Tag Archives: Women

Women in Space

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With March upon us, the calls start coming for information about women in space.  March is Women’s History Month and those of us trained as women’s historians know that our topics have particular currency in the third month of the year.  But for women in space, the month to celebrate really should be June.

Valentina Tereshkova

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladmirovna Tereshkova in the spacecraft Vostok 6.

Fifty years ago, on June 16, 1963, the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space. Tereshkova was chosen from a group of five women who had been selected and trained as possible cosmonauts in the Soviet Union.  Her expertise as a skydiver and her personal and family background (her father was a war hero) aided her selection to fly in space.  Launched as the sole occupant of Vostok 6, Tereshkova orbited at the same time as Vostok 5, marking the second time that two human spaceflight vehicles were in space at the same time. Her mission lasted just less than three days (two days, 23 hours, and 12 minutes).

Twenty years later (almost to the day), on June 18, 1983, which is exactly 30 years ago this year, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-7). She flew with four other crew members on a six-day mission that included launching two communications satellites. After earning her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University, Ride applied to be an astronaut and was selected in 1978 as a part of the first NASA astronaut candidate class to include women and people of color.  (Five other women also became astronauts in that class: Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judith Resnik, Rhea Seddon, and Kathryn Sullivan.)  Ride’s distinguished career with NASA included two spaceflights, service on the Rogers Commission after the Challenger disaster in 1986, and founding NASA’s Office of Exploration.

Sally Ride

Sally Ride was the first American woman in space.

Finally, last year, in 2012, again in June (on June 16, exactly 49 years after Tereshkova), Liu Yang became the first female taikonaut to fly into space when she, along with two male crewmates, participated in a thirteen-day mission to dock, both manually and robotically, with China’s prototype space station. As the third nation in the world to launch human beings into orbit, China has flown four crewed missions: its first human mission in 2003, a two-person flight in 2005, its first spacewalk in 2008, and the first crewed orbital docking (in which Liu participated) in 2012. As it did for the Soviet space program in the early 1960s, including a female flyer in a mission drew attention to the program.

Although the inclusion of women in spaceflight is only one part of the broader history of women in aerospace, space travelers serve as the public face of their organizations and thus have symbolic importance in addition to their real contributions.

In the United States, the factors affecting the number of women in space tend to be related to the “pipeline” of experience, schooling, and training required to fulfill those positions.  In the early years of the space race, when astronauts were drawn primarily from the ranks of military-trained jet test pilots, women —who were excluded from military flying from the end of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1944 until military flight training was reopened to women in the early 1970s—did not have the military jet test piloting experience to be considered. (A group of talented women pilots did undergo some private astronaut testing in 1960, but the Lovelace Women in Space Program ended abruptly in 1961.) The introduction of the Space Transportation System or “Space Shuttle” also introduced a new type of astronaut: the mission specialists, who were researchers with advanced scientific or technical degrees. The first American women astronaut candidates announced by NASA in 1978 were drawn from an applicant pool that included a greater proportion of women with terminal research degrees (Ph.D.s or M.D.s) than had previously existed.

Although Women’s History Month will be over at the end of March, we will revisit this particular history in June at the Museum. Three curators in Space History are planning an informal series of lunchtime talks, done as a part of the Museum’s weekly “Ask an Expert” series, explaining the history of these women’s achievements. After all, pioneering women deserve attention, even if it is not March.

Margaret A. Weitekamp is a curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s Space History Department.

Reflections on “Explore the Universe” 2001-2012

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One of the jokes I inherited from my student years is the final exam question “Describe the Universe” which was followed by “and give two examples.” In the 1960s, this could be funny of course, at least to astronomers. Today, however, the answer might be, “Only two?”  Since the Explore the Universe gallery opened in September 2001, the appreciation that more than our universe may well exist has strengthened  If we were to revamp the gallery today, there would be some discussion of where the evidence might someday actually come from.  What we will probably do instead is utilize one of the various updatable features already in the gallery, when the time really comes.

