[Powder Puff Problems and the Curse of the Ladybirds] Page: 45 of 46
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women pilots in this regard. The regulation was formally dropped. The WAFs
had flown almost daily from December through March without a single accident..."
(Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines, Keil, 1979)
But Nancy Love and Jacqueline Cochran had something better in mind than
a polite mutiny. Passing through Women's Airforce Service Pilot training
was the largest sample of US female fliers ever assembled, perhaps to this day.
The chance to make a disciplined scientific study wasn't lost.
The Avenger Field Flight Surgeon, Dr. Nels Monserud, was tough enough to
offend modesty in the interests of science. Every trainee was ordered to
report the normal incidents and dysfunctions of menstruation. But no
correlation could be discovered with performance-- the curse had nothing to do
with flunk-outs, or flying grades; with minor accidents, or bad ones, or deaths.
Flight surgeons who followed the record of the graduates discovered that they
lost less flying time per month than men.
Journal of Aviation Medicine ignored Monserud's work-- Bauer was still editor--
but his findings were printed in Air Surgeon's Bulletin, July 1945. The taboo
against unclean women in the holy cockpit persisted, in commercial aviation,
until 1960, when the cautionary paragraph was dropped from Aviation Medical
Examiner's Guide.
Even today, aerospace medical textbooks contain no reference to the
controversy or its resolution. But though they havn't had an apology, or even
an official correction, Marvel Crosson, Florence Klingensmith, Frances Marsalis,
and the other fliers whose deaths were made into weapons against their sisters,
have had the last laugh.
You see, recent high-speed centrifuge tests have finally detected a sex-
related difference in response to high acceleration. Once in a while, a blood
vessel will break in the groin and turn a man's scrotum into a big, aching,
hematoma.
Women are mysteriously immune to this effect.
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Day, Leon. [Powder Puff Problems and the Curse of the Ladybirds], text, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1029802/m1/45/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting National WASP WWII Museum.