was ferrying a BT-13 from Long Beach to Dallas when one of the recently trained male pilots she was flying with accidentally clipped her wing. She nose-dived so hard that her plane’s engine was later found buried two feet underground. Fort was the first woman pilot in American history to be killed while on active duty for her country. The military did not pay for her funeral.

Thirty-seven other WASPs died in service, either during training or on assignment. Each time, their remains were sent home at the expense of their families—the women at Avenger got used to passing around a hat, collecting donations. Their caskets were not permitted to be draped with the American flag, but sometimes their families did it anyway.

Almost the entire time the WASP program existed, its leaders fought for it to be made an official part of the military, with all the attendant benefits. Almost the entire time, they were met with resistance from male pilots. In 1944, as an end to the war appeared to be in sight and the pilot shortage eased, the government ordered the cancellation of a flight-instruction program for men. A group of male teachers began petitioning elected officials and writing to the press: Why should women have these jobs when they couldn’t?

[Read: Why women weren’t allowed to be astronauts]

Soon enough, public sentiment toward the WASPs started to shift. “Women: Unnecessary and Undesirable?” a headline in Time magazine asked. A government report found the program to be expensive and wasteful, especially when so many male pilots were available. A bill that would have provided the WASPs with full military status was narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives. By October, it was all over: The program was to be disbanded by the end of the year.

On December 7, 1944, it graduated its final class. “The WASP have completed their mission,” General Henry Arnold said at the ceremony. “If ever there was a doubt in anyone’s mind that women can become skillful pilots, the WASP have dispelled that doubt.” The pilots he was addressing would never get to put their skills to use. The ones currently on base were sent home.

And so the WASPs scattered back to their lives. They finished school, bred Pekingese dogs, won bowling competitions, sold encyclopedias, had babies, devoted themselves to their families. A number of them applied to be commercial pilots and were rejected, though occasionally an airline would suggest that they were perfectly qualified to become stewardesses.

Marion Schorr Brown married a civilian pilot and settled down in Columbus, Ohio, staying home to raise her children. Nell Stevenson Bright began a career in finance, and eventually became one of the first female stockbrokers in Phoenix. And Pat went back to Northern California, only to find that the law school she’d been admitted to before volunteering had dramatically reduced operations, on account of the fact that there weren’t enough men around to fill a class.

She instead enrolled at a different, less prestigious school. After graduation, despite having job offers in Los Angeles, she returned to Auburn at her parents’ insistence and married a local war hero—my grandfather. She joined him in working at his family’s law firm, which didn’t allow Pat to bill clients or appear in court. On the ground as in the sky, it seemed she was expected to use her many talents in order to help the men around her, without being too bothersome or visible about it.

When she had my mom, in 1951, Pat left the firm for good. Twelve years later, she and my grandfather divorced. He quickly remarried, and she moved to Monterey with my mom and my uncle, then 6. She had graduated from an elite college, flown warplanes, and passed the bar, but as a divorcée in 1963, the best job she could find was working the reception desk at a hotel.

By then, the WASP program had been all but erased from public memory. Like so many who had served during the war, the WASPs themselves generally tried their best to move on afterward. Margo Thurman, Nell Stevenson Bright’s daughter, told me that she’d been unaware of her mom’s service until she was in her 20s. Pat did tell her young children about it, but she didn’t say much: She was proud of what she had done, but it was a closemouthed kind of pride. At some point, she threw away her uniform.

Because they’d gone their separate ways after training, and the internet did not exist, and most of the women had changed their name, many of them lost touch. Most WASPs had little to no contact with the only people who had shared in, and could validate, their experience. Records of the program were classified, and the military didn’t publicize it after it ended. What, after all, would be the point? “No one even knows about us,” one WASP told her local paper in the 1970s. “They say I’m nuts when I mention it.”

Starting in the early 1960s, WASPs organized various efforts to gain veteran status. They all failed. Then, in 1976, when the Air Force began accepting female recruits for combat, newspapers, working off military press releases, ran articles about the “first women pilots to fly military airplanes.” By this point, the women’s-rights movement had gained momentum, and the nation, having just lost an ethically murky war, was inclined to glorify World War II and its veterans. Many of the WASPs, including Nell Stevenson Bright, began organizing anew, hoping that this time, the conditions were right for them to actually be heard.

Stevenson Bright turned 104 in June. In late fall, she spoke with me over Zoom from her assisted-living facility in Salt Lake City. She wore cherry-red lipstick and a cable-knit sweater; behind her sat a flower arrangement with a small American flag in it. She talked about the fight for recognition the same way she talked about flying an airplane: matter-of-factly, and with little interest in questions about how it felt. While living in Arizona, she had become friendly with Senator Barry Goldwater, she told me, and shortly after she and other WASPs pleaded their case to him, he “got to work” on a bill—simple. In 1977, the women were finally, formally recognized as veterans and made eligible for benefits.

The recognition effort helped many of the remaining WASPs get back in touch with one another. A few had gathered casually for years, but now they began to have larger, more formal reunions. “We’d just sit around and yak,” Stevenson Bright recalled. They began making the rounds at air shows, setting up a booth and trying to talk with as many people as they could—for starters, they wanted everyone to understand that 1976 was not the first time women had flown military planes. They began considering what else they might want to do to make sure they wouldn’t be forgotten.

