The Death of Girlhood

...The woman at the wash-tub, the sewing machine, the office-desk, and the typewriter can glance up from the window when she hears the rhythmic hum of a motor overhead, and say, 'If it's a woman she is helping free me, too!' A woman who can find fulfillment in the skies will never again need to live her life in some man's spare moments...

...Pushy parents have existed from time immemorial, but social pressure to protect children-particularly young girls-also existed to check the egos of parents...

...CNN's Martin Savidge said it all when he told Jessica, "I can't wait to talk to you and find out how it went...

...For we had given up long ago on the notion that we have a special duty to protect young girls from harm...

...We do know that the daughter, upon seeing one of her mother's photographs published in the New York Times Magazine-with black bars over her eyes, nipples, and genitals-was ashamed, began covering herself up, and refused to let her mother photograph her nude...

...But when the "feminine flyer" in question is a seven-year-old girl, she is in no position to choose to exchange this "super-sentimental valuation" on her life in favor of equal-opportunity death...

...She was very brave-wasn't she...

...the crash, he said, had "ended the dream of a little girl who wanted to be the youngest person to fly across America...

...A fatal accident to a woman pilot is not a greater disaster than one to a man of equal worth," she pronounced...

...Many have dubbed Jessica "another Amelia," but there is one difference: a difference in age...

...Fear' is a word that's not part of Jessica Dubroff's vocabulary," reported Vick Lee, KRON-TV correspondent...

...Like Lisa Hathaway, who says she gave Jessica "the freedom to be," the controversial artist Sally Mann also speaks the language of liberation when it comes to her daughter, whom she has photographed nude and in clearly erotic poses since her infancy...

...We do seem to be rapidly approaching this final phase, of excising what Firestone calls "the cult of childhood...

...The legendary fascination of her own death eight years later-a death still the subject of books and movies six decades later-gives the lie to that idea...

...Has the age of hype gone so far now that attention-hungry parents and news-hungry media are colluding to place children in danger...

...Keep soaring...

...Orril Fluharty, a minister attending her funeral, enjoined us to "use Jessica as an example to live our lives to the fullest...

...Feminine flyers have never subscribed to the super-sentimental valuation placed upon their needs...

...puritanical censorship led to this child's shame at her own body and deprived the world of works that provoke thoughts we may need to think...

...Amelia Earhart, as one of these, led the way so that others might follow...

...Mom wasn't in favor of age restrictions because "to hold anyone back is to miss the message...

...As Jane Pauley would later sum up: "Yesterday, in an anguished homecoming, Lisa and her children returned to Pescadero, California...

...Anchormen trilled, "Never mind the fact that she can't reach some of the cockpit pedals-she's in the driver's seat anyhow...

...We have since learned several things about the crash itself...

...And women have more important work to do...

...On the Today show, Lisa Hathaway said her daughter "had a freedom which you can't get by holding her back...

...Would it have seemed such a worthy undertaking...

...That may be what an exhilarated Margery Brown had in mind when she exclaimed in 1930, "Women are seeking freedom...

...As Louise Thaden put it in 1938: "Flying is the only real freedom we are privileged to possess...

...That detail, among others, has caused the press to shift the subject away from the fact that a seven year-old was trying to fly a small plane across the country and onto the conduct of the press itself...

...Jessica's journey had come full circle...

...When a bunch of girls in my school decided to found a club with the encouragement of their math teacher, it was named "The Women's Science and Math Club...

...Wendy Shalit, a student at Williams College, has written for the Women's Quarterly, Commentary and Reader's Digest...

...Maybe these girls should stop posing naked and flying in sleet storms to please their mothers and just be allowed to play with Barbie once in a while...

...Francetta Cole, whom the author cites, offers a nice encapsulation of this dream: "Miss Earhart...

...I only know from reading old manners books with titles like No Nice Girl Swears that this state of affairs wasn't always the case...

...The Court finds harm in the practice of ladies' night discounts," he wrote in Novak and Luscher v. Madison Motel Associates, "in that it promotes the stereotypes that (1) men are the financial providers and that women, because of their inferior economic status, need special discounts, and (2) that women are sex objects...

...And indeed, one of the reasons Amelia Earhart was admired by some was her insistence that George Putnam agree to an open marriage...

...Women pilots have long occupied a special, almost sacred, place in the imagination of modern feminism...

