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.

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”.