Indeed, as the Museum contemplated a new astronomy gallery in the 1990s, we knew that we were dealing with a subject that is constantly changing.  We had formed a core group of scientists, historians, educators, and designers to craft a vision for the new presentation.  What emerged, after three Museum directors and many other staff changes, was a simple and hardly radical statement: “New Tools, New Universes.”  Of course, it was the same universe each time, but seen and understood more completely, and, typically, was found to be very unlike the conception that went before.  This single statement embodied others, like “New Universes tend to be larger and less homocentric” or “There are no final answers, only better informed questions.”

One of the most interesting themes, or threads, that we decided to incorporate, however, was how “Women have played significant roles in changing our view of the nature of the Universe.”  This last one, like the others, helped to guide the choices we made as to what instruments played a role in giving us new views, where did those instruments come from, and who were the people who either used those instruments or analyzed the data coming from them?

During the course of developing the gallery we well knew that astronomy has long been a male-dominated enterprise.  This is, happily, no longer the case. But even in past times, it is not difficult to point to women who played critical roles in revolutionizing our view of the nature of the Universe.

We therefore set about to portray some of these women in Explore the Universe, within the contexts in which they worked, and the roles they played making the new discoveries.  As you walk through the gallery located on the east end of the first floor of the Museum, here are some of the stories  you will encounter:

The First Room

The first universe you will encounter is human or earth-centered, “homocentric” in other words.  It was the view we constructed based upon observations by eye alone, aided only by pointing devices to determine positions of things in the sky, and over time, their motions.  The geometric earth centered view of the Greeks is depicted, together with the instruments that refined it, ending in a replica of Tycho Brahe’s great 16th Century equatorial armillary sphere being used by one of his assistants.  No women are depicted here.

Armillary Sphere

A view of the Tycho Armillary Sphere reproduction on display in “Explore the Universe.” The Sphere was built by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the late 1500s to study the sky and to teach about the celestial coordinate system.

The Second Room

The second universe, brought by the advent of the telescope, led to the confirmation of a model suggested prior to Tycho: that the universe was centered on the Sun and not the earth.  Tycho’s tables and observations had given strong evidence of this, but in and of themselves were not sufficient to overthrow the Aristotelian universe.  Observations with Galileo’s telescope were sensational enough to bring about this revolution, enabled by his ability to dramatically portray his evidence (the Jovian satellites, the Venusian phases, the Sun’s spots, etc.) through visual representation.

Walking through this second room is a walk through telescopic history in a universe composed of stars, all contained within what we call the Milky Way.  Ever bigger and more powerful telescopes were built through the 18th and 19th centuries to probe this universe. Featured in the gallery is the grand 20-foot reflector of William Herschel in a diorama showing him at work gauging the heavens, with his sister Caroline both directing and recording his observing routine from an open window.  Caroline’s contribution to William’s legacy, producing the first observational map of the structure of the known universe, was in fact as more than his assistant.  It was she, according to recent scholarship, who made William’s work systematic, and it was she who also encouraged him to carefully catalog those fuzzy faint apparitions they were recording night after night, year by year.  These so-called nebular forms could be unresolved clusters of stars, or some ethereal shining fluid out of which stars someday would form.  But were they among the stars? Or beyond the stars?  Were they other universes, the Herschels asked?  The distribution of the nebulae was oddly different than the distribution of stars, or the shape of the universe as they found it.

Carolyn Herschel

Carolyn Herschel was an astronomer and researcher who became the first woman, and the only woman for well over a century, to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London. Her work was formally recognized in 1828.

