13 Who Dared
How surprised the subdivision book club was to learn that Almost Astronauts, 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, was recommended solely for 9-12 year olds.
Two or three times a year, we like to break up our steady diet of fiction with a factual volume or two and don’t even mind learning a little something in the process. That’s how Almost Astronauts and Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her made the 2011 reading list.
Growing up in the 60s, I was not aware that qualified women had been denied the opportunity to participate in America’s Mercury space program.
During the late 50s and early 60s, “women weren’t allowed to rent a car or take out a bank loan without a man’s signature; they could not play on a professional sports team at all. They couldn’t report the news on television or run in a city marathon or serve as police officers. They weren’t allowed to fly jets, either.” (page 5)
Let’s look at the women featured in the situation comedies of that era: the zany red head, Lucille Ball; Dick Van Dyke‘s beautiful, yet ditzy, stay-at-home wife, Laura; Margaret Anderson, a paragon of solid reason and patience on Father Knows Best; and the ever present pearls of June Cleaver, mother of the ‘Beav“. No matter what the weekly plot line, the man of the family was almost always called upon to save the day even though the wife/mother was present in the household and capable of handling the matter herself.
With role models such as these on the boob tube, it’s not surprising that media bias and influential politicians were able to keep these women out of the space program.
In Tanya Lee Stone‘s 130 pages, the reader finds a vivid description of the testing and training set up by Dr. Randy Lovelace, the doctor responsible for overseeing testing for Mercury astronauts. Led by Pilot Jerrie Cobb, the first to pass all the tests, the group equaled or surpassed their male counterparts with much less complaint.
As one reviewer pointed out, the only purpose of the privately-funded project was to develop medical standards for women in space. They were “never trained for space, never worked for NASA nor were they ever classified as ‘top secret’”.
If that is a true statement, then please explain why the entire program was stonewalled by President Lyndon B. Johnson‘s terse note: “Let’s stop this now!” Was it just jealousy that prompted Jackie Cochran‘s lack of support for her fellow fliers? Cochran had run the WWII WASP Program, the first women in history trained to fly American military aircraft.
Read Almost Astronauts and you will be intrigued by the historical and scientific details, outraged at the attitudes of powerful people and inspired by the women who paved the road for others.
Discussion Questions:
1. Tom Wolfe wrote, “The world was divided into those that had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named . . . The idea was to prove . . . that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff.” What do you think ‘it’ was? Could women as well as men have ‘it’?
2. Compare/contrast the roles of women during WWII with that of the 1960s. In which time period would you have been most comfortable? Why?
3. Discuss the motives of Randolph Lovelace, chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee, Look magazine and Brigadier General Donald Flickinger behind their campaign to include women in the space program.
4. Discuss why project WISE (Women In Space Earliest) stalled.
5. The U.S. and Russia were neck and neck in the race to land a man on the moon. Why did the U.S. never enter the race with the Russians to send a woman into space?
6. The possibility of women in the space program prompted the media to ask:
What is a woman capable of? What is a woman’s place?
How were those two questions answered in the 1960s? How would they be answered today?
7. Discuss the part that politics played in the space race taking into consideration the of intentions of JFK and LBJ.
8. In lieu of the fact that, “women are less susceptible to monotony, loneliness, heat, cold, pain and noise than the opposite sex,” would you classify the female of the human species as stronger than the male?
9. Was Jackie Cochran a traitor? Why or why not?
10. John Glenn said, “I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” What does John Glenn mean by the term, ‘social order’? Would you consider his statement just another excuse to restrict women from the men only astronaut club?
11. What part did NOW and the Civil Rights movement play in changing the social order?
