I named our first minivan Elizabeth Greene. I’ve christened all my vehicles with the names of women who broke barriers, and though no one at the time knew who Elizabeth (Betty) Green was, I knew. One of my biggest regrets was not knowing that our paths intersected for a few years when I lived in Seattle. By the time she passed away seven years later, I was two cities and three kids down the road. I never got to meet one of the most interesting women of both the skies and the Christian faith.
The closest I’ll ever come to wanting to be a pilot is longing to play Beverly Bass onstage (Come from Away), and yet I’ve always been fascinated by Betty Greene, a woman who ticked all the boxes:
- An original Women’s Air Force Service Pilot (WASP) in WW2.[1]
- One of the first women to experiment with high-altitude flight.
- The first woman to pilot a mission endeavor, as a founding member of Missionary Aviation Fellowship.
- The first woman to fly over the Andes.
- The first woman to fly into Sudanese airspace.
As a child growing up near Seattle in the 1920s, Betty dreamed of combining her love of flying with her love for God but assumed she’d have to settle for more “traditional” options. I doubt that girl could have imagined how her dreams would later impact people in countries she’d probably never heard of.
Pondering her life of firsts, I have to wonder what her life would have looked like now, fifty years after her retirement in 1971. What skills did she have then that could be equally useful now? How did her faith change the way she broke barriers, and how might she herself have been different had she been given different opportunities? How much has changed since those days, and how much has remained the same?
From the beginning, Betty had character traits that helped her succeed. She knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to ask or work for it. When she wanted a horse, though her parents had barely scraped out of a house fire, they agreed to buy one if she proved she would care for it and be generous with it.
She wanted a college education, so she rode an early ferry and then walked five miles to the University of Washington (UW) to get it. When opportunities came to train for a pilot’s license in 1940 and later to enroll in WASP boot camp in Texas (1943), Betty unflinchingly grabbed the opportunity. Her class at UW was the last one to admit women for certification. Had she waited, someone else may have claimed all her records.
As a WASP,[2] Betty flew high over North Carolina while servicemen below her practiced their radar skills or (more frighteningly) their artillery aim. Her calmness at the controls earned her a transfer to Wright Field in Dayton, where she helped experiment with high-altitude technology that gave pilots an advantage in flying above their opponents. At heights we now take for granted in our pressurized cabins, a one-minute error could have cost her her life, with no oxygen and subarctic temperatures!
After publishing an article about her love of flying and of missionary work, Betty received a letter gauging her interest in joining three men planning to form the Christian Airmen’s Fellowship (later MAF) after the war. When WASP disbanded in 1944, she immediately agreed to move to Los Angeles and open the first office herself. A year later, she would pilot the inaugural flight of the organization to Mexico, despite the fact that she was no Christian airman. For almost thirty years, she ferried missionaries’ children, medical supplies, patients, and government dignitaries, all with the same tranquility she’d flown during those target practices.
Every mission she flew was a first. No woman—often no human being—had ever piloted a plane into the deeper territories of Mexico (1945), Peru, Nigeria (1951), Sudan (1956), and Irian Jaya (1960) (present-day Indonesia). To the chagrin of at least one American military general, the Peruvian Air Force decorated her for her achievement in flying over the Andes (December 19, 1946), which helped open supply and medical care routes to villages deep in the jungles.
Betty worked hard and took advantage of opportunities to excel and move forward in her field. Yet surely, she was not the only little girl of the 1920s who had dreamed of flying. This was, after all, the era of Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974). Everyone had flying mania, including girls. Few of them managed to fulfill those dreams.
Betty was fortunate to have benefactors who had the power she needed. Her parents educated her alongside her brothers and encouraged her interest in flying. They didn’t expect her to be safer, more traditional, or less herself because she was a girl. Though her reflections imply her parents might have preferred her to complete the nursing course she began, to marry, and eventually settle safely close to home, they recognized her passions and gifts and gave unreserved support to her choices.
