February 10, 2016 • 43 mins
When NASA was formed in 1958, its prized pool of all-female "computers" desegregated. Until then, mathematicians of color -- including Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Katherine Johnson -- worked, ate and used the restroom in a separate facilities. Cristen and Caroline shed overdue light on Johnson and her brilliant West Computer teammates who helped launch America into space.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You. From House top
Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and listeners. This episode has it all.
It's got space, it's got science, it has amazing women
(00:24):
you've never heard of, and it also has the rage
factor of the fact that you've never heard of them
and the double rage factor of some racist working conditions.
There are literal highs. I'm talking like into space, space,
into space, eyes and lows i e. Racism and segregation. Yes, yeah,
(00:45):
um uh. This episode is is I hope, as fascinating
to listen to as it was for us to research.
It really continues the theme that we started in our
episode on Polly Murray last time, of women who have
sort of been buried by history, women who played a
(01:06):
huge part in our country's history. In this case science
history with Paully Murray was legal history and racism and segregation.
But the thing is in all of these amazing women's stories,
for so many of them, there's still so little known.
We have names, but it's taking a woman like Margot
Lee Shutterley, who is publishing this year the book Hidden Figures,
(01:30):
the untold story of the African American women who helped
the United States when the Space race. It's taking Shutterley
publishing a book and then attracting movie attention because it
will be made into a movie next year to get
these women some more attention. Yeah, and we've talked before
on stuff Mo'm never told you about the history of
(01:54):
computing and how women or the first quote unquote computers
doing the computer work, which was consider or like low
level clerical work. Um. But even in that knowledge, it's
only just now becoming more commonly known. At first, the
image was just of white women doing all of this computing.
(02:14):
And now thanks to Shutterly and um, a couple of
other researchers that she's collaborated with, we are learning about
these women of color who are also doing computing work
but might have been segregated in separate working areas, and
who were critical in the case of what we're going
to talk about today, to the space race, to us
(02:37):
even landing on the Moon. Maybe space race should be
the penny name of this episode, space Race, Race space. Um.
But I mean it's not like these women's stories were
secret or unknown by any means. I mean, what's so
fascinating and like mind boggling is that you'll see obituaries
(02:58):
of some of these women and it's like, you know,
so and so passed away and she was a family
woman and she like did some stuff for NASA and
then she died and you're like what wait? And so,
I mean these women's lives and stories were no secret.
I mean Katherine Johnson, one woman who will talk about,
was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
(03:22):
So their their work is definitely being recognized. But we
want to do our part as Sminty, to dig into
this history a little bit more and enlighten you. Yeah,
so before we get into NASA, we've got to talk
about NAKA because the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was
(03:43):
the predecessor to NASA, and it was formed in nineteen fifteen, which,
by the way, was only a little more than a
decade after the airplane was invented. Yeah, they got right
on that. They're like, I feel like this is important,
we would probably do something with this. So they were
formed with the goal of furthering aeronautical research, and in
(04:05):
nineteen fifty eight would become NASA. But first in nineteen
twenty NAKA sets up the Langley Memorial Research Center in Hampton,
Virginia to study aircraft and eventually space flights. Now geographical
note that is important to well note Hampton, Virginia is
(04:25):
also home to what was then called Hampton Institute, which
is a historically black college that had started around about
the Civil War to educate former slaves, and it grew
into a university which is still a historically black institution,
(04:46):
and many people in that college. In this case, lady
people funneled right from Hampton to NACA and Langley. Yeah,
I mean the geographical location almost feels like destiny. And
this was something that Margot Lee Shutterley, who author while
is writing right now Hidden Figures um notes because she
(05:10):
grew up in Hampton, I believe, and talks about how
there were a lot of African American families who were
in STEM careers all around her. It was very normalized. Yeah. Well,
her dad was also in science and she she talks
about how, yes, I knew black people who had any
job anything from like a shoeshine or to a teacher,
(05:32):
to a lawyer to a doctor. But so many of
the African Americans in our community around us were in
science and technology, and she said, I just I thought
it was what black people did. I thought you just
went into science. And and I love that tidbit because
I feel like Kristen, anytime you and I talked about
stem topics, we always are very careful to point out
(05:53):
how women entered the field in the first place, because
things like men worship people who inspire you as a
young person to get involved in science. They're they're critical.
That's a critical role to inspire young people and to
normalize a life spent pursuing science. And so I love
(06:13):
that shutter Lely has this normalization of science around her,
as do some of the women will talk about. Yeah,
and it traces all the way back to the Hampton Institute,
which by the way, was Booker T. Washington's alma mater.
And Hampton Institute was preceded by the efforts of an
(06:34):
African American woman of means to educate freed slaves because
originally in Virginia, there was a law passive believe pre
Civil War um forbidding black people from getting educated. Yeah,
so at great risk, this woman, I believe her name
is Margaret Peak started educating people and the institution even
(06:58):
educated a group of Native America ends who had been
prisoner elsewhere in the country and sent to Hampton. They're like, well,
we don't we don't know what to do with these people,
so please educate them. So Hampton has an amazing and
very rich history of educating people in this country. So,
in other words, it was a perfect place for NAKA
to set up shop with the Langley Memorial Research Center
(07:22):
in Langley hires its first woman, Pearl Young, who becomes
an engineer and a technical editor at NAKA. So she
broke the gender becker there. Pearl. Yeah, Pearl was the
first lady person. But as NAKA is picking up steam,
they need more people. What do we do, well, I
guess we get cheap women with their tiny little hands
(07:44):
who can use the slide rules. So they began hiring
women computers in the nineteen thirties in earnest But it's
industry to think about that. They called it a computer
pool in the same way that at a big office,
for instance, you might have a stenography pool. These women
(08:04):
could provide a lot of labor to a lot of
calculations for relatively cheap and their primary task was to
do all the calculating and computation the engineers had been
doing for aircraft and later space missions in order to
free them up for other aspects of research. And the
(08:25):
engineers of this time were exclusively men. So the calculating
and computation including things such as reading film of monometer boards,
which that just makes me think of the muppets. Phenomena
do do do do? So the Phenomena boards measured pressure
(08:47):
changes during wind tunnel resistance tests and recorded that data
on spreadsheets, and honestly, this was a part of the
research that took me right back to my high school
physics class and thankst washed over me. Well. Um, I
watched an interview with Christine Darden, who is another woman
we will talk about later in the podcast. But as
(09:07):
she's talking about spreadsheets, she's literally using hand motions of
like indicating how big these spreadsheets were, and that women
just for hours and hours, day in and day out,
twenty four hours round the clock, we're entering data and spreadsheets,
and that just made my mind melt a little. Oh God,
it's like excel I R. L By and so in
(09:32):
addition to reading the Phenomena boards, which it is, manometer listeners,
but I prefer mahenomena. I prefer phenomena as well. They
also calculated rocket trajectories and safe reentry angles, and in
analyzing the data, they would plot the results on graph
paper in those giant spreadsheet booklets, and all this was
(09:55):
done by hand, not with their t I at three passes.
I had a tight five with Frogger on it, a
T E D five. Yeah, you know, I'm ritzy. It's
the one time in my life when I was ritzy. Um.
But yeah, they would. They would use tools like slide rules,
magnifying glasses, and and really basic calculating machines to get
(10:16):
all of this done. But you know, lest you think
that all they were doing is writing stuff on spreadsheets,
I mean, these women had to have a very specialized
knowledge to do this. They ended up a lot of
these women ended up devising aeronautics and aerospace specific computing methods,
and many went on to write papers and books of
(10:37):
their own. So it's not like they're just sitting there
day in and day out mindlessly calculating. These are brilliant
people and they were effective. They were collectively praised for
calculating data more rapidly and accurately doing more in a
morning than an engineer alone could finish in a day. Yeah,
that's right, Lady brain's powerful. Well, when World War two hits,
(11:04):
NAKA needs more people to work to do these calculations.