Caroline, of course, worked in astronomy by virtue of her brother’s interests, and they both were supported by a king’s pension, provided by George III  after William had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

The Third Room

The question the Herschels posed (“what was the nature of the nebulae?”) was answered in the early 20th century when photography was applied to increase the power of the telescope.  The eye is a very sensitive detector of light energy, but it accumulates that energy for only a very small fraction of a second, depending upon the light level.  Photographic emulsions can collect and accumulate light energy for many hours, providing a vast increase in sensitivity.  This is why, once photographic emulsions came available, they were quickly adapted to telescope cameras to replace the eye.  Now, also, information could be stored on these photographic plates and be available permanently, housed in protected chambers astronomers called vaults, and brought out for examination day and night.

By 1900, photographic astronomy had shown that most of the faint nebulae Herschel had glimpsed were in fact spiral in structure, reminiscent of whirlpools.  And there were many many thousands of them.  Meanwhile, women working at Harvard College Observatory, like Henrietta Swan Leavitt, were making some very valuable observations and coming to powerful conclusions examining many photographs over time of  nearby star clusters like the Clouds of Magellan, visible only from the southern hemisphere.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Swan Leavitt examined photographs of both the Small and the Large Magellanic Clouds taken over many weeks and months and found over 2,500 stars that varied in brightness in the two clouds, now known as companion galaxies to the Milky Way. She was the first to show that the variations in brightness were a measure of the intrinsic brightnesses of these stars, thus providing a powerful new distance indicator for astronomy.

There were many stars in these clusters that did not radiate constantly, but varied in brightness over great ranges.  Leavitt’s contribution, between 1908 and 1912, was to realize that for a certain class of these light-varying (or variable) stars, the period of their variation was in proportion to their mean brightnesses.  The brighter ones had longer periods (a matter of days) than the fainter ones.  Since all the stars were in the same cluster, and therefore at the same distance, she had discovered an intrinsic property of these stars.  Without even knowing why these stars varied in brightness, she showed that they constituted a new and valuable means for determining the distances to stars, if their intrinsic brightnesses could be ascertained.  Her conclusion was quickly picked up by a astronomers both in Europe and the United States.  The Mount Wilson astronomer Harlow Shapley calibrated this class of variables and found bunches of them in globular clusters. By 1920, he had determined their distribution and from it deduced the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, finding it so vast he felt nothing could be outside of it.

Soon after Shapley’s work, Edwin Hubble, also working at Mount Wilson with the new 100-inch reflecting telescope, used Leavitt’s variables and Shapley’s calibrations, modified by others, to determine the distance to the Andromeda nebulae, one of the largest and brightest spirals in the sky. He found that its distance was at least 10 times greater than Shapley’s estimate for the size of the Milky Way. In others words, it lay outside the Milky Way and hence was an island universe.  Thus Leavitt, employed as an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory (not included through an accident of family as Caroline Herschel had been) produced a distance-determining tool that once again revolutionized the universe.  We live in a universe of galaxies, not stars.

Magellanic Clouds

Magellanic Clouds. Credit: AURA/NOAO/NSF.

Neither Leavitt or Caroline Herschel worked as independent astronomers, setting their own course of investigation. Although Leavitt was given a certain degree of freedom to search out anything that might be interesting, she was directed to this work by others.  As you continue to walk through the gallery, you will encounter other women, in more recent times, who designed their own research programs and carried them out. These include Vera Rubin in the fifth room, who found in the 1970s that dark matter dominates galaxies like Andromeda, and Margaret Geller, who found in the 1980s that the universe is not uniform, but clumpy on a huge scale that may well outline the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

So if and when we find evidence that, indeed, universes other than our own exist, and have left their marks on our own universe in deep time, what role will women play in that realization?  Only time, and larger telescopes on the ground and in space, will tell.

David DeVorkin is a curator in the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum.

Sally Ride (1951-2012)

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Sally Ride

Sally Ride was the first American woman in space.