...A seven-year-old cannot understand the significance of this tradeoff, even if on the surface she appears bravely prepared for it (and of course, since we know the trip was her father's idea, and the decision never to teach "negative words" such as "risk" or "danger" her mother's, it wasn't exactly Jessica's decision to make...

...Pushy parents do not operate in a vacuum...

...Jessica believed that if she could do this, she could do anything...

...Death, too, has a way of dampening self-esteem (to the extent there is no longer a self left to esteem), and if our enlightened vocabulary is putting little girls in danger by seducing us into thinking they are capable of adult feats, then perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate...

...There is no way of understanding the media's reluctance to question this daredevil flight without attending to the social significance of Jessica's cap...

...What right do adults have to take away these girlhoods under the guise of "liberating" them...

...They didn't have toys...

...One hundred years ago our great grandmothers had to keep their wings clipped like discontented little birds...

...Little did we know that this would prove literally true, that Jessica's mother Lisa Hathaway didn't teach or use "negative words...

...But what is the nature of this kind of message...

...For example, if only the "real story" about Amelia Earhart were known, as Susan Ware hopes in her 1993 book Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, then maybe feminism would experience its great rebirth...

...Not her parents, not the Federal Aviation Administration, not the media, and certainly no one in the gaping crowd...

...Or perhaps not...

...It is perhaps the height of impropriety to contradict Lisa Hathaway's account of her daughter's life, but I simply cannot believe that Jessica had a "full, wonderful, wonderful, exquisite life," nor that she was in a "deep state of joy about her life" when her plane took its final, sickening dive...

...As Newsweek's Jonathan Alter put it, "media folks are asking some hard questions of themselves, such as why they didn't ask some hard questions before the folly began...

...Even Governor Pete Wilson eulogized Jessica in terms uncannily similar to the ones that fueled her father's ambition in the first place...

...Essentially it's to save them from being "demeaned," from suffering low self-esteem...

...More significantly, these accounts reveal the hidden dream of an entranced public, still caught up in the very mentality that allowed her crash to happen-the mistaken belief that Jessica was engaged in some kind of worthy self-actualization, and we were witnessing some sort of rite de passage...

...When the 1932 press took a beating for its coverage of Amelia's triumphant Atlantic crossing, it was for referring to this 35-year-old woman as a "girl" (Boston girl, girl flyer, girl thrilled by adventure, and so forth...

...The death of Jessica Dubroff, a seven-year old girl, throws light on another, little-remarked death: The death of girlhood itself...

...But if women want equality in society," she reminded us on her PBS all-female public-affairs show, To the Contrary, "can you then say, well, beating a man is terrible, but beating a woman is horrendous...

...We, the women of America, feel grateful...

...And had her father not delayed the flight an hour to field all the media hoopla surrounding their takeoff, they could have avoided a driving sleet storm...

...A key component, after all, of the feminist revolution involved saying "Down with Childhood," in the words of the early women's-lib theorist Shulamith Firestone...

...we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice versa...

...Then there was the Today show waiting to interview Jessica once they reached Massachusetts...

...She'd had the freedom to . . . what...

...But they are not girls...

...A few years ago, Wisconsin judge Daniel R. Moeser wrote an opinion explaining why he would outlaw free drinks for women...

...Across the nation, news stories piled up...

...But even if it had been her decision, where in the world has this language of self- determination and autonomy for a seven-year-old girl come from...

...Mere casualties like Jessica Dubroff won't stop the momentum, either, for if you try to prohibit your children from doing something they want to do-whether it be eating candy or running in the middle of the street-remember that now they can always try to divorce you and get a respectful hearing on the matter...

...In 1970's Dialectic of Sex, Firestone explains why women's true freedom must eventually involve the liberation of children as well: "The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone...

...Mann assures us she takes her photographs with the girl's consent, but it is rather hard to discern what constitutes meaningful consent when one's own mother is doing the asking...

...Now, the seven-year-old girl from Pescadero, Calif, is taking her independent spirit to the sky," in the pre-crash words of the San Francisco Examiner's Eve Mitchell...

...She was a girl on the brink of becoming a truly liberated woman...

...The answer to this kid-glove treatment of a patently insane act that came to a predictably tragic end may lie along the front of Jessica Dubroff's baseball cap, where the triumphant words "Women Fly" were emblazoned in black lettering...