But the men folk are leaving. So what happens there's
a computer boom. They begin actively recruiting more women workers.
They were advertising in trade journals and in pamphlets, they
sent to colleges, and they sent recruiters out to college campuses,
and some of those early women computers were even in
(11:27):
the group who went to college campuses to try to
be like sea ladies, you can do maths just like
I can professionally. And they had a hand during this
time in a lot of critical projects, ranging up from
everything from World War two aircraft testing to transnic and
supersonic flight research. And because this was happening during World
(11:49):
War two, NAKA was running twenty four seven, meaning that
the computers these women would work in eight hour shifts
around the clock. So this is disrupting the typical domestic
setting for women at the time. But here's a thing.
(12:09):
Not surprisingly, just because these computers worked harder and faster,
and we're also desperately needed, they weren't making equal wages
as the fellas, but it was still gainful employment for
women at the time. And this is echoing our podcast
way back when now about secretaries, where it was like
(12:30):
female secretaries would get paid so much less than male secretaries,
but what the women made was still so much more
than they could have made elsewhere. So similarly, in the
nineteen forties, women computers were classified as sub professionals and
could earn between a whopping one thousand, four d forty
(12:51):
dollars and thirty dollars per year. Meanwhile, dudes were usually
hired as junior engineers, passified as professionals and started out
with dollars. And I keep in mind, though, that these
quote unquote sub professional women still had to have at
least a bachelor's degree, and many of them had already
(13:14):
served as high school teachers for years and years before
they entered this work. Many of them too, as we'll
talk about, were very unsatisfied with their teaching careers. But basically,
like teaching and nursing were the avenues that were open, uh,
particularly to women of color, as we'll get into in
a bit, but this science work offered them an entirely
(13:36):
new path and a path into aeronautics. Yeah, and quickly
about the money to a teacher would be making around
five fifty dollars a year, So in that context this
is good money, even though it's not equitable money. But
that doesn't mean that there weren't progressive policies in place
at Naka. Yeah. So we've talked a lot in previous
(13:58):
episodes about UH, particularly teaching, but also other fields where
at the time UH, if you got married and or
started a family, you were expected to leave. There were
policies against hiring married women, especially pregnant women, UM because
it was expected like the home is where you're supposed
(14:19):
to be, you're a woman. But Naka was like, we
need you. You're so smart, please stay. So very importantly,
marriage and family based discrimination was not a thing at Naka.
They didn't have any of the whole like get rid
of women when they get married. And in fact, after
World War Two, when so many women were forced out
(14:40):
of the workplace once the men came home, Naka was like,
no, no no, no, can you please stay. You're so smart?
Can you please keep doing the math? Please do the
math well? And several of those computers were also married
to NACA engineers. So this, like you said, provided women
entry into aeronautics and provided an alternative and an exciting
(15:01):
alternative if you were into science and math. And this
wasn't just a job for white ladies. African American women
computers were part of naka's hiring push, and we will
introduce you to these women when we come right back
from a quick break. Now. Unfortunately, it did take a
(15:31):
presidential executive order for African American women to officially be
part of naka's hiring push. Um because back in nineteen
forty one, a Philip Randolph, who was a tremendous labor
and civil rights leader, pressured FDR into issuing executive order
(15:54):
a D eight O two Yeah, which says there shall
be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
So that just opens the hiring floodgates. And again NAK
is placing ads and papers, sending recruiters out, but this
time they're putting ads in black communities newspapers, and they
(16:18):
were putting out ads for everyone from janitors to laborers
to women with math and chemistry degrees. So this means
that they're hiring smart African American women. But this is
also the era of segregation. So black women at Langley
(16:38):
worked eight and even use the restroom in separate facilities
in what was called the West Area, and they were
referred to as the West Area computers, and their facilities
were so far removed from where the white computers worked.
A lot of those women, the white women didn't even
(16:58):
know that the West Computers existed. Yeah, and I mean,
so well, it's wonderful that all of these women of
color were hired. I mean, it wasn't without its problems.
For instance, if you were a single white woman, you
got to live in really nice dorms at the facility,
but if you were an unmarried black woman, you had
to have the extra expense of finding a place to
(17:20):
stay in town. And also the lab was built on
the side of a plantation. Yeah, yeah, that's that's unfortunate.
But I mean, what else are you going to do
with all that land in Virginia, I guess, but build
amazing science facilities on it. But build rocket ships? Yeah, exactly,
just blast right on out of that past. But even
(17:42):
within NACA, once they got in the door, obviously they
were facing these uh the segregation, and they also faced
barriers to advancement compared to their white counterparts. Um For instance,
one woman hired to work in a chemistry division ended
up being transferred to the all black computer division because
(18:02):
black women weren't hired for that original chemistry spots. And
this is ironic since African American computers had to take
a chemistry course at nearby Hampton Institute before starting their jobs,
so they even had a higher bar that they had
to cross to get in the door. Yeah, and so
(18:22):
how did some of them end up moving up the
ranks if they were segregated off an entirely separate facilities
as well? It was the black computers, those West Area
computers who would be regularly quote unquote loaned two different
branches of NAKA when help was needed doing calculations or
data processing. And eventually the computing divisions did become less segregated,
(18:48):
and when NACA became NASA Night, these segregated facilities were
completely done away with. And we've been talking about the
West Area computers of one kind of personal group. But
now comes the fun part of the podcast where we
get to highlight these individual women who were doing all
(19:10):
sorts of incredible trailblazing work. And one of the first
we're going to talk about is Miriam Daniel Man. And
she was born in nineteen o seven in Georgia. She
was a valectorian of her prep school, and then she
graduated from Talladega College with a chemistry major and math minor.
What up stem And she worked as a teacher for
(19:31):
a few years. Then she and her husband moved to Virginia,
where he gets a job at Hampton Institute Destiny, Uh
in nineteen forty three, the same year that NACA puts
out the call for workers of color. She hears about
the job opening and Land's job. Of course, she and
(19:52):
the other colored computers as they were called did have
to take that chemistry class at Hampton, which is kind
of a joke considering how qualified these women already were.
I mean, she fell a Victorian chemistry major, math minor.
This is no dummy, um, and the women were coming
in Tanaka with just as many qualifications as the men
(20:15):
and still being paid less and how to take a
course blah. Anyway, I love the hints of Man's humor
that we get from an account that her daughter wrote.
Her daughter remembers Miriam bringing home the cafeteria sign that
said colored, which of course then was replaced. But I
love that she was like, nope, swiping this, taking this away. Now,
(20:37):
I I hate segregation. Um. And once NAKA became NASA,
she was one of the computers who worked on that
Mercury program, making calculations for John Glenn's and Alan Shepherd's flights.
And next up, we've got to talk about Dorothy Vaughan.
Because Dorothy Vaughan was not gonna let white women as
(20:59):
managers stop her. So she was a prodigy hands down.
She was born in Kansas City in nineteen She graduated
from Wilbur Forest University in nineteen nine, and after working
as a math teacher. Yet again we have the teaching coming. First,
she's hired by Langley In on the West Computers team,
(21:21):
and in nineteen forty nine she became the first black
manager of the West Computers and she was called the
head Computer, which is it's the coolest job title computer. Um.