Unlike many astronauts, Sally Kristen Ride did not dream of going into space since childhood. She was already in her mid-twenties, completing her Ph.D. in physics, when the idea dawned. NASA was recruiting women to apply to become astronauts for a spacecraft that had not yet flown: the Space Shuttle. She was well prepared to seize the opportunity to become a scientist-astronaut in a new role called Mission Specialist. She had the academic credentials and the spirit to decide to apply, and the rest is history.

Selected with five other women scientists in 1978, Sally Ride soon became the first U.S. woman to fly in space in 1983, on the seventh shuttle mission. The Soviets had sent a woman into orbit twenty years earlier during the Space Race to claim the first, but Sally Ride’s flight was the start of something different—a steady queue of women going to work in space. She made her second flight in 1984 with the first U.S. woman to do a spacewalk. Since those historic missions, women have performed all roles in space as scientists, engineers, operators of the robotic arm (she was the first), spacewalkers, pilots, and commanders.

Sally Ride’s career and legacy extended well beyond her missions in space. Twice she served on the commissions appointed to investigate the causes and recommend remedies after the tragic losses of the Challenger and Columbia crews. She led a strategic planning effort for NASA that yielded the 1987 report Leadership and America’s Future in Space, and she served as the first chief of the new NASA Office of Exploration.

After leaving NASA in 1987, Dr. Sally Ride became a full-time educator, first at the University of California and California Space Institute in San Diego, and later through her independent initiatives as an author and founder of Sally Ride Science, an organization dedicated to improving science education and encouraging young people, especially girls, to study science.

Sally Ride became a national icon of women’s achievement in science and space in 1983. Her flight suit from that historic mission is on display in the Moving Beyond Earth exhibition gallery.

Sally Ride's Flight Suit

Astronaut Sally K. Ride wore these clothes during the six-day STS-7 Space Shuttle mission aboard Challenger in June 1983, when she became the first U.S. woman in space.

Valerie Neal is a curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

The Tomboy of the Air

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Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blogathon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website .

One hundred and one years ago, on October 23, 1910, Blanche Stuart Scott made her first public flight with the Glenn Curtiss Exhibition Team in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Scott, billed as the “Tomboy of the Air,” is one of America’s earliest female aviators.  There is conflicting evidence regarding the exact date of Blanche Stuart Scott’s first solo flight, so we may never determine which of Scott or Bessica Raiche was, indeed, America’s first female to fly solo.

 

Blanche Stuart Scott

Blanche Stuart Scott seated at the controls of a Curtiss Model D, circa early 1910s. SI-72-4803-A

 

There are also conflicting reports on Scott’s appearance in Fort Wayne.  The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reported that Scott flew across the field and landed immediately, though she had wished to make a few circles.  In later years, Scott remembered making eight circles of the field.  In most reports, Scott’s flew at a height of approximately twelve feet, ostensibly because show promoters did not want outside spectators to get a free show.

Regardless of these conflicting reports, Blanche Stuart Scott is a pioneer of American aviation.  The Blanche Stuart Scott Collection (Acc. No. XXXX-0062) at the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division contains 0.0283 cubic meters (one cubic foot) of material relating to the pioneering aviatrix. It includes correspondence, memorabilia, and a great many newspaper clippings.   A finding aid to the collection can be found in both PDF and HTML formats.  The Archives Division also has a sizeable file on Scott in its Biographical Technical Files.

Elizabeth C. Borja is a reference services archivist in the National Air and Space Museum’s Archives Division.

Musings on Black History Month-Women’s History Month and the History of Aviation

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For a number of years now, the United States has set aside February and March to celebrate Black History Month and National Women’s History Month, respectively. While these commemorations are praiseworthy, they should not disguise the fact that they have been rather contentious culturally. Some would argue that it is insulting to African Americans to celebrate their history for only one month every year. In the case of women, National Women’s History Month has become a call to arms in an ongoing struggle for women’s rights, to ensure educational and economic opportunities for all women, and for ending violence against them. Moreover, these celebrations give the impression of being restitution for past historical wrongs and injustices.

