The year was 1933, and Amelia Earhart received an invitation to a White House event.



The year was 1933, and Amelia Earhart received an invitation to a White House event. During the dinner, Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt discreetly left the White House to embark on a joyride in an airplane. Earhart took control of an Eastern Air Transport twin-engine Curtis Condor at Hoover Field in Arlington, Virginia, and they soared into the sky. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had recently acquired her student pilot's license, briefly assumed control while airborne. She later told The Baltimore Sun, "I'd love to do it myself. I make no bones about it. It does mark an epoch, doesn't it, when a girl in an evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night."

Recently, I learned that Earhart insisted on an open marriage with her husband, George Putnam. Before their marriage, she composed a letter expressing her sentiments: "On our life together, I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."

As it turned out, Putnam held progressive views of his own and clarified that he was not "preventing" his wife from flying but, instead, encouraging it. One year into their marriage, Putnam wrote, "Women who earn their salt are entitled to have what they want to put the salt on!"

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