She was the first black manager though, of the West
Computers at that time, because before then even the West
Computers managers had all been white women according to policy,
(21:46):
right exactly. And so this makes her the first black
manager at NACA period, and this granted her a much
greater visibility and a lot more opportunities for collaboration. She
worked with other computers on a handbook for al to
break methods and calculating machines. And I know that you know,
when you get to talking about managers, sometimes they can
(22:07):
be jerks, but she was not one of them. This
was a beloved both mathematician and manager because she advocated
for the West computers, but she also intervened on behalf
of women workers in general when they deserved promotions. Are
raises white or black. If you worked hard and deserved
to raise, Vaughan was going to go to the map
for you. And the engineers valued her too. They took
(22:32):
her personnel recommendations seriously, but they often wanted her to
be the one to work on the more challenging work
and calculations when they had stuff to get done. They
were like, oh, we really appreciate who you're recommending, Like,
we we trust you and we'll hire that person for
this division, but could you do it? Thanks Dorothy uh
(22:53):
In Naka transitions to NASA, as we've mentioned, and the
segregated facilities are shuttered, and this is when Vaughan and
many of the former West computers are moved to electronic
computing in the new Analysis and Computation Division. When NASA
gets the machine computeurs and Vaughan continues her education, she
(23:17):
becomes an expert in for Tran, which is a computer
programming language still in use today for scientific computing. Oh
and meanwhile she's also raising a family and one of
her children group to work for NASA. Talk about awesome
mom role model. I know, I love it. I love
that there's like a NASA legacy in a family. It's
(23:40):
just the family business, you know, NASA UM. And then
the next one we want to talk about is the
amazing Catherine Johnson. She's the physicist and mathematician who worked
with both Man and Vaughan and who was recently awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom UM. But she she was
drawn to math from an early age. She would write later, Matt,
(24:00):
it's just there. You're either right or you're wrong, and
that's what I like about it. And she also has
told numerous interviewers that I counted everything, the steps, the dishes,
the stars in the sky, and her family growing up
was pretty poor, but they were so invested in Catherine
and her siblings education and very encouraging of them. Um.
(24:24):
And in school, she was a math prodigy and she
was inspired by her geometry teacher, Miss Turner. Shout out
to teachers and again more mentorship. Um. And she graduated
from high school at fourteen. But listen, her parents were
so invested in Katherine and her schooling that because there
(24:47):
was no high school for black children in her original hometown,
her parents sent her in her siblings to a lab
school on the all black West Virginia State Institute campus. Yeah.
So I mean no small feat that this woman graduated
from high school at fourteen. Yeah. And then she graduated
from college with degrees in math and French at eighteen.
(25:09):
In French, the brain is an amazing thing, especially when
it belongs to Katherine Johnson. Well, and she even had
more mentorship in college. She was taught by Dr William W.
Chefflin Claytor, who spotted her potential as a research mathematician,
and he would go on to to achieve a degree
of fame for his own research. And so, I mean
(25:31):
that reflects so amazingly on Catherine that she has this
person helping guide her through her research. But in nineteen
thirty nine she was actually one of three black students
selected to integrate West Virginia University's grad program. And she
stayed just a year before getting married and starting a family.
And there's a while here where she is raising her kids,
(25:55):
she's teaching. Then in nineteen fifty three, she ends up
taking a computer job at Langley because the year before
her husband had fallen ill and she needed to get
back to work. She had taken time off from teaching math,
French and music. So she gets in at Langley because
of naka's recruitment efforts for its Guidance and Navigation department.
(26:21):
And the first year though that she applied, they had
already filled their quota, so she reapplied the next year
and got in. So lesson learned. If at first you
do not get the job, you can always reapply. Yeah,
especially if you get to work under Dorothy von like
she did. Yeah, And we are so lucky that Katherine
Johnson reapplied, because I mean, just weeks after she started
(26:45):
in the computer pool, she starts to just start asking
questions about but why are all of the people on
the research team guys wait, why aren't any of the
women computers invited to these meetings? Is there a policy
or law against me not being allowed to be here? No, okay,
I'm just gonna be here. I can ask a lot
of questions. Yeah, it's amazing. She She credits this habit
(27:10):
of incessantly asking questions with being asked to fill in
on the all Dude flight research team. She got to
research airplane gust alleviation and wake turbulence. And in nineteen
fifty eight she moves from the flight mechanics branch to
the spacecraft Controls branch, whose job it was to get
men into space like a SAP. And it's in that
(27:33):
space research division where she seriously makes her mark and
she doesn't waste any time. In nineteen sixty she becomes
the Flight Research Division's first credited female author when she
co authors a report with equations that describe the trajectories
for placing the manned Mercury capsule into low Earth orbit
and bringing it back safely. And then in nineteen sixty one,
(27:56):
she calculated the trajectory that put the first American Alan
Shepherd into space. How am I thirty one and just
learning this incredible women's history fact Caroline Well, and I
love that she has no lack of confidence when she's
looking back on this. In two thousand eight, she tells
an interviewer the early trajectory was a parabola, and it
(28:19):
was easy to predict where it would be at any point.
Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to
come down at a certain place, they were trying to
compute when it should start, I said, letting me do it.
I just like to imagine that was her being like, Oh,
for God's sake, she says, you tell me when you
want it and where you want it to land, and
I'll do it backwards and I'll tell you when to
(28:39):
take off. That was my forte. What a smooth operator.
Just be confident like Catherine, so confident in nineteen sixty two,
despite the fact that actual computer machines by this point
we're being used to perform calculations. When it was John
Glenn's turn to go into space and orbit the Earth
(29:00):
in m A six, he specifically asked Johnson to run
the numbers against what the computer had come up with,
so in his pre flight checklist he had quote have
the girl double check the numbers yeah, and she said
that she was very nervous, but I knew that my
calculations were correct and they were so over an ounce
(29:22):
of Catherine's confidence. Uh. And in the mid sixties she
worked on trajectories for the Lunar Orbiter program, which map
the Moon's surface before the nineteen sixty nine moon landing,
speaking of which, in nineteen sixty nine she calculated the
trajectory for the Apollo eleven flight to the Moon. And
it doesn't stop there. In seventy she collaborated on the
(29:46):
backup calculation that brought Apollo thirteen astronauts home safely. So
it is little wonder then that she was awarded the
highest civilian honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and
November and there's so many other women at NAKA slash
NASA flash Langley to mention, but so little has been
(30:10):
known about them all these years, and that's actually something
that hidden figures. Author Margot Lee Shutterley is working to rectify.
She has teamed up with McAlister College researchers, Duchess Harris,
who is the granddaughter of Miriam Daniel Man, one of
the first computers, and Lucy Short on what's called the
(30:32):
Human Computer Project, which is their digital effort to document
the lives and work of women who worked as computers
at Langley. And so there, I mean, there are names
that we know that I just wasn't able to find
enough information about. Women like Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, and
(30:54):
the very prolific writer and researcher Barba Holly. All I
know is her name, and I know that she researched
a lot of stuff that my brain can barely comprehend, um,
but I just don't have that much background. One of
those women also is Katherine Pedrew, who graduated from Store
College in nineteen forty three with a chemistry degree and
(31:14):
went to work for NAKA immediately. She retired in nineteen
six and she was involved in research on balance in
the Instrument Research Division. And that's about as much as
I could find on Catherine. Well, and we have more
information on women who worked at NASA in more recent years. Relatively,
there's Melbo Roy Mountain, who was Howard University alum. She
(31:38):
earned a master's in math, who became assistant chief of
Research Programs at NASA's Trajectory and Geodynamics Division in the
nineteen sixties and she I mean at this point to
consider how revolutionary it is that she's the head of
a team, and not so long ago you have Miriam
Daniel Mann taking down the colored sign from the cafeteria
(32:03):
spunk like. So, Mountain leads a team of mathematicians who
did the intense computational work of launching and tracking echo
satellites in Earth's orbit, and Mountain held a lot of
impressive jobs during her time at NASA. In she was
promoted to head programmer in charge of the team that
(32:24):
determined aircraft orbits in space. She actually designed computer programs
to predict trajectories and aircraft locations before transitioning into the
job that Christia was talking about, that assistant Chief of
Research Programs. And finally, we're going to circle back to
a name that you mentioned early in the episode, Caroline
(32:44):
Christine man Darden, who was the first black woman at
NASA Langley to be promoted into senior executive service. And
her bio is fantastic as well, because going back to childhood,
her interests in math was sparked exploring how bikes and
cars worked with her dad, rad Dad alert And here's
(33:06):
another case of a kid whose parents really valued her education.
