What happened to that other Laura Ingalls?!

"As late as 1938, Ingalls was still the subject of glowing press coverage. A cover story in the magazine of Connecticut’s New Haven Sunday Register heralded her as a woman who sacrificed a future with men to 'lift her sisters from the kitchen to a cloud.'

'I haven’t time for romance. There’s too much to do in the sky,' she said, giving voice to a future dream of opening a school of aviation for women. “Now women must train with men, and they hate to appear at a disadvantage because they do not have the same preparation with which to start. Instructors, too, often jolly a girl along instead of taking her work seriously.”

"The Aviatrix Whose Name Lives in Infamy" | by Danny Glover | Medium

https://danny-glover.medium.com/the-aviatrix-whose-name-lives-in-infamy-a219ad658d8d

"Vision like that no doubt contributed to Ingalls’ popularity on the speaking circuit. But outside the realm of aviation, her wisdom was questionable. It was one thing, for instance, for Ingalls to align herself with the Women’s National Committee to Keep the United States out of War; it was quite another to drop antiwar pamphlets on Washington, D.C.

Ingalls did that in a two-hour peace flight on Sept. 26, 1939, on behalf of the committee. She dropped one-page leaflets containing an appeal to Congress to take legislative action to keep the country out of war. The flight violated two rules of the Civil Aeronautics Authority: 1) dropping anything over a city from an aircraft without permission; and 2) flying in the restricted zone around the White House and most other government buildings.

CAA officials met her at Washington Airport with a threat to revoke her license. 'In her defense, few pilots were aware of restrictions on where they could fly,' according to the account in the Ninety-Nines history, 'and Laura maintained that she had done it out of love for her country.'

That same patriotic passion moved Ingalls to defiantly raise another ruckus outside a closed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing two days later. Rebuffed by committee leaders, she fumed: 'And this is the government of the United States! I can’t understand it. Imagine! Holding hearings behind closed doors! This is a dictatorship already.'"