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.

Wobbly Utopia

Let’s be honest, Star Trek has had some bad press over the years. Its gender politics were sometimes a bit wonky. Its racial politics also wobbled a bit. Its view of homosexuality was that it didn’t exist, and if it did, only aliens were gay (and if they were hot, semi-naked female aliens, so much the better). Most people in the Western world have seen at least one episode of the original series, and if they saw it at any point other than the ’60s, they may have formed some negative views. There were probably Forehead Aliens involved, and the sets probably wobbled a bit. Captain Kirk spoke… with many… pauses… and… gestures. Spock raised an eyebrow. McCoy said, “He’s dead, Jim,” and at least one redshirt died to prove it was serious. And maybe it was interesting at the time, and had some interesting ideas, but then ten million spin-offs followed, and then there was a film, and Zoe Saldana ran around in a miniskirt while Chris Pine fought Zachary Quinto in an erotically-charged episode of fisticuffs on the bridge.

This is all true, and the less said about the debacle of Enterprise, the better. But the thing is, none of this detracts from the achievements of the original series. I’ll start with this cast photo…

Original Trek, second season cast. Image (c) Paramount

You’ll notice several things immediately:

1) everyone is wearing implausible outfits and has magical levitating hair;

2) the women are in miniskirts; and

3) the Russian guy is definitely wearing a wig.

But look a bit closer. This is a second season cast photo, so that places it in 1967/8, in a show marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. There are people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and there are also two women. Neither are secretaries.

I could talk at length about what Star Trek has done in promoting a vision of a multicultural, utopian future. The crew included a Russian crewmember at a time when the Cold War was going strong; it included a Japanese crewmember not so very long after WWII and not in a chop socky or waiter role. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, when Kirk and Uhura are forced to embrace in the otherwise execrable episode, Plato’s Stepchildren. (In fact, the actors ensured that the actual kiss, rather than a simulated one, was shown, by pulling faces in all subsequent retakes.) The Federation itself is a multicultural utopia, where member nations hate each other and violently disagree on everything, and yet will work together for the common good just the same.

Living in the Future

I could focus instead on the technological impact. I could talk about classic Trek ‘inventing’ a cornucopia of future tech, from mobile phones to warp drive to transporters. Sure, warp drive remains an impossibility, and thus far transporters have only managed to send bits of plastic from one transporter to another, more akin to The Prestige than true teleportation, but how many people were thinking about it at all before Trek dreamed it up? Someone always has to dream up the idea before it can be invented. Sure, Trek only invented their Feinbergers because they didn’t have enough money and had to make do from scrounging through the waste bins of other shows, but that’s the beauty of it. Other people’s rubbish – when painted purple and hung on the wall – was enough to inspire people. Now that’s impressive.

Fandom

Or I could discuss the creation of slash fiction, of how it came about in the 1970s in response to the cancellation of Trek. Of how fans – primarily female and in their 20s and 30s – loved the characters and missed them so much that they got together and wrote stories for them. Many of them got published and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list – AC Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son was a fanzine before it was a book, for instance. I could talk about how they took the names Kirk and Spock and made them into Kirk/Spock, the slash in the middle indicating a homoerotic relationship. I’ve read the early slash efforts, and frankly, they’re not terribly good: it’s primarily people writing about sex they’re not having, in plots that aren’t convincing, with art that is a bit lacking. But the thing is, it’s astonishing that those early fanzines existed at all, that communities sprung up with such fervour and dedication to focus on one little show, long-cancelled. These days, ‘slash’ means an m/m story, irrespective of fandom. Many young fans have no idea of the origin of the term and, influenced in equal measure by anime yaoi naming conventions, will mark the pairing with an x (eg. KirkxSpock), yet still refer to the relationship as ‘slash’. The name endures.

That’s not all that Trek decided online. When the internet started up, the Trek groups had a tricky problem: both classic and TNG‘s main characters shared letters. This was a disaster at a time when Usenet was the main source of contact, and subject lines were limited to a small number of characters. Naming and pairing conventions quickly sprang up, with the order of the letters indicating the pairing. American film rating systems were brought into use. [FIC] TOS: New Dawn, K/S, Mc, NC-17 (1/1) was instantly decipherable as a post title. Trek fandom has had a massive impact on fandom in general, its conventions and rules seeping through a multitude of others.