They ended up sending her to a boarding school in Asheville,
where a geometry teacher helped her fall in love with
the subject, just like Miss Turner, Katherine Johnson's geometry teacher. Yes,
so important. I like geometry too. I hope there are
(33:27):
geometry teachers listening who feel very special right now. I
also loved geometry. That was my favorite. Math in high
school I liked now. Granted, I literally was tutored in
math from the time I was in sixth grade to
twelfth grade because I am a word person. That's just
how it shook out. Um. But I really liked algebraan geometry,
Physics not so much, and chemistry I barely passed. So
(33:50):
I am impressed with all these women, to say the least. Um.
But in nineteen sixty two, Christine graduates from Hampden Institute
with a bachelor's in Math education in a minor in
physics at just twenty, and she starts teaching because the
whole thing, uh that she talks about in that interview
I watched, which I encourage you to google, is that
(34:13):
her father was so concerned about his daughter not having
a job, and so he did what a lot of
parents do, and he's like, UM, I know you have
this one interest which is cool, and that's math, and
that's awesome. However, can you please major in something that
will actually let you get hired after college. So he strongly, strongly,
strongly encouraged his daughter to major in education because, as
(34:38):
she points out in the interview, like you know, they're
just there. Still weren't a ton of jobs open, like
high paying jobs and secure jobs open to women at
the time. So she's like, I, as much as I
loved math, I had to be prepared to do whatever
I could to make a living and helps for my family.
And so she does teach for a while. But in
(34:59):
the meantime, as she's teaching and still going to school,
she's participating in lunch counter sit in so she's participating
in the civil rights movement at the same time that
she's you know, pursuing math and eventually going to shoot
to NASA like a rocket ship pocket ship of awesome.
So in nineteen seven, after studying physics and math at
(35:21):
Virginia State College, she earns her masters and math and
she's hired for the Langley Computer Pool. But she is
not going to remain in that pool she needs to
cannonball into the deep end. So in the seventies, as
computers like machine computers like we think of today or
(35:41):
starting to become a thing, Darden was one of the
first to work on developing computer programs because she'd studied
programming in her masters, so she began researching also sonic
boom minimization, and after five years in computing and programming support,
she I mean she just felt limited. She didn't feel
(36:03):
like she had enough knowledge of everything that she was
working on, and also she hadn't gotten promoted, so she
was she was getting a little anxious to do some
new stuff. Yeah, So in nineteen seventy two she complains
to the section head about men who were coming in
with similar credentials but getting more opportunities for advancement. I mean,
(36:25):
this was the same kind of thing that we're hearing
from the very get go of women being hired first
at NAKA and then at NASA. So he transfers her
to sonic boom research, like like you do well. And
I think that she had even suggested to him because
she had started doing sonic boom research on her own,
that that's the direction that she should go in and
(36:47):
her career path also echoes Katherine Johnson in the sense
of speaking up, calling attention to what you know and
what you would be good at, incessant questioning, very important.
Uh three. She earns a PhD in engineering and becomes
one of NASA's foremost experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms.
(37:10):
And one of the most endearing things about Johnson and
Darden's ten years at NASA is how they were not
only invested in their nine to five work, but also
in outreach and encouraging girls, in particular to get into
STEM like they did. Yeah, work that is so important,
and I mean, yes, the NASA works important, but that
outreach work and providing visible role models to children is
(37:33):
so important, and that is something that NASA itself has highlighted.
They put out a report in um that looked at
data stretching from two thousand eight to twelve that found
that women of color make up just five and a
half percent of aerospace tech engineers, and they linked this
to quote inherent biases and stereotyping that exists for women
(37:57):
of color in the science and engineering work place. In addition,
they write there are challenges related to the lack of
mentorship and isolation, and so they strongly encourage in this
this report those same outreach efforts, but in an official capacity.
So yes, it's so important to have these visible figures
like Johnson and like Darden. But now the this NASA
(38:19):
report is saying, we have to continue our efforts to
create a pipeline in the same way that having Langley
next door to Hampton created a you know, a figurative
pipeline of people geniuses to Langley. NASA still needs to
continue to do that kind of work of encouraging boys
(38:40):
and girls, but in this case women of color to
join their ranks and be among their researchers. Yeah. I mean,
one astounding statistic is that there are around one hundred
black female physicists in the US. Well, yeah, so it's
not just an issue at NASA. I mean this is
(39:01):
across the board um in the US and likely abroad
as well, although there are countries that are far better
in terms of gender equity in STEM fields. But now
we're curious to know who your STEM heroines are, and
especially the unsung ones, because as you can probably tell,
(39:22):
it really excites Caroline and me to learn about new
not new but women we should have known about a
long time ago. We were doing all sorts of trailblazing
and brainpowering. Yeah. So I encourage all of you. If
you're at school or at work and you're starting to
doubt yourself, I want you to ask yourself, what would
(39:45):
Katherine Johnson do? She knew who she was, she knew
what she was good at, and she was not going
to stop asking questions or counting or counting. She just
counted everything. Well. Listeners, you can email us mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com, or you can also
tweet us your thoughts at mom Stuff podcast, or send
(40:05):
us a message on Facebook. And we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. I have
a letter here from Sarah in response to our abortion episodes.
She says, I love the show and love that you
ladies are so vocally supportive of a woman's right to
have an abortion if she wishes. However, there seems to
(40:26):
be this narrative of the good abortion, and more specifically
the hard decision abortion that I find frustrating. Yes, there
are many women for whom choosing to have an abortion
is stressful, emotional, and heart wrenching, but there are just
as many women for whom it is a no brainer decision.
When I found out I was pregnant at twenty one,
I didn't even have to think twice before calling an
abortion clinic and making an appointment. I have been using
(40:49):
contraception because I was not ready to have a child,
and I had always known that I would abort in
the case of an unplanned pregnancy. I feel like there
is a cultural perception of the good abortion at an
in dudes handwringing with a long term boyfriend or a
high stakes job or a traumatic situation, and that simply
isn't always the case. Women should feel free and empowered
to have an abortion simply because they don't want to
(41:11):
be pregnant, which I'm sure you already know, so thank you, Sarah. Well.
I've got a letter here from Sierra about psychic women
line of employment far different than the NASA work we
were talking about in today's episode, but she writes about
how she briefly worked as a phone psychic when she
(41:32):
was having some trouble finding steadier employment, and she says
you would collect as much personal information from the collar
as you could before launching into the reading in order
to give your psychic forecast some degree of believable, very similitude,
and this may speak to why so many psychics are women.
The people who are in the company I worked for
(41:53):
were of the opinion that women were better at teasing
out the nuggets of personal intel that were so crucial
to creating a believable chic experience. My callers were pretty
evenly split between men and women, but both groups seemed
more willing to open up to a female psychic and
divulge personal details without suspicion that I could then work
into my readings. I had a male roommate at the
(42:14):
time who worked at the same company, and he had
a harder time with callers getting aggressive when he asked
personal questions. I didn't work as a phone psychic for
long because it was a very sad job. I knew
I had no psychic abilities, and most people who called
were in desperate situations and just looking for someone to
tell them it would be okay. I felt terrible about
the fact that they were paying three dollars a minute
(42:35):
to get support during some of the darkest times of
their lives, and the company's only directive to me was
to keep callers on the line for as long as possible.
I also felt exploited because it's emotionally draining to listen
to the sad stories of strangers and concoct b as
designed only to fleece them out of money, and I
was only being paid twenty cents a minute. The emotional
(42:55):
labor the job demanded, combined with the lack of financial security,
was just too much and I quit after a few months.
I love the show well, Thanks Sierra for sharing your
experiences with us and now listeners, do we want to
hear what's on your mind? Mom? Stuff at how stuff
works dot com is our email address and for links
(43:15):
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources so you
can learn more about the incredible women of color who
worked at NACA and NASA. Head on over to stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com for more on this
(43:37):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You. From House top
Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and listeners. This episode has it all.
