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Cover painting of a 1911 booklet posed Harriet with her Bleriot. A skilled newspaper and magazine writer she earned the admiration of millions. [Image caption]

THE GRACEFUL, WHITE Bleriot monoplane circled the pylon to complete its fifth figure-eight and began to descend. As it entered for the final turn and straightened out for a landing the sputtering Gnome engine became silent, and soon the wheels touched down near a mark on the grassy sod of Moisant Aviation School, Mineola, New York. A slender, strikingly beautiful, dark-haired young woman slipped out of the cockpit and walked over to a group of spectators (including two judges from the Aero Club of America) sitting on hard wooden chairs around the flagpole. 

"I guess I get that license!" she exclaimed, gray eyes sparkling. 

"I guess you do," one of the Aero Club judges replied. 

And thus, on August 1, 1911, Harriet Quimby entered the rolls of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale and the Aero Club of America as Pilot Number 37, the nation's first licensed woman aviator. (She was second in the world- Baroness de la Roche of France was first, having obtained her license in 1910.)

It was a great day for André Houpert, her instructor, but the two judges appointed by the Rules Committee of the Aero Club (J. C. Campbell-Wood and Baron Darcy) were more restrained in their enthusiasm-they would have to justify their unprecedented action before that body. The day before they had failed Harriet because she landed too far from the point of ascent. (The rules said the landing must be within 100 feet of the point where the aircraft's wheels left the ground.) Today, they could hardly question her landing since she had set down her Bleriot almost precisely on the mark-seven feet and nine inches away!

Harriet unbuttoned the pantaloon legs of her satin plum-colored flying suit, turning it into a skirt, and she and the men drove off in her roadster to have [cuts off]

The flyer who broke the sex barrier...
MISS HARRIET [[picture]] QUIMBY 

Samuel S. Whitt 
Photos from the Smithsonian Institution 

In eleven short months America's first woman pilot disproved the belief that women lack the strength, presence of mind, and the courage to excel as aviators. 

20 National Aeronautics 

[?]: National Aeronautics Spring/ 1973. Vol. 1, No. 1

Transcription Notes:
Unsure of first word of handwriting at bottom