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Her adventures are the subject of two books, one written by Call of the Sea volunteer David Hirzel: The Socialite and the Sea Captain: Louise Arner Boyd and Captain Bob Bartlett at Sea 1941. A second was written by Joanna Kafarowski: The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd.
Consider also the lives of thousands of women who flocked to the Bay Area during WWII to work in the shipyards. At the beginning of 1940, there were only 36 female shipyard production workers in the entire country. By 1943, there were 160,000. Right here in Sausalito, more than 4,000 women were employed at Marinship by the end of 1943, nearly one-fourth of the workforce. There were 1,201 female welders, 40% of all welders in the yard. An equally dramatic change was the entrance of black workers. Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito by Charles Wollenberg.
During the 1950s and 1960s, however, the gates to the shipyards and other maritime trades were again mostly closed to women. It was not until the 1970s that exceptional women were able to reopen some gates, and chart a course for following generations of women to take vital positions in the maritime industry. One such pioneering woman is Nancy Wagner, one of the first women admitted in 1974 to the Kings Point US Maritime Academy and the first female ship pilot in the United States, guiding ships entering and leaving our challenging San Francisco Bay. Her story, and the stories of other pioneering women mariners, appears in a SF Maritime Park article on Women in Maritime History.
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