Would she have found the same support in 2020? Different expectations for our daughters and sons persist, even unintentionally. While girls perform as well as boys in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics–subjects necessary for aviation), their relative better performance in language arts sends the message that their skill set lies in more traditional female roles—teaching, caregiving, and social services. Overwhelmingly, this is what they choose. A University of Washington study found that girls will self-select away from STEM activities as young as six if they believe boys prefer them—possibly eliminating another Betty Greene from our future.
We know that ambition is a product of environment— “informed by the social structural positions that individuals inhabit.”[3] Betty was privileged to have unusual supportive structures. Have we grown that unusual support into the norm for Christian women, or have we backtracked, especially in our churches?
Betty also had wise men who advocated for her when she could not. Stuart King placed her resume before Sudan’s Civil Aviation Department, making it possible for her to circumvent their law and be the first woman to fly into Sudanese airspace.[4] Several times in her career at MAF, men stood in the gap with authorities who were resistant to a woman in a “man’s job,” making her advancement possible.
Another reason I believe Betty succeeded is that she was perceived as a non-threatening woman. She is described as “sweet, warm, very feminine, a real lady.”[5] One superior seemed to find it a relief that she was not forceful and determined. One assumes he wouldn’t have found this a relief had she been a man; in fact, it’s likely that he would have been proud to apply those adjectives to himself.
For the decades between 1946 and 1971, forcefulness likely would have failed a woman in her position. We know from her encounter with General Ross Powell in Peru that she possessed courage and confidence. When he barked, “I wonder what Wycliffe is about bringing in a girl to do a man’s work! She’s a big ship—too big for a woman to handle!” Betty clearly, but gently, presented both her credentials and her backing.[6] Betty knew how to finesse a situation. Those around her called it “being feminine,” but I suspect now we would call it a form of code-switching. She declares that she was not a feminist and “resisted being drawn into such ideological agendas,” yet she also admits it was, at times a lonely and deeply unaffirmed life as a woman.[7]
A dilemma many women of faith face is where to assert their own competence and where to trust that God will open doors. Betty’s writing is filled with the latter, and we have no reason to suppose her trust was not genuine. How much Betty was untroubled by this dilemma, though, and how much her writing, solely under the umbrella of her employer, required it, we don’t know. I imagine that even as a woman of great faith, she had moments of sheer frustration, knowing that it would be received poorly if she demanded her due. Her farewell to the organization reflected some of this frustration: “Long years of involvement are not easily broken; feelings about being rejected by those you counted your dearest friends force their way in—though unwarranted.”[8]) This is one of the areas where I wonder about the difference between 1960s Betty and imaginary 2020s Betty. It’s one of the things I most wish I had gone to ask her during those days in Seattle.
Another reason for her success is that Betty went into a field where men were scarcer. Doors slammed in front of WASPs who attempted to fly commercially after the war. “Men want to return to those jobs. We know the WASP wouldn’t want to replace qualified male pilots!” It’s an excuse women hear in my field today, too. “Men have to support their families. You wouldn’t want us to pay you the same, would you?” It’s the rationale I received when I told a pastor I was called into the ministry. “We don’t allow women to serve as pastors. But you can be a missionary or a rural church leader and do the same things without the title.”
“You can go where men won’t go” became the slogan of the early career woman. While men chose those commercial gigs after the war, Betty found it possible to carve a career in places they didn’t want. Those who could work for PanAm weren’t begging to become poor bush pilots, often in danger. As had always been the case, women took the jobs men would not. But in Betty’s case, she did so with joy.
Perhaps the largest reason Betty continued in her career for so long was that she chose to remain single. Knowing her ability to follow wherever the Lord led would end with the addition of a husband and children, she steered away from that possibility. “Each time I came to that crossroads,” she writes, “I chose not to marry. Having a family and continuing long-term flying were incompatible. The Lord showed me that He was my sufficiency.”[9] She put it down to faithfulness—which it was, regardless of whatever emotional baggage it may have carried.
