If Amelia Earhart were around today, she might not have had much patience for Instagram. She wasn’t a natural self-promoter, disliked the fuss of staged photos, and rarely reveled in curating her public image. And yet, nearly everything we think we know about her was a carefully assembled product—polished to a high shine and sold to an eager public.
Take the often told story of her spontaneous flight with Eleanor Roosevelt—a tale that even spawned a children’s picture book. The usual version: two pioneering women lock eyes across a White House dinner table, feel an instant bond, and sneak off for a spur-of-the-moment night flight over Washington with dinner guests in tow.
It was a brilliant piece of stagecraft—with George Palmer Putnam directing from the wings. Putnam—Amelia’s husband and a tireless promoter—had a gift for manufacturing headlines the way other men make shoes. In April 1933, just six weeks into Eleanor’s tenure as First Lady, Amelia was invited to an official dinner with George and a curated crowd of aviation insiders. Somebody—almost certainly George—floated the idea of a joyride. A press corps materialized as if on cue. Amelia, suspiciously ready for a flight, turned to Eleanor and asked, “Mrs. Roosevelt, would you like a ride over Washington tonight?”
The First Lady, dressed in silk slippers, beamed from the cabin of a hulking Curtiss Condor as it dipped low over the Potomac. She called the view a “fairyland.” It made for a perfect headline—which was, almost certainly, the point. The moment has since become a staple in storybooks, lesson plans, and profiles of both women, where fact and fiction have happily merged.
Amelia’s fashion line followed the same playbook. In 1934, at George’s urging, Amelia Earhart Fashions launched in 30 department stores across the country, with newspapers breathlessly reporting that Amelia was sketching dresses at her kitchen table. In truth, she floated a few ideas—pockets, washable fabrics, freedom to move—before George handed them off to Eve Bennett, a seasoned designer he’d secured from Foremost Sportswear. Amelia’s sister, Muriel, would later admit that Amelia hadn’t touched a sewing machine since school. Former classmates from Ogontz recalled her as the least fashion-inclined girl on campus.
The creative force behind the Amelia Earhart Shop at Macy’s wasn’t Amelia. She would have preferred to be flying, but in the Depression, her name was a meal ticket. The real driver was George. He’d swiped the boutique-in-a-store idea from a dinner with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles, and combined it with snippets of Amelia’s conversations with Elsa Schiaparelli. Voilà: instant brand.
A small item in Women’s Wear Daily hinted that Bennett deserved the credit—and that Amelia’s “innovations” looked suspiciously like styles already available from the French designer Maggy Rouff. But Amelia didn’t need to sew—she needed to sell. She understood the power of an idea pinned to a famous name. Soon, she endorsed leather flying caps, luggage sets, and even oatmeal. (She signed on with Quaker Oats for a youth campaign.)
Even her pilot’s credentials had asterisks. In 1929, when she entered the Women’s Air Derby, Amelia technically didn’t hold the transport license required to compete. Friends leaned on officials. The missing paperwork was quietly waived, and papers announced that she’d qualified as the fourth woman to hold the license. She hadn’t yet passed all the tests, but by then she was already a symbol—and symbols tend to fly through red tape faster than real people.
None of this makes her less brave. Rather, it makes her savvier than the legend suggests. She knew fame wasn’t about perfection—it was about persuasion. She played the part the world needed—a leather-jacketed heroine to believe in.
But she also knew the cost. Amelia was exhausted toward the end of her short life, scrambling to finance the round-the-world attempt that ended with her disappearance in 1937, when she was just 39. The myth had lifted her—but with the constant promotion eating into hours she could have spent flying, self-mythologizing threatened to burn her out midair.
Still, she endures. Not because she was flawless, but because she understood that sometimes the story—the vision of possibility—is as vital as the facts. Amelia Earhart didn’t just fly planes. She flew straight into the American imagination, having been stitched together by guts, design, and a fierce belief in what could be.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro is the author of The Stowaway
