Rhetoric and Resilience: Exploring the Discourse of the Women Airforce Service Pilots Program

Rhetoric and Resilience explores discourse produced about and by the women involved in the World War II era Women Airforce Service Pilots program. Aviators such as Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love provided the initial rhetorical boost to successfully launch the program, while countless other pilots such as Cornelia Fort and Barbara Poole wrote to define the significance of the work the WASP were doing. Despite a formidable amount of concrete evidence in her favor, Cochran was unsuccessful in having WASP militarized. After the program's disbandment in 1944, the women of WASP settled back into civilian life but maintained strong rhetorical bonds which served them greatly in the 1970s campaign for veteran status. Using the lenses of both feminist rhetorical theory and classical rhetoric, this book seeks to recover these rhetorics. The chapters illustrate how the women employed a spectrum of strategies carefully designed to provide a fitting response to those both supportive of and hostile to their labor in the arena of military aviation.