Dr Mae Jemison

What do you call a female astronaut? These are some of the ingenious words that journalists invented in the early 1960s to avoid having to say ‘astronaut’ when describing Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to pass NASA tests and qualify as an astronaut, although she never had a chance to go into space.

I’ve been thinking about astronauts recently for two reasons. Firstly, a friend of mine lent me this absorbing book about the ‘Mercury 13′ – women including Cobb who were trained as astronauts but never went into space because America wasn’t brave enough.

Secondly, I discovered a pile of my old school reports in my mum’s flat the other day and was astonished to read that my stated career ambition at age 11 was ‘astronaut’. I mean, I loved space and stars and rockets – are there any kids that don’t? And I do remember wanting to be an astronaut. But at 11? It makes me wonder how old I was when I gave up wanting to be a knight of the round table…

A dream for boys?

I’m not going to rant about how being an astronaut shouldn’t be a distant dream for a girl. Let’s face it, astronauting isn’t an easy line to get into – it’s a distant dream for most people. Apparently there have been 512 humans in space, of which 10% have been women (Wikipedia  has a list of space travellers.) Unimpressive, I agree, but when you bear in mind that we can scarcely get women into the House of Commons (around 20% of MPs are women) getting them into space seems like less of a priority.

What really interests me is that women into space doesn’t really go even as a dream. Of course, there’s been an astronaut Barbie, but the gender stereotypes that so confused journalists back then are still very much in evidence in the aisles of toy shops today, as this post on Sociological Images neatly shows. Being an astronaut is a childhood dream for boys only.

A dream for men?

In fact, even in adult culture it seems we’re not totally cool with the dream of female astronauts. Here’s a brief, interesting article  by Marie Lathers from Times Higher Ed about women astronauts in films, which takes in Alien, Contact, Apollo 13 and even I Dream of Jeannie (astronaut husband).

Lathers sees an identification of the feminine with mother earth and nature, setting them in opposition to space and even to science. Given this conflict she suggests that women in space are more frequently aligned with the alien (our old friend the Other) than with the human space adventurer. She sez:

Popular culture representations of women in space reveal a need to “ground” women by keeping them bound to Earth. Woman grounded is woman subjected to the weight of gravity; bodies in space defy gravity. Feminist theory needs to assess the possibilities that rethinking women in space affords. “Extraterrestrial” feminism may provide a way out of the essentialism that bottles us up.

It’s an interesting notion, and one that the arts student in me would like to pursue. However, I wanted to talk about some of the real female astronauts as well as the dream. I’ll just give a few examples from their stories – I couldn’t bear to pick just one of these incredible women.

‘A woman’s place is in the cockpit’

I mentioned poor Jerrie Cobb and the Mercury 13  who so narrowly missed being the first ‘feminauts’. Another fascinating woman is linked to the US Women in Space Program. Without beautician-turned-aviator Jackie Cochran – who held more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history at the time of her death in 1980 – it may never have happened at all. Check out Right Stuff Wrong Sex  for the story of a serious political operator at work.

Russian Valentina Tereshkova made it to first woman in space, in 1963 (beating the US by an appalling TWENTY YEARS) and launched skywards from a suitably proletarian background – she was a textile factory worker and an amateur parachutist who left school at 8 and continued her education through correspondence courses. She spent three days in space, and went round the earth 48 times.

Physicist Dr Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, in 1983, and one of our own (feminists, that is). Ride reportedly:

… refused to be seen in television downlinks doing food preparation or toilet cleaning, even though these were shared crew responsibilities. She refused to accept a bouquet of flowers from NASA after completing her first space mission. She pasted a bumper sticker to the front of her desk: “A woman’s place is in the cockpit”.

Ride went on to found science education organisation Sally Ride Science, which pleasingly promises to be “all science, all the time” and encourages girls to learn about and enjoy science and maths.

In 1992 scientist, doctor and peace worker Dr Mae Jemison became the first woman of colour in space. After her retirement from NASA, Jemison has led work supporting research into the use of technology in developing countries and science education for teenagers. AND she wins pop culture points by being the first real life astronaut to appear on Star Trek. Which is especially neat as she said that Lieutenant Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) was one of her early heroes. Look at this awesome picture of them together.

Women to look up to

I think it’s particularly because I’m not from a tech or science background that female astronauts are like superheroes to me. That’s why I love this Flickr set of loosely inspired portraits Philip Bond has done. Obviously they’ve lovely things in themselves, but I like them because they look like collectible playing cards, or stickers. I want Tereshkova on a t-shirt. I want people to ask me who she is so I can tell them.

Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009 (philipjbond on Flickr)

You know when I said earlier that getting women into space wasn’t really a priority? Not compared to getting women into Parliament, for example. Well, in a way that’s not true. It’s all a priority. Because real life role models give you the permission to have the dream.

Every girl who dreams of being an astronaut won’t become one. But she may become an engineer, or a physicist, a mathematician, a pilot, an athlete. She might teach science to other girls. She may be a leader.

