Secondary Source: Looking Back at Hazel Ying Lee's Life & Legacy

Sandra Edwards Spears, member of the National WASP WWII Museum Board, commented on the experiences of female pilots at the time in an interview with NBC Asian America in May, 2017.

“It was not easy for any woman at that time to become a pilot,” Sandra Edwards Spears of the National WASP WWII Museum told NBC News. “A lot of people believed that women shouldn’t be flying at all. But they freed up the men who used to fly those planes so that they would be able to go to combat.”

“The main purpose was to free up [male] pilots. [Female pilots] would ferry airplanes to [male] pilots wherever they were and would tow targets to gunners,” Spears explained. “They wouldn’t allow them to fly abroad. [The WASP] would have liked to, but it wasn’t permitted.”

“It was not easy for any woman at that time to become a pilot. A lot of people believed that women shouldn’t be flying at all.”

“The girls already had to have a pilot’s license and to have a certain number of flying hours,” Spears said, noting that all of this had to be done at the pilot’s expense because the WASP were not considered members of the military at the time and as such they also had to pay for their room, board, and uniforms.

“They also had to be American,” she added.

Source: Lakshmi Gandhi, "Remembering Hazel Lee, the first Chinese-American female military pilot," NBC Asian America, May 25, 2017.