Unfortunately, the use of these tributes in the history of aviation has its own sense of tokenism. Celebrations of the aviation accomplishments of African Americans and women should not ignore the fact that often these groups had to struggle against deeply-ingrained racial and gender prejudice. Laudably, the interwar years saw attempts to democratize aviation, with such programs as “An Airplane for Everyman,” a New Deal attempt to design and build an affordable aircraft for Americans, and the Civilian Pilot Training Program, another New Deal program created to stimulate the private flying business and train thousands of pilots in preparation for wartime. Ironically, while attempts were being made to make flying all inclusive, blacks and women were routinely disenfranchised from aviation because of prejudice.

Eugene Bullard

Eugene Bullard is the acknowledged first African American military pilot, although he flew for the French flying service not the US Air Service. An American expatriate to France, Bullard was a hero of the Battle of Verdun before he began to fly for the French.

Eugene Bullard, the acknowledged first American black military pilot was initially accepted into the Aéronautique Militaire, trained as a pilot, and flew in combat, but was refused entry into the U.S. Air Service largely because of racial prejudice. There is some reason to believe that Bullard was subsequently booted out of the French air service because of American influence and American racial prejudice. Bessie Coleman, the acknowledged first black woman aviator in United States, was so determined to learn to fly that she had to travel to France to do so. Her successors in Chicago were forced to create a “shadow” activity, flying in segregated circumstances, because they were barred from the white flying community. William J. Powell, who established black flying activity and trade education programs in California, saw aviation as a way for blacks to be accepted into the mainstream. As enlightened as Powell’s ideas were, they came to naught in a climate of racial prejudice.

Bessie Coleman Aero Club and William Powell

Founded by William J. Powell (standing, extreme right) in California 1931, the Bessie Coleman Aero Club took the name of the first acknowledged African-American woman pilot. The club promoted flying activities and trade education in the belief that aviation would break down racial barriers. Powell insisted that the club be open to all races and to women.

Military flying was especially an area where blacks were excluded because they were deemed intellectually unfit. In October 1925 a report prepared for the U.S. Army chief of staff, titled “The Use of Negro Manpower in War,” was reportedly the result of several years of study by War College students and faculty. The report concluded that Negro men considered themselves to be inferior to white men, subservient by nature, and lacked initiative and resourcefulness. Blacks were only “fair” laborers and thought to be substandard as technicians and fighters. Blacks were also very low on the scale of human evolution, with a smaller cranial cavity than that of whites. Blacks were thought to be profoundly superstitious by nature, and to possess numerous character and moral weaknesses, among them petty lying, promiscuity, and a tendency to commit atrocities in regard to white women. But the most injurious accusation was that blacks were cowardly. This study would be the basis for the exclusion of black Americans from the Army Air Corps, but it could also have served as a blueprint for keeping them out of flying altogether. Even when the U.S. Army Air Corps was finally forced by law to admit blacks into its flying program on January 16, 1941, it was on a segregated basis until well after WWII.

The War College report, however, had a larger context. Reinforcement for racism was provided by nineteenth-century scientific theory. For example, Samuel G. Morton, a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote numerous works, among which Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (1839), An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America (1842), and Crania Aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History, and the Monuments (1844), are considered to be the foundation of a theory of scientific racism. Crania Americana, for example, sought to divide peoples into four hierarchical racial classifications, based on measurable physical differences, especially as regards the capacity of the brain, with Europeans at the high end of the scale, and Asians, Native Americans and Africans at the low end.

In the twentieth century, the idea of the separation of the races and the superiority of one race over another was further reinforced by psychology. Anthropologist Audrey Smedley [Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2007)] points out that the development of intelligence tests was one avenue of reinforcing the idea of race and racial superiority and inferiority established scientifically in the nineteenth century. These tests claimed that intelligence was measurable and based on hereditary differences rather than environmental factors. “The IQ tests,” Smedley writes, “became the favorite technique of pro-heredity advocates, and their success reflects the fact that their findings and interpretations have been highly compatible with the racial worldview to which Americans in general have subscribed.” (293)

In the case of women, Blanche Stuart Scott, Matilde Moissant, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, and Katherine Stinson overcame numerous barriers in the years before WWI to fly and set flying records. One of the largest obstacles was the overwhelming impression that piloting an airplane was a masculine endeavor, an idea that had been promulgated in the early years of flying. It was the Great War, however, that definitely put a masculine stamp on flying, especially with the creation of the “ace,” a fighter pilot who gained prominence by the number of victories (aircraft shot down) scored against the enemy. Businessmen like Andre Michelin, the French tire mogul established a million-franc fund for aviators who had distinguished themselves in battle. By 1916, governments began to recognize aviators and exploit their nationalistic and propagandistic value. Courage in aerial combat was seen as a distinctly male trait.

American cultural taboos against women taking part in combat affirmed that women would not be allowed to fly in combat; thus, there was no possibility that women could achieve distinction as military pilots. Nor were women admitted into other areas of aviation, except in a token manner, despite the fact that there were notable headliners during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly Amelia Earhart, Louise Thaden, and Jacqueline Cochran. As Susan Ware [Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism (New York; W.W. Norton)] points out, “The late 1920s represented a golden age for the woman pilot. But at the end of the decade women pilots had been excluded from the next stage of development—that of commercial aviation—and their marginalization was cemented by World War II. The postwar world of aviation was very much a man’s world, although strong-minded and talented individual women continued to play a role.” (61-62)

Amelia Earhart

The most famous woman pilot of her era, Amelia Earhart was a promoter of women’s careers in aviation and one of the founders of the Ninety-Nines, the first professional organization of women pilots. Her disappearance in 1937 during an around-the-world flight attempt sent shockwaves through the aviation community. Speculation about what happened to her is widespread nearly three quarters of a century later.

Louise Thaden

Another renowned woman pilot who came to prominence in the interwar years, Thaden was winner of the 1929 transcontinental Women’s Air Derby (the so-called “Powder Puff Derby”), one of the founders of the Ninety-Nines, and the first woman (with Blanche Noyes) to win the Bendix Trophy Race in 1936, flying from New York to Los Angeles in slightly less than fifteen hours.

Jaqueline Cochrane

Cochran was a celebrated woman pilot whose career spanned four decades from the 1930s to the 1960s. In 1937, she won the prestigious long-distance Bendix Trophy Race, flying from Los Angeles to Cleveland in a little more than eight hours. She later founded the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots), a group of civilian women who flew military aircraft in non-combat situations during World War II. In 1953 she became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

Ware’s statement is borne out by the fate of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program of WWII. The WASP were civilian women who worked for the U.S. Army Air Forces as service pilots, ferrying aircraft from factories to ports and military training bases, towing targets, and flying cargo. Despite the success of the program, and the fact that women proved they were capable of flying many different kinds of military aircraft in difficult circumstances and over long distances, the program came to an abrupt end because of politics, and the fears of male service pilots that their jobs would be taken by women after the war.

WASP

Members of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) are pictured at Lockbourne Army Air Field in World War II. From left to right are Frances Green, Margaret (Peg) Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn. The WASP were civilian women pilots who flew in non-combat situations for the U.S. Army Air Forces during the war. The program came to an abrupt end in 1944 because of gender politics.

While the situation for blacks and women in aviation has changed somewhat, racial and gender stereotypes still exist. Also, despite the breaking of barriers, blacks and women are decidedly underrepresented in military aviation, commercial aviation, aeronautical engineering, and the aviation business in general. One can only hope that commemorations like Black History Month and National Women’s History Month will at least make people aware that historically blacks and women have proved they were capable of making significant contributions, and that they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and be accorded equal status.

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.