There are exceptional individuals who blaze a trail, like the women above. But I think I can safely speak for most of us when I say it’s nice to have someone to look up to.

Why was I so keen on being an astronaut? I think it was as much to do with Helen Sharman, who became the first British person in space when I was 8, as it was to do with my love of stars.

You’ve probably deduced that I didn’t become an astronaut. But I did become a feminist, and it’s women like these that inspire me.

DETERMINED STARE OF AWESOME, 1943

Flying is for many people an utterly terrifying prospect. The loss of control, the unshakable awareness of all that distance between you and the ground, the realisation that you’re strapped into a thin metal tube hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour, and the knowledge that if something does go wrong you almost certainly won’t walk away from it. It’s no wonder a lot of people have a fear of flying.

Jacqueline Cochran, on the other hand, quite distinctly did not have any fears when it came to taking to the air. Even today, a full thirty years after her death, she still holds more aviation records and firsts than any other pilot, ever.

Born some time in the early 20th century (the details of her birth are somewhat unclear – she was raised by a foster family and didn’t know her own date of birth), Cochran lived at a time when aviation was vastly more dangerous than it is now. Radios? Safety precautions? Reliable engineering? Stuff and nonsense. Those were just the far-flung dreams of futurists. To illustrate the perils of early aviation, consider the first US Air Mail service, which during the first couple of years of operation, saw the death of fully half its 40 pilots.

Combine the expense and danger of flying with growing up in poverty and having minimal education, and it seems Jackie Cochran had little or no chance of ever taking to the air. This, however, is failing to account for her quite remarkable levels of determination, and refusal to take any nonsense from anyone. In one interview she recounts an experience working in a textile mill, aged perhaps 10 or 11.

I didn’t see him coming, but a foreman was suddenly over me and pinching me in a way that no little girl should ever be pinched. My reaction was immediate and not surprising. My fist flew up and I hit him squarely on the nose. Hard. He jumped back and then rushed away, shocked. He never touched me again.

– Jackie Cochran

Climbing out of her plane at the 1938 Bendix Air Race

Cochran applied this same attitude to her flying lessons. Having been told that learning to fly would take two to three months, she accepted a wager from her future husband, Floyd Odlum, that she couldn’t complete it in just six weeks. Three weeks later she finished flight school and got her wings. Within months she was entering some of the world’s most prestigious air races.

A decade later she took this same determination into the US military. Having previously worked with the British Air Transport Auxiliary and been the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic, Cochran proceeded to gather evidence to back her claim that female pilots were more than capable of filling all the domestic flight roles left empty during the war. With her experience training women to fly for the ATA, and drive to see them made a part of the Army Air Corps, Cochran eventually oversaw the creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of just over a thousand pilots who collectively would cover 60,000,000 miles in every kind of military aircraft.

Following the war, Cochran upgraded to piloting jet engined aircraft and set one of her many records, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier. Flying a modified Canadian jet up to over 45,000 feet, she made a dive towards the ground, not quite managing to break the barrier on her first attempt. When asked when she’d like to make a second attempt, Cochran reportedly responded “Let’s go right now!” The second attempt did the trick, a sonic boom echoing over the landscape as Cochran accelerated her jet towards the ground and passed Mach 1. Consider for a moment just how nerve-wracking an experience it has to be, accelerating a thin metal tube towards the ground from 45,000 feet, trying to get up faster than almost anyone had ever gone. Then consider just how badass you have to be to do that twice in one day, because the first time just wasn’t quite fast enough.

What other records and achievements did Cochran manage? Alongside a list of speed and altitude records long enough to keep us here for several days, she was also the first pilot to ever make a ‘blind’ landing using only instruments, and the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask. She was the first woman to enter the prestigious Bendix Trans-continental Air Race, and the first to win it, along with many other famously difficult air races throughout her career. Perhaps her most especially daring records were set during her flights of the F-104 Starfighter, in which she set no less than three speed records in the space of a month.

The F-104 was a staggeringly dangerous craft to fly. In the first 18 months of its use the German Air Force had 85 fatal incidents involving them, earning it the nickname ‘The Widowmaker’. When a plane is killing off pilots at a rate of almost two a week you have to be exceptionally brave to climb into the cockpit even once, and exceedingly skillful to survive the experience often enough to set a handful of world records. Jackie Cochran was both.

In addition to her contributions to aviation Cochran maintained a successful cosmetics business (indeed, it was to promote her ‘Wings’ line of cosmetics that she initially learned to fly). Following the war she poured a lot of her time and money into charitable causes, particularly those providing education and opportunity for those coming from impoverished backgrounds. Whilst she never gained the fame or attention of Amelia Earhart (whose organisation of female pilots, The Ninety-Nines, Cochran presided over between 1941 and 1943), Cochran left a legacy as a successful businesswoman and one of the most daring and important pilots to have lived.

 



Too much badass to fit in the camera frame: Jackie (centre) and a load of trainee WASPs

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting awesome people we never learned about at school.

Rob Mulligan blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes.