Our teaching guide for Fly Girls: The Daring American Women Pilots Who Helped Win WWII contains various activities and questions to guide your lesson. Use the pre-reading activity to gauge how much your students already know about World War II. Once your students complete the readings, use our discussion questions to enhance their critical thinking skills. The extension activities are meant enhance students' knowledge about World War II, gender bias, vocabulary, and much more!
Excerpted from
Fly Girls: The Daring American Women Pilots Who Helped Win WWII
At the height of World War II, the US Army Airforce faced a desperate need for skilled pilots—but only men were allowed in military airplanes, even if the expert pilots who were training them to fly were women. Through grit and pure determination, 1,100 of these female pilots—who had to prove their worth time and time again—were finally allowed to ferry planes from factories to bases, to tow targets for live ammunition artillery training, to test repaired planes and new equipment, and more. Though the WASPs lived on military bases, trained as military pilots, wore uniforms, marched in review, and sometimes died violently in the line of duty, they were civilian employees and received less pay than men doing the same jobs and no military benefits, not even...