It's got space, it's got science, it has amazing women
(00:24):
you've never heard of, and it also has the rage
factor of the fact that you've never heard of them
and the double rage factor of some racist working conditions.
There are literal highs. I'm talking like into space, space,
into space, eyes and lows i e. Racism and segregation. Yes, yeah,
(00:45):
um uh. This episode is is I hope, as fascinating
to listen to as it was for us to research.
It really continues the theme that we started in our
episode on Polly Murray last time, of women who have
sort of been buried by history, women who played a
(01:06):
huge part in our country's history. In this case science
history with Paully Murray was legal history and racism and segregation.
But the thing is in all of these amazing women's stories,
for so many of them, there's still so little known.
We have names, but it's taking a woman like Margot
Lee Shutterley, who is publishing this year the book Hidden Figures,
(01:30):
the untold story of the African American women who helped
the United States when the Space race. It's taking Shutterley
publishing a book and then attracting movie attention because it
will be made into a movie next year to get
these women some more attention. Yeah, and we've talked before
on stuff Mo'm never told you about the history of
(01:54):
computing and how women or the first quote unquote computers
doing the computer work, which was consider or like low
level clerical work. Um. But even in that knowledge, it's
only just now becoming more commonly known. At first, the
image was just of white women doing all of this computing.
(02:14):
And now thanks to Shutterly and um, a couple of
other researchers that she's collaborated with, we are learning about
these women of color who are also doing computing work
but might have been segregated in separate working areas, and
who were critical in the case of what we're going
to talk about today, to the space race, to us
(02:37):
even landing on the Moon. Maybe space race should be
the penny name of this episode, space Race, Race space. Um.
But I mean it's not like these women's stories were
secret or unknown by any means. I mean, what's so
fascinating and like mind boggling is that you'll see obituaries
(02:58):
of some of these women and it's like, you know,
so and so passed away and she was a family
woman and she like did some stuff for NASA and
then she died and you're like what wait? And so,
I mean these women's lives and stories were no secret.
I mean Katherine Johnson, one woman who will talk about,
was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
(03:22):
So their their work is definitely being recognized. But we
want to do our part as Sminty, to dig into
this history a little bit more and enlighten you. Yeah,
so before we get into NASA, we've got to talk
about NAKA because the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was
(03:43):
the predecessor to NASA, and it was formed in nineteen fifteen, which,
by the way, was only a little more than a
decade after the airplane was invented. Yeah, they got right
on that. They're like, I feel like this is important,
we would probably do something with this. So they were
formed with the goal of furthering aeronautical research, and in
(04:05):
nineteen fifty eight would become NASA. But first in nineteen
twenty NAKA sets up the Langley Memorial Research Center in Hampton,
Virginia to study aircraft and eventually space flights. Now geographical
note that is important to well note Hampton, Virginia is
(04:25):
also home to what was then called Hampton Institute, which
is a historically black college that had started around about
the Civil War to educate former slaves, and it grew
into a university which is still a historically black institution,
(04:46):
and many people in that college. In this case, lady
people funneled right from Hampton to NACA and Langley. Yeah,
I mean the geographical location almost feels like destiny. And
this was something that Margot Lee Shutterley, who author while
is writing right now Hidden Figures um notes because she
(05:10):
grew up in Hampton, I believe, and talks about how
there were a lot of African American families who were
in STEM careers all around her. It was very normalized. Yeah. Well,
her dad was also in science and she she talks
about how, yes, I knew black people who had any
job anything from like a shoeshine or to a teacher,
(05:32):
to a lawyer to a doctor. But so many of
the African Americans in our community around us were in
science and technology, and she said, I just I thought
it was what black people did. I thought you just
went into science. And and I love that tidbit because
I feel like Kristen, anytime you and I talked about
stem topics, we always are very careful to point out
(05:53):
how women entered the field in the first place, because
things like men worship people who inspire you as a
young person to get involved in science. They're they're critical.
That's a critical role to inspire young people and to
normalize a life spent pursuing science. And so I love
(06:13):
that shutter Lely has this normalization of science around her,
as do some of the women will talk about. Yeah,
and it traces all the way back to the Hampton Institute,
which by the way, was Booker T. Washington's alma mater.
And Hampton Institute was preceded by the efforts of an
(06:34):
African American woman of means to educate freed slaves because
originally in Virginia, there was a law passive believe pre
Civil War um forbidding black people from getting educated. Yeah,
so at great risk, this woman, I believe her name
is Margaret Peak started educating people and the institution even
(06:58):
educated a group of Native America ends who had been
prisoner elsewhere in the country and sent to Hampton. They're like, well,
we don't we don't know what to do with these people,
so please educate them. So Hampton has an amazing and
very rich history of educating people in this country. So,
in other words, it was a perfect place for NAKA
to set up shop with the Langley Memorial Research Center
(07:22):
in Langley hires its first woman, Pearl Young, who becomes
an engineer and a technical editor at NAKA. So she
broke the gender becker there. Pearl. Yeah, Pearl was the
first lady person. But as NAKA is picking up steam,
they need more people. What do we do, well, I
guess we get cheap women with their tiny little hands
(07:44):
who can use the slide rules. So they began hiring
women computers in the nineteen thirties in earnest But it's
industry to think about that. They called it a computer
pool in the same way that at a big office,
for instance, you might have a stenography pool. These women
(08:04):
could provide a lot of labor to a lot of
calculations for relatively cheap and their primary task was to
do all the calculating and computation the engineers had been
doing for aircraft and later space missions in order to
free them up for other aspects of research. And the
(08:25):
engineers of this time were exclusively men. So the calculating
and computation including things such as reading film of monometer boards,
which that just makes me think of the muppets. Phenomena
do do do do? So the Phenomena boards measured pressure
(08:47):
changes during wind tunnel resistance tests and recorded that data
on spreadsheets, and honestly, this was a part of the
research that took me right back to my high school
physics class and thankst washed over me. Well. Um, I
watched an interview with Christine Darden, who is another woman
we will talk about later in the podcast. But as
(09:07):
she's talking about spreadsheets, she's literally using hand motions of
like indicating how big these spreadsheets were, and that women
just for hours and hours, day in and day out,
twenty four hours round the clock, we're entering data and spreadsheets,
and that just made my mind melt a little. Oh God,
it's like excel I R. L By and so in
(09:32):
addition to reading the Phenomena boards, which it is, manometer listeners,
but I prefer mahenomena. I prefer phenomena as well. They
also calculated rocket trajectories and safe reentry angles, and in
analyzing the data, they would plot the results on graph
paper in those giant spreadsheet booklets, and all this was
(09:55):
done by hand, not with their t I at three passes.
I had a tight five with Frogger on it, a
T E D five. Yeah, you know, I'm ritzy. It's
the one time in my life when I was ritzy. Um.
But yeah, they would. They would use tools like slide rules,
magnifying glasses, and and really basic calculating machines to get
(10:16):
all of this done. But you know, lest you think
that all they were doing is writing stuff on spreadsheets,
I mean, these women had to have a very specialized
knowledge to do this. They ended up a lot of
these women ended up devising aeronautics and aerospace specific computing methods,
and many went on to write papers and books of
(10:37):
their own. So it's not like they're just sitting there
day in and day out mindlessly calculating. These are brilliant
people and they were effective. They were collectively praised for
calculating data more rapidly and accurately doing more in a
morning than an engineer alone could finish in a day. Yeah,
that's right, Lady brain's powerful. Well, when World War two hits,
(11:04):
NAKA needs more people to work to do these calculations.
But the men folk are leaving. So what happens there's
a computer boom. They begin actively recruiting more women workers.