In 1992, the WASPs established an archive at Texas Woman’s University, in Denton, about 45 minutes north of Dallas. A few years later, one of the women and her daughter began advocating and raising money for a museum. It opened in 2005 at Avenger Field, 62 years to the day after the first WASP class graduated. As of this spring, 18 WASPs have had their ashes scattered there, with one another instead of their husbands, under the big gray sky. In 2009, after an extended lobbying effort, the women were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their service. A few years later, the family of a WASP named Elaine Danforth Harmon fought to bury her at Arlington National Cemetery, and won.

[Read: A woman pilot receives the military funeral the Army denied her]

Pat died in 1995, when I was 7. My sense of her is arrested at the second-grade level: All I remember is that she loved golf, had bright-red hair, and gave me age-inappropriate books about the economy for Christmas, because she thought it was important for little girls to understand how money worked.

I wish I could ask her what she thought of it all—the archive, the medal, the long battle for recognition, the question of whether it’s even possible to win a fight you never should have had to wage in the first place. I know that she was interested in justice, on a philosophical and professional level as well as a personal one, but I also know that her feelings about being a WASP were complicated. When Pat’s children asked her about the war, mostly what she told them was how terrifying it was, how cold she was in the cockpit. She did not make enduring friendships in the program. It did not grant her greater opportunities later in life, or a sense that women could accomplish whatever they set out to do. She died angry at the U.S. military, and terrified of snakes. My mom believes that she did not want to think being a WASP was the most exciting thing she had ever done or would do. She also believes, as she told me recently, that Pat’s life was full of disappointments, often because of her gender, and that her experience as a WASP—during, but especially after, the war—“was the first, and the biggest.”

Recently, pop culture has developed an interest in history-makers and hidden figures—in stories about spunky women who clopped around institutions that didn’t respect them in fabulous high heels, doing math or playing chess, glamorously but silently moving humanity forward. Part of the appeal of these narratives is that they flatter the present simply by virtue of its not being the past: You consume them and think, Thank God we’re not like that anymore. They are stories about discrimination and hardship that are designed to make their audience feel good, as though progress is always linear and justice is always served.

[Read: Why are there so few cultural portrayals of women in combat?]

Many of the women I spoke with for this story have wondered why no one has made a big Hollywood movie about the WASPs. I have a theory. I think it’s because their story does not neatly represent the beginning of anything. A thousand American women were flying planes during the biggest and deadliest conflict the world had ever seen, and then they were back on Earth, wives and mothers, their contribution forgotten before the war even ended. They did not integrate the military or significantly alter the general public’s understanding of what women were capable of—women weren’t allowed to fly military planes again for another generation. As of 2024, just 7.3 percent of this country’s licensed pilots were women; the government report I found this figure in is titled “U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics.” Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently declared that the military must be returned “to the highest male standard only,” and ended a 74-year-old committee created to support women in service.

The WASPs hurtled into a hard wall and it didn’t break. If their story offers a lesson for the women of my generation or the girls of the next, it’s not a particularly uplifting one.

In November, my mom and I paid a visit to Texas Woman’s University. Twenty-first-century women crisscrossed campus in tiny shorts or enormous cargo pants, carrying fat textbooks on physics and Eastern philosophy. At an information desk inside the administrative building that houses special collections, a student worker stared at me blankly when I asked about the WASP archive. “Like … wasp?” she said, moving her finger in the air like an insect.

We got there eventually. The archive shares space with the Texas First Ladies Historic Gown Collection, and one of the world’s largest collections of cookbooks—a news crew had recently been there to film a segment on the cookbooks, and the WASP memorabilia had been moved out of the way. We sat on soft chairs and talked with Corynthia Dorgan, the archive’s WASP expert.

In the months before I arrived in Texas, the Trump administration had embarked on a large-scale effort to purge government materials of references to women, people of color, and various other marginalized groups. (Two months after my trip, Texas A&M University would abruptly end its women’s- and gender-studies program.) Simply acknowledging the existence of certain individuals, facts, and concepts had become a political act. The United States seemed to be in the middle of a mass experiment designed to test just how durable the reality of the past really is.

In some ways, the WASPs and their long, halting fight for status are a perfect example of Americans’ perennial willingness to elide entire histories and people for the sake of convenience or ideology. And they have been subject to this great erasing themselves. Shortly after President Trump started his second term, the Air Force Times reported that at least a dozen pages related to the WASPs and other female pilots had been removed from Air Force websites.

[Read: What the female veterans in Congress think about women in combat]

Recently, Dorgan told me, she and her colleagues had pulled as many PDFs of government webpages about the WASPs as they could, as a precaution. They have also subtly reframed the way they talk about the program publicly, emphasizing its role in Texas history more than women’s history. “You do the little things,” Dorgan said, in order to protect the truth. You do your best to tell the story you care about in a way that will make people want to listen, in the moment you are telling it.

This is something that the WASPs became good at. They started the archive where Dorgan now works, she told me, because “they knew what they did was unique, and it was hidden, and they thought it shouldn’t be.” They created a museum because they felt that they should have a museum. It is still there for anyone who wants to visit; on a recent Wednesday, a group of teenagers was being led around on a tour. The WASPs spent their 80s traveling the country talking about their experiences because they thought those experiences mattered. They talked to anyone who would listen. History, they understood, isn’t something that’s ordained impartially or fixed in position—it’s whatever people decide is worth repeating over and over.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The Women of Avenger Field.” It has been updated to reflect that Patricia Perry moved two hours southwest, not southeast, to study at UC Berkeley, and that July 5, 1943, is when she began training in Sweetwater, Texas, not the date she arrived there. The article has also been updated to clarify that the remarks attributed to a base commander were not a direct quote, and to correct the verb tense in the quote from Pete Hegseth.

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