Making History

Then there are the people that Trek has influenced. How about Rev. Martin Luther King, for example? In a candid conversation with Nichelle Nichols, he expressed his admiration for her work as Uhura, and urged her to remain on the show at a time when she was considering quitting. Or maybe Dr Mae Jamison, the first African American woman in space. She, too, watched the show as a child and was inspired by the example that Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura set.

“I’ll protect you, fair maiden.”

“Sorry, neither!”

– Sulu tries to ‘rescue’ Uhura, but she’s having none of it in the first season episode, The Naked Time.

Mae Jamison, being awesome.

How can you NOT love a show that gives you this much awesomeness?

“Ah,” I hear you cry, “but you’ve only talked about the impact of the show, not the show itself! I distinctly recall some dodgy gender politics at work…”

A Handy Viewing Guide for the New Recruit

Yes. OK, I admit it. Star Trek, like many shows at the time, had its writing farmed out to a pool of writers that took story outlines and turned them into scripts. Maybe they knew and loved the show and its characters, maybe they didn’t know them from Adam. Sometimes you had Harlan Ellison delivering City on the Edge of Forever, and sometimes you had Arthur Heinemann’s The Way to Eden, where space hippies sing songs and the viewer writhes in agony. So what? No show out there can claim to have 100% hit rate, and when Trek got it right, they really got it right. So here are a few episodes to check out, mostly from Season 1, but a couple from the later seasons:

1. Where No Man Has Gone Before: where two members of the crew develop god-like powers and the inevitable happens. There is gratuitous eye-candy, in the shape of Kirk’s bared chest. Meanwhile the lead female character is dressed in exactly the same uniform as everyone else, down to the ridiculous bell-bottoms. She’s the ship’s psychiatrist, and ends up saving the day… sort of.
2. Charlie X: where a young boy with god-like powers… yes, OK. But this is a creepy, scary little episode, with eye candy provided by the semi-naked Kirk wrestling for no apparent reason. More disturbing is Charlie’s attempted rape of a crewwoman, his reactions coarse and demanding and selfish, and hers grown-up and mature. He may be the one using violence, but she never once relinquishes her control.

“There’s no right way to hit a woman.”

– James Kirk to Charlie X, after the latter slaps Yeoman Rand’s bottom, Charlie X.

3. The Menagerie: where the original pilot is reworked. Trek does loyalty, captivity, mind-control and extreme measures.
4. Balance of Terror: the Cold War episode, where Kirk informs a crewmember that bigotry has no place on his bridge.
5. Devil in the Dark: where the crew learn not to make assumptions about appearances.
6. City on the Edge of Forever: where Harlan Ellison disavows all knowledge of this rather excellent episode. Kirk, Spock and McCoy end up in 1930s Earth, where Kirk meets Joan Collins, a peace activist who runs a homeless shelter. She’s strong and independent and a visionary, and is unmistakably the love of his life. (Therefore, according to the requirements of drama, she must die.)
7. Mirror Mirror: Where Uhura wears an even more revealing uniform, and evil!Spock mind-invades McCoy.
8. The Enterprise Incident: where the opposing Romulan commander is female, and is tricked in the expected way. What isn’t expected is her dignity throughout. Kirk and Spock treat her throughout as their equal.
9. Is There In Truth No Beauty?: Where Trek had a blind character, and had her as the lead guest character for the episode.
10. Turnabout Intruder: where Kirk and an old flame – who has a grudge – trade bodies. This episode, for all its flaws, is fascinating. Janice Lester was a contemporary of Kirk’s, and they were briefly involved. However, she never got command, something she attributed to her gender. In Trek-world, she has no argument: her gender is irrelevant. In 1960s America, this is something so obvious that it was rarely mentioned: of course her gender stopped her from getting command, no woman could possibly be a military commander! Lester’s fury is so intently realised that you can’t help feeling sorry for her, for all her insanity… and rooting for her, just a little.

“Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”

– Janice Lester, Turnabout Intruder

Trek and Me

Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009

So, there it is: my deepest, darkest secret. I studied maths and music as a child because of Trek. I got into fandom because of Trek, trying to navigate newsgroups in a cybercafe at age 13 when an Amstrad was the height of luxury. I have the DVDs, and a few of the books, and many of the friends. And above it all, when people ask what I want to do when I grow up, my immediate, unspoken reaction is, “I want to be an astronaut.”

Tell me that’s a bad thing.

Born in Alabama in 1956, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago in 1959 to take advantage of the better educational opportunities there. Jemison took to the sciences with ease, doing well enough in her studies that she was able to enrol at Stanford University aged just 16.

In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist. She said, ‘Don’t you mean a nurse?’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that’s not what I wanted to be.

– Mae Jemison

Jemison faced barriers due to both racism and sexism at Stanford, particularly in the engineering department, a place that was (and unfortunately to some extent still is) the domain of well off white males. She describes, looking back, occasions where professors would ignore her input while congratulating her male classmates for the exact same comments, and credits her success in part to the youthful arrogance of a teen allowing her to push on through.

After getting her chemical engineering degree Jemison went on to study medicine at Cornell, graduating in 1981. She did extensive work abroad during her time there, ranging from Thailand to Kenya as a primary care provider, and eventually joining the Peace Corps in 1983. With the Peace Corps she served in Sierra Leone, acting both as a medical doctor and a writer of guidelines, care manuals, and research proposals.

So, we’ve established she’s pretty goddamn awesome as both a doctor and a scientist. But I promised you a doctor in space, and so far it’s all been ground bound¹. So, onto her career with NASA.

Rejected on her first try, Jemison was accepted into the program in 1987, the first class of astronauts to be enrolled after the 1986 Challenger disaster. She worked in launch support at the Kennedy Space Centre while training for her launch, helping to send other shuttle flights up into orbit. Her own turn came in 1992, when she became the first black woman to go into space, flying aboard the shuttle Endeavour with the six other astronauts of STS-47.

I wouldn’t have cared less if 2,000 people had gone up before me … I would still have had my hand up, ‘I want to do this.’

– Mae Jemison, speaking to the Des Moines Register in 2008

For the next 190 hours Jemison would orbit the Earth, one of the select few to see the planet from above for themselves.² She conducted a series of life science experiments on how living organisms responded to the microgravity of space. This included one of her own devising, to study the effects of orbital conditions on bone cells. On September 20th 1992, Jemison and the rest of the mission’s crew returned safely to Earth, having spent the last eight days being awesome enough to risk death in the name of science.

STS-47 was to be Jemison’s only space mission, as she retired from NASA shortly after her return. She wanted to focus on social issues surrounding technology, its impact in developing nations, and means of mitigating future-shock. To this end she founded two rather cool organisations. First up, doing applied research, there’s the Jemison Group, set up to develop technology for daily life, which has worked on projects including thermal energy generation for developing countries, and satellite communications for facilitating health care in West Africa.

Her second project was the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named for her mother. The foundation runs international science camps for students in their teens, aimed at encouraging people to think globally about how technology can deal with problems. The group works to build critical thinking skills and scientific literacy, which is a pretty damn solid aim.

Oh, and a last point of geeky coolness (which obviously is the most important kind), Jemison appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation after LeVar Burton discovered she was a fan and invited her to take part. That makes her the first real life astronaut to have featured on the show. It’s a neat bit of circularity, given that Jemison cites Nichelle Nichols’s performance as Lt. Uhura as one of her motivations for joining NASA.

So, doctor, astronaut, advocate for science education, and she even got to hang out on the bridge of the Enterprise. That’s a pretty good definition for a badass life right there.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

1. Well, excepting an incident in Sierra Leone where Jemison commandeered a hospital plane to evacuate a volunteer with meningitis and worked throughout the flight to keep them alive, racking up an eventual total of 56 hours solid work.
2. As of today only around 500 people have been up there, depending on exactly what you define as “in space”.