Opal Logan Giberson (later Kunz) was born on October 10, 1890, in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Opal Logan Giberson was born on October 10, 1890, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She would grow up to become one of the most prominent American aviatrixes of the early twentieth century, at a time when women were largely excluded from aeronautics and considered incapable of the physical and technical demands of flight.
Little formal record exists of her earliest childhood, but she was raised in a comfortable East Coast family and later married into the socially prominent Kunz family through her union with gemologist and mineralogist Dr. George Frederick Kunz, a renowned scientist affiliated with Tiffany & Co. and the American Museum of Natural History. This marriage placed her within elite scientific and social circles of New York, providing her both the means and the encouragement to pursue her passion for aviation once it took hold in the 1920s.
Kunz's birth in 1890 places her generation among the first women who would come of age just as powered flight was being invented and who would, by the 1920s and 1930s, seize the opportunity to become pilots themselves, breaking gender barriers in a field dominated entirely by men.