In her discussion of the five ages of women, Dr. Claudia Goldin[10] covers all the eras of Betty’s life. College-educated women of her age and time knew they could choose career or family, and they, more often than their non-college-educated peers, chose the former. Post-war, many who had worked returned to jobs, but they did so after having their families, not during. Betty chose a career, but she never really had the option to have both. Even today, women in fast-track careers are more likely to opt out of family, knowing it will cost them advancement. In the church, Betty’s choice is often still required: Family? Or career? Rarely both. It’s a double standard male leaders don’t face. Still, household, family, and emotional labor are largely the weight of women in American society and especially in the church.
The men with whom I attended seminary laughed when I asked how much time they spent caring for home and children. It didn’t cross their minds that such questions weren’t abstract to me at all with two rambunctious toddlers at home—and yet there I stood, receiving the same degree they were. Nor do many denominations that ordain women routinely and consistently provide childcare for conferences, parental leave for either parent or equitable pay for equal training. Betty was well aware that becoming a wife and mother might sideline her dreams and calling. We are less aware, and therefore perhaps more in danger of allowing that sidelining to happen incrementally, putting us years behind before we know it’s happened. What we don’t address proactively—having policies that offer family life care for everyone—we leave as status quo, which means that women fall behind their married male cohorts.
How is the church doing in its ability to encourage the Betty Greene’s in it? One advocacy group recently hosted a panel of men telling others how they had learned to advocate for women in ministry–much like Betty’s MAF partners. How many pastors and leaders are intentionally learning this skill in our churches? Women need their ministry colleagues to stand in that gap for us, too. (Listening in to that event is a great place to start.)
How hard is the church working to ensure that women have equal access to ministry opportunities and equal pay? Are we still allowing our boards to ask questions about women’s need for full-time pay, or their intent to remain in ministry once they marry or have children? We ought to be screening our hiring questions so that no one asks anything of a woman they wouldn’t ask a man, so no woman has to choose like Betty did.
When conflict happens in the church, do we expect women leaders to remain “nice,” while men are allowed to push boundaries? Do we make room for women to demand their due without serving them guilt for being prideful—an accusation we rarely make against men who put themselves forward? The church can improve when it stops the tone double standard for women and men in ministry. All of these were barriers Betty faced–and women in ministry still face them. We can and must do better.
Betty Greene died in 1997, nearly the same time as the Caravan I named in her honor. I’m grateful for the path she created for other women in ministry to follow a call, even when it wasn’t smooth flying.
Photo by Branislav Nenin on Shutterstock.
[1] All biographical information from this article was gathered from the following sources unless otherwise noted:
- Betty Greene and Dietrich Buss, Flying High: The Amazing Story of Betty Greene (Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 2002).
- Records of Mission Aviation Fellowship, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College Library, Collection 136.
[2] The role of the WASPs was to free male pilots for active military duty by towing targets for practice, ferrying planes, testing new ideas and equipment, and other duties. The WASP would be disbanded in 1944. They would not be recognized as actual veterans until 1977. Dr. Andrew T. Wackerfuss, Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, Air Force Historical Support Division, https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/458964/womens-airforce-service-pilots-wasp/#:~:text=A%20month%20later%2C%20on%205,its%20pilots%20known%20as%20WASPs.
[3] Chardie L. Baird, Stephanie W. Burge , and John R. Reynolds, “Absurdly Ambitious? Teenagers’ Expectations for the Future and the Realities of Social Structure,” Sociology Compass, 2008, 950.
[4] Flying High, 138.
[5] MAF Collection 136.
[6] Janet and Geoff Benge, Betty Greene: Wings To Serve (Seattle: YWAM Publishing, 1999), 103.
[7] Flying High, 182.
[8] Records of Mission Aviation Fellowship, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College Library, Collection 136.
[9] Flying High, 181.
[10] Claudia Golden, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021).
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