...I wanted them to have something more powerful...

...It is up to her parents, and all of society, in fact, to protect her from making just such a choice...

...But someone slapped a "Women Fly" cap on little Jessica Dubroff, she innocently waved at the camera, and like a lamb to the slaughter clambered into the plane...

...She'd lost her life, but she'd had her freedom...

...The Death of Girlhood By Wendy Shalit It has been more than a week since the death of seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff, who was trying to become what her daddy and mommy wanted her to become: the youngest pilot ever to complete a crosscountry flight...

...One can only hope the angels will be more protective of her, and that now Jessica will get the girlhood she never had...

...Both act in response to ideas in common currency, even if they do not know they are doing so...

...They are "women...

...A few ugly ducklings flew from the barnyard to become beautiful white swans...

...Perhaps it is no loss to let a girl enjoy the genuine freedom to be found in childhood's innocence-Mann's daughter has enough time to decide for herself whether she wants to be naked in front of the whole world when she grows up...

...Conditions were harsh enough that day to challenge a veteran pilot, but camera crews were waiting at the next stop...

...She embodied the California spirit...

...That idea is what feminists call the "pedestalturned-into-cage" problem, and it holds that when males treat females too well or are too protective of them, they must necessarily be "subordinating" them...

...And no one stopped her...

...To Jane Pauley of Dateline Hathaway said of her children, "They didn't have children's books...

...Today, after years and years of chastisement, we seem to err too far in the opposite direction-so terrified are we of being accused of "not taking women seriously" that we let an adorable seven-year-old girl who needed booster seats and extensions to reach the pedals fly a plane in a driving storm...

...Why was Jessica wearing a cap that said "Women Fly," when no woman, only a little seven-year-old girl, was flying that day...

...It was a hard bargain...

...I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression...

...First, though fractures to her adult co-pilot's wrist suggest he was in command during the final plunge, the initial stalling of the aircraft was caused by its nose being lifted at too sharp an angle-a mistake some speculate was more likely to have been made by Jessica herself...

...is an inspiration to young women who, rather than stay at home in the kitchen, would fly the air as birds...

...Everyone was eager to live up to great expectations...

...Her last article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "Babar, Bennett, and the Book of Values," appeared in our February 12 issue...

...What sort of freedom is that...

...To lose her life...

...Some of the public response to news of Jessica's death had the same eerily positive spin...

...Though the bestseller list tells us that America has now learned, yet again, that males are from Mars and females from Venus-that the sexes are different and thus cannot be treated in completely parallel, egalitarian fashion-the culture at large is increasingly dominated by another idea lifted straight from feminist dogma...

...Eleanor Roosevelt, who was friends with Amelia Earhart and wanted to take flying lessons, was prohibited by FDR from doing so...

...Hathaway notes that "regrets don't have any value" for her, since they "would bring [her] out of a state of peace and being," so maybe we should have regrets in her stead...

...If Jessica's cap had read "Little Girls Fly" instead of "Women Fly," I wonder whether it would have been so easy for the media to rubber-stamp her dangerous mission...

...Banners near her home town read: "Jessica-An inspiration to all of us...

...Another video camera was on the plane...

...The only problem with these accounts, of course, is that they weren't quite true, to the extent the stunt wasn't in fact her dream, but Lloyd's and Lisa's...

...The critic Wendy Steiner gives us some clue where these ideas come from when she actually criticizes Mann's daughter in her recent book, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism: "This is both [the girl's] loss and ours...

...I wanted them to have freedom...

...Since I was born when feminism was already in full bloom, I am all too familiar with this strange practice of referring to girls as "women...

...Four days before Jessica's death, the TV talking-head Bonnie Erbe used it to defend the equal-opportunity beating of a female illegal alien in Riverside, Calif, by a police officer...

...Jessica should be horseback riding now, or playing the piano, or doing one of the many other things this precocious girl loved to do...

...But even so, Earhart was certainly entitled to her opinion of the value of her life after living 32 years on this earth...

...But it wasn't only feminists of the 30s who pinned their hopes on women aviators: Many books on the market today still celebrate the old sanctified link, still hope for that vicarious freedom...

...Amelia Earhart struck a similar note in 1929 when Marvel Crosson, one of the contestants in the Women's Air Derby, was killed...

...Freedom in the skies...

...And neither do the media...