They were advertising in trade journals and in pamphlets, they
sent to colleges, and they sent recruiters out to college campuses,
and some of those early women computers were even in
(11:27):
the group who went to college campuses to try to
be like sea ladies, you can do maths just like
I can professionally. And they had a hand during this
time in a lot of critical projects, ranging up from
everything from World War two aircraft testing to transnic and
supersonic flight research. And because this was happening during World
(11:49):
War two, NAKA was running twenty four seven, meaning that
the computers these women would work in eight hour shifts
around the clock. So this is disrupting the typical domestic
setting for women at the time. But here's a thing.
(12:09):
Not surprisingly, just because these computers worked harder and faster,
and we're also desperately needed, they weren't making equal wages
as the fellas, but it was still gainful employment for
women at the time. And this is echoing our podcast
way back when now about secretaries, where it was like
(12:30):
female secretaries would get paid so much less than male secretaries,
but what the women made was still so much more
than they could have made elsewhere. So similarly, in the
nineteen forties, women computers were classified as sub professionals and
could earn between a whopping one thousand, four d forty
(12:51):
dollars and thirty dollars per year. Meanwhile, dudes were usually
hired as junior engineers, passified as professionals and started out
with dollars. And I keep in mind, though, that these
quote unquote sub professional women still had to have at
least a bachelor's degree, and many of them had already
(13:14):
served as high school teachers for years and years before
they entered this work. Many of them too, as we'll
talk about, were very unsatisfied with their teaching careers. But basically,
like teaching and nursing were the avenues that were open, uh,
particularly to women of color, as we'll get into in
a bit, but this science work offered them an entirely
(13:36):
new path and a path into aeronautics. Yeah, and quickly
about the money to a teacher would be making around
five fifty dollars a year, So in that context this
is good money, even though it's not equitable money. But
that doesn't mean that there weren't progressive policies in place
at Naka. Yeah. So we've talked a lot in previous
(13:58):
episodes about UH, particularly teaching, but also other fields where
at the time UH, if you got married and or
started a family, you were expected to leave. There were
policies against hiring married women, especially pregnant women, UM because
it was expected like the home is where you're supposed
(14:19):
to be, you're a woman. But Naka was like, we
need you. You're so smart, please stay. So very importantly,
marriage and family based discrimination was not a thing at Naka.
They didn't have any of the whole like get rid
of women when they get married. And in fact, after
World War Two, when so many women were forced out
(14:40):
of the workplace once the men came home, Naka was like,
no, no no, no, can you please stay. You're so smart?
Can you please keep doing the math? Please do the
math well? And several of those computers were also married
to NACA engineers. So this, like you said, provided women
entry into aeronautics and provided an alternative and an exciting
(15:01):
alternative if you were into science and math. And this
wasn't just a job for white ladies. African American women
computers were part of naka's hiring push, and we will
introduce you to these women when we come right back
from a quick break. Now. Unfortunately, it did take a
(15:31):
presidential executive order for African American women to officially be
part of naka's hiring push. Um because back in nineteen
forty one, a Philip Randolph, who was a tremendous labor
and civil rights leader, pressured FDR into issuing executive order
(15:54):
a D eight O two Yeah, which says there shall
be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense
industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
So that just opens the hiring floodgates. And again NAK
is placing ads and papers, sending recruiters out, but this
time they're putting ads in black communities newspapers, and they
(16:18):
were putting out ads for everyone from janitors to laborers
to women with math and chemistry degrees. So this means
that they're hiring smart African American women. But this is
also the era of segregation. So black women at Langley
(16:38):
worked eight and even use the restroom in separate facilities
in what was called the West Area, and they were
referred to as the West Area computers, and their facilities
were so far removed from where the white computers worked.
A lot of those women, the white women didn't even
(16:58):
know that the West Computers existed. Yeah, and I mean,
so well, it's wonderful that all of these women of
color were hired. I mean, it wasn't without its problems.
For instance, if you were a single white woman, you
got to live in really nice dorms at the facility,
but if you were an unmarried black woman, you had
to have the extra expense of finding a place to
(17:20):
stay in town. And also the lab was built on
the side of a plantation. Yeah, yeah, that's that's unfortunate.
But I mean, what else are you going to do
with all that land in Virginia, I guess, but build
amazing science facilities on it. But build rocket ships? Yeah, exactly,
just blast right on out of that past. But even
(17:42):
within NACA, once they got in the door, obviously they
were facing these uh the segregation, and they also faced
barriers to advancement compared to their white counterparts. Um For instance,
one woman hired to work in a chemistry division ended
up being transferred to the all black computer division because
(18:02):
black women weren't hired for that original chemistry spots. And
this is ironic since African American computers had to take
a chemistry course at nearby Hampton Institute before starting their jobs,
so they even had a higher bar that they had
to cross to get in the door. Yeah, and so
(18:22):
how did some of them end up moving up the
ranks if they were segregated off an entirely separate facilities
as well? It was the black computers, those West Area
computers who would be regularly quote unquote loaned two different
branches of NAKA when help was needed doing calculations or
data processing. And eventually the computing divisions did become less segregated,
(18:48):
and when NACA became NASA Night, these segregated facilities were
completely done away with. And we've been talking about the
West Area computers of one kind of personal group. But
now comes the fun part of the podcast where we
get to highlight these individual women who were doing all
(19:10):
sorts of incredible trailblazing work. And one of the first
we're going to talk about is Miriam Daniel Man. And
she was born in nineteen o seven in Georgia. She
was a valectorian of her prep school, and then she
graduated from Talladega College with a chemistry major and math minor.
What up stem And she worked as a teacher for
(19:31):
a few years. Then she and her husband moved to Virginia,
where he gets a job at Hampton Institute Destiny, Uh
in nineteen forty three, the same year that NACA puts
out the call for workers of color. She hears about
the job opening and Land's job. Of course, she and
(19:52):
the other colored computers as they were called did have
to take that chemistry class at Hampton, which is kind
of a joke considering how qualified these women already were.
I mean, she fell a Victorian chemistry major, math minor.
This is no dummy, um, and the women were coming
in Tanaka with just as many qualifications as the men
(20:15):
and still being paid less and how to take a
course blah. Anyway, I love the hints of Man's humor
that we get from an account that her daughter wrote.
Her daughter remembers Miriam bringing home the cafeteria sign that
said colored, which of course then was replaced. But I
love that she was like, nope, swiping this, taking this away. Now,
(20:37):
I I hate segregation. Um. And once NAKA became NASA,
she was one of the computers who worked on that
Mercury program, making calculations for John Glenn's and Alan Shepherd's flights.
And next up, we've got to talk about Dorothy Vaughan.
Because Dorothy Vaughan was not gonna let white women as
(20:59):
managers stop her. So she was a prodigy hands down.
She was born in Kansas City in nineteen She graduated
from Wilbur Forest University in nineteen nine, and after working
as a math teacher. Yet again we have the teaching coming. First,
she's hired by Langley In on the West Computers team,
(21:21):
and in nineteen forty nine she became the first black
manager of the West Computers and she was called the
head Computer, which is it's the coolest job title computer. Um.
