The Flying Housewife

Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock became the first woman in history to fly solo around the world on this day in 1964. Nicknamed "the flying housewife" by the press, Mock circumnavigated the Earth flying a Cessna 180 single-engine monoplane; 27 years after Amelia Earhart's famous and ill-fated attempt. Despite her incredible record-making feat, Mock's name is largely unknown today.

 

In an interview before her death, the Ohio native said, “I did not conform to what girls did. What the girls did was boring.” At age 7, after taking a short airplane ride at a nearby airport, Mock declared she wanted to be a pilot. Several years later, following Amelia Earhart’s adventures on the radio, she dreamed of making similar flights. “I wanted to see the world,” she remembered. “I wanted to see the oceans and the jungles and the deserts and the people.”

She was the only woman in the aeronautical engineering class at Ohio State University, where the male students left her alone after she got the only perfect score on a difficult chemistry exam. But in 1945, women rarely pursued aeronautics careers, and at the age of 20, she dropped out of college to marry Russell Mock. Soon, Mock was busy with her role as wife and mother of three, but she still dreamed of flying. Once her oldest children were in school, she started taking flying lessons and earned her pilot's license. When Mock tired of her ordinary life at home, she complained to her husband about being bored. “Maybe you should get in your plane and just fly around the world,” he joked, but Mock decided he was right.

She spent a year preparing for a round-the-world flight, helped by fellow pilots and navigators who thought she was crazy to want to undertake such a dangerous endeavor. At the age of 38, she began her flight on March 19, 1964 -- two days after another woman, Joan Merriam Smith, also departed on a solo round-the-world attempt.

The pressure to set the record took some of the joy out of her flight; what she had planned as a leisurely sightseeing trip ended up a grueling marathon made up of 12 or more hours of flying on five hours of sleep. Even given these challenges, when she landed back home on April 17, she announced: “I don’t know what to say. This is just wonderful."

Mock never wanted to capitalize on her fame, preferring solitude and quiet: “The kind of person who can sit in an airplane alone is not the type of person who likes to be continually with other people,” she explained. After 1969, finances prevented her from ever flying an airplane again. And while she recognized the significance of her flight, achieving the record was not as important as the joy she took in flying. In interviews on her various stops during the flight, she demurely said, “I just wanted to have a little fun in my airplane.” Jerrie Mock passed away in 2014 at the age of 88.