The Ninety-Nines

The Ninety-Nines is the name chosen by a group of female pilots to identify the organization they formed in the mid-1920’s. The organization was created to serve as a unified voice and representation of the pilots as they struggled against the different forms and manifestations of sexism while trying to achieve their goals and ambitions. It was, in many ways, an organization that followed in the footsteps of the suffragettes in the early 1900’s, women who faced similar sexisms as they struggled to obtain the right to vote for themselves and for all women. In other words, the rights for which the Ninety-Nines fought were essentially the rights for which many women at the time were fighting – the right to be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives.

Several individual members of the Ninety-Nines are the focus of much of...