She was the first black manager though, of the West
Computers at that time, because before then even the West
Computers managers had all been white women according to policy,
(21:46):
right exactly. And so this makes her the first black
manager at NACA period, and this granted her a much
greater visibility and a lot more opportunities for collaboration. She
worked with other computers on a handbook for al to
break methods and calculating machines. And I know that you know,
when you get to talking about managers, sometimes they can
(22:07):
be jerks, but she was not one of them. This
was a beloved both mathematician and manager because she advocated
for the West computers, but she also intervened on behalf
of women workers in general when they deserved promotions. Are
raises white or black. If you worked hard and deserved
to raise, Vaughan was going to go to the map
for you. And the engineers valued her too. They took
(22:32):
her personnel recommendations seriously, but they often wanted her to
be the one to work on the more challenging work
and calculations when they had stuff to get done. They
were like, oh, we really appreciate who you're recommending, Like,
we we trust you and we'll hire that person for
this division, but could you do it? Thanks Dorothy uh
(22:53):
In Naka transitions to NASA, as we've mentioned, and the
segregated facilities are shuttered, and this is when Vaughan and
many of the former West computers are moved to electronic
computing in the new Analysis and Computation Division. When NASA
gets the machine computeurs and Vaughan continues her education, she
(23:17):
becomes an expert in for Tran, which is a computer
programming language still in use today for scientific computing. Oh
and meanwhile she's also raising a family and one of
her children group to work for NASA. Talk about awesome
mom role model. I know, I love it. I love
that there's like a NASA legacy in a family. It's
(23:40):
just the family business, you know, NASA UM. And then
the next one we want to talk about is the
amazing Catherine Johnson. She's the physicist and mathematician who worked
with both Man and Vaughan and who was recently awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom UM. But she she was
drawn to math from an early age. She would write later, Matt,
(24:00):
it's just there. You're either right or you're wrong, and
that's what I like about it. And she also has
told numerous interviewers that I counted everything, the steps, the dishes,
the stars in the sky, and her family growing up
was pretty poor, but they were so invested in Catherine
and her siblings education and very encouraging of them. Um.
(24:24):
And in school, she was a math prodigy and she
was inspired by her geometry teacher, Miss Turner. Shout out
to teachers and again more mentorship. Um. And she graduated
from high school at fourteen. But listen, her parents were
so invested in Katherine and her schooling that because there
(24:47):
was no high school for black children in her original hometown,
her parents sent her in her siblings to a lab
school on the all black West Virginia State Institute campus. Yeah.
So I mean no small feat that this woman graduated
from high school at fourteen. Yeah. And then she graduated
from college with degrees in math and French at eighteen.
(25:09):
In French, the brain is an amazing thing, especially when
it belongs to Katherine Johnson. Well, and she even had
more mentorship in college. She was taught by Dr William W.
Chefflin Claytor, who spotted her potential as a research mathematician,
and he would go on to to achieve a degree
of fame for his own research. And so, I mean
(25:31):
that reflects so amazingly on Catherine that she has this
person helping guide her through her research. But in nineteen
thirty nine she was actually one of three black students
selected to integrate West Virginia University's grad program. And she
stayed just a year before getting married and starting a family.
And there's a while here where she is raising her kids,
(25:55):
she's teaching. Then in nineteen fifty three, she ends up
taking a computer job at Langley because the year before
her husband had fallen ill and she needed to get
back to work. She had taken time off from teaching math,
French and music. So she gets in at Langley because
of naka's recruitment efforts for its Guidance and Navigation department.
(26:21):
And the first year though that she applied, they had
already filled their quota, so she reapplied the next year
and got in. So lesson learned. If at first you
do not get the job, you can always reapply. Yeah,
especially if you get to work under Dorothy von like
she did. Yeah, And we are so lucky that Katherine
Johnson reapplied, because I mean, just weeks after she started
(26:45):
in the computer pool, she starts to just start asking
questions about but why are all of the people on
the research team guys wait, why aren't any of the
women computers invited to these meetings? Is there a policy
or law against me not being allowed to be here? No, okay,
I'm just gonna be here. I can ask a lot
of questions. Yeah, it's amazing. She She credits this habit
(27:10):
of incessantly asking questions with being asked to fill in
on the all Dude flight research team. She got to
research airplane gust alleviation and wake turbulence. And in nineteen
fifty eight she moves from the flight mechanics branch to
the spacecraft Controls branch, whose job it was to get
men into space like a SAP. And it's in that
(27:33):
space research division where she seriously makes her mark and
she doesn't waste any time. In nineteen sixty she becomes
the Flight Research Division's first credited female author when she
co authors a report with equations that describe the trajectories
for placing the manned Mercury capsule into low Earth orbit
and bringing it back safely. And then in nineteen sixty one,
(27:56):
she calculated the trajectory that put the first American Alan
Shepherd into space. How am I thirty one and just
learning this incredible women's history fact Caroline Well, and I
love that she has no lack of confidence when she's
looking back on this. In two thousand eight, she tells
an interviewer the early trajectory was a parabola, and it
(28:19):
was easy to predict where it would be at any point.
Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to
come down at a certain place, they were trying to
compute when it should start, I said, letting me do it.
I just like to imagine that was her being like, Oh,
for God's sake, she says, you tell me when you
want it and where you want it to land, and
I'll do it backwards and I'll tell you when to
(28:39):
take off. That was my forte. What a smooth operator.
Just be confident like Catherine, so confident in nineteen sixty two,
despite the fact that actual computer machines by this point
we're being used to perform calculations. When it was John
Glenn's turn to go into space and orbit the Earth
(29:00):
in m A six, he specifically asked Johnson to run
the numbers against what the computer had come up with,
so in his pre flight checklist he had quote have
the girl double check the numbers yeah, and she said
that she was very nervous, but I knew that my
calculations were correct and they were so over an ounce
(29:22):
of Catherine's confidence. Uh. And in the mid sixties she
worked on trajectories for the Lunar Orbiter program, which map
the Moon's surface before the nineteen sixty nine moon landing,
speaking of which, in nineteen sixty nine she calculated the
trajectory for the Apollo eleven flight to the Moon. And
it doesn't stop there. In seventy she collaborated on the
(29:46):
backup calculation that brought Apollo thirteen astronauts home safely. So
it is little wonder then that she was awarded the
highest civilian honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and
November and there's so many other women at NAKA slash
NASA flash Langley to mention, but so little has been
(30:10):
known about them all these years, and that's actually something
that hidden figures. Author Margot Lee Shutterley is working to rectify.
She has teamed up with McAlister College researchers, Duchess Harris,
who is the granddaughter of Miriam Daniel Man, one of
the first computers, and Lucy Short on what's called the
(30:32):
Human Computer Project, which is their digital effort to document
the lives and work of women who worked as computers
at Langley. And so there, I mean, there are names
that we know that I just wasn't able to find
enough information about. Women like Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, and
(30:54):
the very prolific writer and researcher Barba Holly. All I
know is her name, and I know that she researched
a lot of stuff that my brain can barely comprehend, um,
but I just don't have that much background. One of
those women also is Katherine Pedrew, who graduated from Store
College in nineteen forty three with a chemistry degree and
(31:14):
went to work for NAKA immediately. She retired in nineteen
six and she was involved in research on balance in
the Instrument Research Division. And that's about as much as
I could find on Catherine. Well, and we have more
information on women who worked at NASA in more recent years. Relatively,
there's Melbo Roy Mountain, who was Howard University alum. She
(31:38):
earned a master's in math, who became assistant chief of
Research Programs at NASA's Trajectory and Geodynamics Division in the
nineteen sixties and she I mean at this point to
consider how revolutionary it is that she's the head of
a team, and not so long ago you have Miriam
Daniel Mann taking down the colored sign from the cafeteria
(32:03):
spunk like. So, Mountain leads a team of mathematicians who
did the intense computational work of launching and tracking echo
satellites in Earth's orbit, and Mountain held a lot of
impressive jobs during her time at NASA. In she was
promoted to head programmer in charge of the team that
(32:24):
determined aircraft orbits in space. She actually designed computer programs
to predict trajectories and aircraft locations before transitioning into the
job that Christia was talking about, that assistant Chief of
Research Programs. And finally, we're going to circle back to
a name that you mentioned early in the episode, Caroline
(32:44):
Christine man Darden, who was the first black woman at
NASA Langley to be promoted into senior executive service. And
her bio is fantastic as well, because going back to childhood,
her interests in math was sparked exploring how bikes and
cars worked with her dad, rad Dad alert And here's
(33:06):
another case of a kid whose parents really valued her education.
