>> we are going to leave this or a moment and we will go to live coverage of congress, the senate is cackling for what's expected to be a brief session. no vote today. live coverage of the senate here on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. the parliamentarian:: washington ddz, june 23, 2023. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tammy duckworth, a senator from the state of illinois, to perform

the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until tuesday, june 6, at 3:00 p.m. don't reae to fly., at 3:00 p.m. don't reae i don't like turbulence. >> i don't like turbulence, unlike the sounds of playing makes in of flight and i really don't like take off, the moment you're barreling down the runway so fast as you take off uvula week of the air in a plane on your chest further and further from the ground, i don't like the feeling at all. i do like to travel more

pleasure and i do travel for work so not flying for me is not an option which means from time to time you will find me in the 29th row of coach white knuckling the armrest as if i alone am holding up the plane. a few years ago i was on flight like that from new orleans to chicago a hot summer night and it's a flight with a private caps on before you can take off and says it's going to be a bad flight and he was right. in the middlet of that summer storm we were bouncing around in the sky in their i'm trying to grow into a tiny ball for resisting the urge because that's an insane thing for a grown person to do on a plane and the woman next to me totally

noticed and finally couldn't take it anymore and she turned to me and said honey, i think i can helpp you. that is a true story. it begs the t question why somee likepe me would spend two and a half years researching and writing about planes and a time when planes travel was exponentially more dangerous than it is today. why would i do that to myself? the answer is really that it has something to do with planes. i was drawn to a story that ultimately became like girls because it is the story of an epic quest populated by character willing to risk everything for the thing they

love who would face adversity after adversity, entrenched discrimination and the death of their friend and still they keep going keep going only to triumph over the men in 1936 and one of the most epic races of them all. that's a story i hope anyone would want to tell and one i'm excited to share here with you tonight so whenever i'm writing whether it's for a magazine, radio or both like to think about my stories in terms of themes, moments. identify early on one of the most important moments here and build around the so i thought i'd begin a moment. imagine september, 1933, labor

day weekend in chicago. the city has been struggling in the grips of great depression three years, record unemployment, red lines down the street, filled with people you'd sleep on your someone else without feel them. that we can labor day weekend 1933 was going to be different. the city preparing for a rush of visitors, 500,000 people streaming and by railcar and automobile coming for an exciting event, they were coming for the air rate. we need to forget what we know about modern day air show, scripted flying event with the world's most modern plane. this was a real store with

winners and losers, enormous crowds and jackpots of money. this little window of time between 1927 and 19361 of the most popular stories in america baseball, horseracing and it was definitively also dangerous. inevitably, have its flying at a high rate of speed low to the ground would crash and the pilots would sometimes die right in front of them and want to make clear it wasn't just air racing considered dangerous or dubious, it was lying itself. my book, i've done research and

read a lot of news coverage in the 20s and 30s and one of the stories was an exposé in chicago of what they termed wildcats, these were flight schools in the chicago area in 184741 create a pilots license in a matter of 19 minutes and that summer, they ran a series of stories about the problems and one line in the story jump out at me and i want to share with you now, such schools furnish one orwi more often with each diploma. this is 1927 in chicago, this is how people felt about flying so because of these risks and

dangers, because of the money involved, many men believed this was no place for a woman. it's sexist and obviously wrong but at the time women were banned from doing all sorts of thing. waiting tables after 10:00 p.m. working in the fauci, working night shift, the late 1920s, women were banned from driving taxicabs in every american city and if you were a married woman cuin particular a married teach,

school teacher it was even harder for you. if you were a single female teacher in the late 1920s in america here in virginia and here in fredericksburg and you have the audacity over the course of the year to get married : at the end of the year your superintendent almost always been, would force you to resign from your job at the school because it was believed by these men and woman couldn't ohandle the rigors of teaching our children only to go home to raise her own so women are denied access to jobs and basic rights and the night of basic things. the late 1920s when my story

begins, there is a major tragedy in washington d.c., the roof collapsed under a heavy weight of the blizzard snowfall and it was national news, real calamity, many people died including a young boy and the boy's mother wished to sue the company for negligence and she likely would have one they denied her that right. only a father had the right to sue the wrongful death of the minor child. the boy's father was already dead meaning the mother in question had no question, no child and no recourse. women planes in 1920s face similar challenges.

the presidential election of 1928, there were 29 million woman eligible to vote, 29 million of voting age. out of that number, fewer than a dozen, you are then 12 had a pilots license on file at the u.s. department of commerce which was the regulating agency at the time, the faa and that made the few women who did fly planes feels predicated radical, the kind of radical almost hard to imagine. in september, 1933 labor day weekend in o chicago one of thoe women was about to do the most radical thing of all, she was going to raise her planes against them in living and around in a triangular course,

50-foot towers. she was 29 years old this woman, divorced and afraid of nothing. her plane that day was so fast, known to be dangerous, this model of claim killed many men before but she knew what she was doing and knew how to fly and he reached the home that labor day as soon as sundown, the crowd knew it to. 220 miles an hour, 50 or 60 feet off the ground she lends it so hard around the tower he stood up on its wings and looked at the girl, the announcer said. those are his words. look at that girl. i've never seen such a beautiful race. she was trailing but in third place, she was right there.

then the home problem, of helpful. the right wing cbgb began to disintegrate. we both thought of linen began to fall apart and flood the ground. with the wind whistling through the holes in her wing, the women in the carpet did exactly as she was supposed to, she peeled off course away from fellow competitors down toward the city of chicago over lakeview avenue. she was trying to save the people on the ground and struggling to gainlf altitude to save herself read everyone now at the airfield in chicago was watching her plane in the sky knowing one of two things was

about to happen. she was going to bail out from a dangerously low altitude or crash. either way, it probably wasn't going to end well. that woman's name, you see her here pictured with amelia earhart one year earlier in 1932 after the first ever all-female amelia ehrhardt trophy. you probably haven't heard, most people haven't. you only think about women in aviation in the 20sen and 30s and we tend to think about one or two women. coleman, the first black female aviator in this country and the only one died in a crash in 1826 or amelia ehrhardt. when you think about amelia,

would like to think of her alone plane over the ocean, alone in those cultural headwinds but of the time amelia was flying, other women were flying with. each of them was brave, each was bold. some of them arguably objectively or perhaps more talented in the cockpit than amelia. today we've forgotten almost everything. their battles and losses, their friendship and rivalries, what they fought for, how hard they fought we've forgotten that possible victory over them and in 1930. ...