As a young woman who had never written a book, never even published a short story, and who was still orbiting that ominous territory of risk and responsibility that comes between adolescence and adult life, I was inspired by Earhart to do something that at the time felt daring and frightening and possibly very stupid: write a novel. A novel no one had asked for and no one, as far as I knew, was going to read. She inspired me to face the unknown, the empty sky, the blank page. Even in her mistakes — her refusal to take a necessary antenna, her lack of knowledge of Morse code, her choice of an unreliable navigator — she inspired me to accept “the inevitable risks involved,” as she once said. “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards,” she wrote to her husband before her last flight. She inspired me to begin my life.

I wrote my book. And the one thing for which I was least prepared happened: it was a success. (This was in the days before anybody knew about Amazon, social media or even Oprah’s book club — the Middle Ages — and I had written a literary book, too literary, many agents had told me, the kind that was not actually supposed to be a success.) But because my first book was a success I was given some remarkable opportunities, one of which was to write an Op-Ed essay in this newspaper, the very paper in which I had first seen the picture of Amelia Earhart.

IN the essay I said several things about Amelia Earhart and why we still care about her, that by disappearing she remains both dead and alive, a symbol, a myth, a star on which to hang our fantasies. I also said that I didn’t think it would necessarily matter if we ever found out what happened to her, and that even if we did, we might not believe it because she was in our dreams and in the air. I still believe all of these things, but in the intervening 15 or so years my thinking has expanded. At the time I wrote the piece I was still the young woman who had just written a first book, still the person who was looking for that place to land in the ocean and not realizing that I would have to build it for myself.

Since then, I have done some building. I have lived some life. Now it is the 21st century. We still wonder what happened to Amelia Earhart — perhaps soon we may even find out — but do we know what to do with her? Do we know how to make not just her mysterious disappearance but also her miraculous life relevant and inspiring to our global society? And could she matter across the globe, that ball around which she tried to fly that feels so much smaller today but is in fact exactly the same size it was then?

I believe she could. It is being said more frequently, more loudly and with more evidence and conviction that the 21st century is the century of women. Research tells us that by empowering women in developing countries we can end poverty, starvation and war. These are ambitious goals, perhaps unreachable, but clearly worth attempting. Organizations like Women, War and Peace, 10 x 10 and the Girl Effect have information that can explain more fully than I can here why giving women and especially girls the help they need — leadership development, education, violence prevention and economic empowerment — can change the world.