They ended up sending her to a boarding school in Asheville,
where a geometry teacher helped her fall in love with
the subject, just like Miss Turner, Katherine Johnson's geometry teacher. Yes,
so important. I like geometry too. I hope there are
(33:27):
geometry teachers listening who feel very special right now. I
also loved geometry. That was my favorite. Math in high
school I liked now. Granted, I literally was tutored in
math from the time I was in sixth grade to
twelfth grade because I am a word person. That's just
how it shook out. Um. But I really liked algebraan geometry,
Physics not so much, and chemistry I barely passed. So
(33:50):
I am impressed with all these women, to say the least. Um.
But in nineteen sixty two, Christine graduates from Hampden Institute
with a bachelor's in Math education in a minor in
physics at just twenty, and she starts teaching because the
whole thing, uh that she talks about in that interview
I watched, which I encourage you to google, is that
(34:13):
her father was so concerned about his daughter not having
a job, and so he did what a lot of
parents do, and he's like, UM, I know you have
this one interest which is cool, and that's math, and
that's awesome. However, can you please major in something that
will actually let you get hired after college. So he strongly, strongly,
strongly encouraged his daughter to major in education because, as
(34:38):
she points out in the interview, like you know, they're
just there. Still weren't a ton of jobs open, like
high paying jobs and secure jobs open to women at
the time. So she's like, I, as much as I
loved math, I had to be prepared to do whatever
I could to make a living and helps for my family.
And so she does teach for a while. But in
(34:59):
the meantime, as she's teaching and still going to school,
she's participating in lunch counter sit in so she's participating
in the civil rights movement at the same time that
she's you know, pursuing math and eventually going to shoot
to NASA like a rocket ship pocket ship of awesome.
So in nineteen seven, after studying physics and math at
(35:21):
Virginia State College, she earns her masters and math and
she's hired for the Langley Computer Pool. But she is
not going to remain in that pool she needs to
cannonball into the deep end. So in the seventies, as
computers like machine computers like we think of today or
(35:41):
starting to become a thing, Darden was one of the
first to work on developing computer programs because she'd studied
programming in her masters, so she began researching also sonic
boom minimization, and after five years in computing and programming support,
she I mean she just felt limited. She didn't feel
(36:03):
like she had enough knowledge of everything that she was
working on, and also she hadn't gotten promoted, so she
was she was getting a little anxious to do some
new stuff. Yeah, So in nineteen seventy two she complains
to the section head about men who were coming in
with similar credentials but getting more opportunities for advancement. I mean,
(36:25):
this was the same kind of thing that we're hearing
from the very get go of women being hired first
at NAKA and then at NASA. So he transfers her
to sonic boom research, like like you do well. And
I think that she had even suggested to him because
she had started doing sonic boom research on her own,
that that's the direction that she should go in and
(36:47):
her career path also echoes Katherine Johnson in the sense
of speaking up, calling attention to what you know and
what you would be good at, incessant questioning, very important.
Uh three. She earns a PhD in engineering and becomes
one of NASA's foremost experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms.
(37:10):
And one of the most endearing things about Johnson and
Darden's ten years at NASA is how they were not
only invested in their nine to five work, but also
in outreach and encouraging girls, in particular to get into
STEM like they did. Yeah, work that is so important,
and I mean, yes, the NASA works important, but that
outreach work and providing visible role models to children is
(37:33):
so important, and that is something that NASA itself has highlighted.
They put out a report in um that looked at
data stretching from two thousand eight to twelve that found
that women of color make up just five and a
half percent of aerospace tech engineers, and they linked this
to quote inherent biases and stereotyping that exists for women
(37:57):
of color in the science and engineering work place. In addition,
they write there are challenges related to the lack of
mentorship and isolation, and so they strongly encourage in this
this report those same outreach efforts, but in an official capacity.
So yes, it's so important to have these visible figures
like Johnson and like Darden. But now the this NASA
(38:19):
report is saying, we have to continue our efforts to
create a pipeline in the same way that having Langley
next door to Hampton created a you know, a figurative
pipeline of people geniuses to Langley. NASA still needs to
continue to do that kind of work of encouraging boys
(38:40):
and girls, but in this case women of color to
join their ranks and be among their researchers. Yeah. I mean,
one astounding statistic is that there are around one hundred
black female physicists in the US. Well, yeah, so it's
not just an issue at NASA. I mean this is
(39:01):
across the board um in the US and likely abroad
as well, although there are countries that are far better
in terms of gender equity in STEM fields. But now
we're curious to know who your STEM heroines are, and
especially the unsung ones, because as you can probably tell,
(39:22):
it really excites Caroline and me to learn about new
not new but women we should have known about a
long time ago. We were doing all sorts of trailblazing
and brainpowering. Yeah. So I encourage all of you. If
you're at school or at work and you're starting to
doubt yourself, I want you to ask yourself, what would
(39:45):
Katherine Johnson do? She knew who she was, she knew
what she was good at, and she was not going
to stop asking questions or counting or counting. She just
counted everything. Well. Listeners, you can email us mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com, or you can also
tweet us your thoughts at mom Stuff podcast, or send
(40:05):
us a message on Facebook. And we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. I have
a letter here from Sarah in response to our abortion episodes.
She says, I love the show and love that you
ladies are so vocally supportive of a woman's right to
have an abortion if she wishes. However, there seems to
(40:26):
be this narrative of the good abortion, and more specifically
the hard decision abortion that I find frustrating. Yes, there
are many women for whom choosing to have an abortion
is stressful, emotional, and heart wrenching, but there are just
as many women for whom it is a no brainer decision.
When I found out I was pregnant at twenty one,
I didn't even have to think twice before calling an
abortion clinic and making an appointment. I have been using
(40:49):
contraception because I was not ready to have a child,
and I had always known that I would abort in
the case of an unplanned pregnancy. I feel like there
is a cultural perception of the good abortion at an
in dudes handwringing with a long term boyfriend or a
high stakes job or a traumatic situation, and that simply
isn't always the case. Women should feel free and empowered
to have an abortion simply because they don't want to
(41:11):
be pregnant, which I'm sure you already know, so thank you, Sarah. Well.
I've got a letter here from Sierra about psychic women
line of employment far different than the NASA work we
were talking about in today's episode, but she writes about
how she briefly worked as a phone psychic when she
(41:32):
was having some trouble finding steadier employment, and she says
you would collect as much personal information from the collar
as you could before launching into the reading in order
to give your psychic forecast some degree of believable, very similitude,
and this may speak to why so many psychics are women.
The people who are in the company I worked for
(41:53):
were of the opinion that women were better at teasing
out the nuggets of personal intel that were so crucial
to creating a believable chic experience. My callers were pretty
evenly split between men and women, but both groups seemed
more willing to open up to a female psychic and
divulge personal details without suspicion that I could then work
into my readings. I had a male roommate at the
(42:14):
time who worked at the same company, and he had
a harder time with callers getting aggressive when he asked
personal questions. I didn't work as a phone psychic for
long because it was a very sad job. I knew
I had no psychic abilities, and most people who called
were in desperate situations and just looking for someone to
tell them it would be okay. I felt terrible about
the fact that they were paying three dollars a minute
(42:35):
to get support during some of the darkest times of
their lives, and the company's only directive to me was
to keep callers on the line for as long as possible.
I also felt exploited because it's emotionally draining to listen
to the sad stories of strangers and concoct b as
designed only to fleece them out of money, and I
was only being paid twenty cents a minute. The emotional
(42:55):
labor the job demanded, combined with the lack of financial security,
was just too much and I quit after a few months.
I love the show well, Thanks Sierra for sharing your
experiences with us and now listeners, do we want to
hear what's on your mind? Mom? Stuff at how stuff
works dot com is our email address and for links
(43:15):
all of our social media as well as all of
our blogs, videos, and podcasts with our sources so you
can learn more about the incredible women of color who
worked at NACA and NASA. Head on over to stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com for more on this
(43:37):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
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