Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.
I recently came across a fairly new book written about a topic I didn’t even know I was interested in.
Do you get this sometimes?
I am not a science-y person. At all. Neither am I interested in the exploration of space and other planets. But what I am interested in (if it wasn’t already pretty obvious from this newsletter!) are the narratives of women. Specifically, women who have gone before us and the ways in which these impact and relate to our current navigation of the world.
I recently came across this review of Loren Grush’s new book The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts which explores the experiences of the first female astronauts inducted into NASA’s astronaut programme in 1978.
A decade prior to NASA’s first female mission, a Russian parachuter named Valentina Tereshkova had reportedly orbited the Earth forty-eight times, a feat rumoured to have caused an emotional breakdown for Tereshkova, something which she denied.
By 1960, female astronaut Jerrie Cobb had previously completed the grueling physical and psychological testing that her male colleagues underwent. However, appearing before a House subcommittee in 1962 in order to request women’s place in the astronaut sphere, she was summarily dismissed, with the rebuff:
“The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”1
Such experiences and knock-backs are detailed in Loren Grush’s book, which attempts to reveal the battle women fought for equality in the spaceflight arena. After decades of push back, the arrival of NASA’s new space shuttle in the mid-1970s finally alerted them to the fact that they could no longer deny the inclusion of both women and people of colour to their ranks.
In her book, Grush explores the intention of NASA to transform space travel from:
“…something dangerous and expensive to an endeavour that was cheap, routine and safe”.
This, she states, required more diversity in its range of civilian specialists. Enrolling the African American actor Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt Uhuru in Star Trek, to front its new recruitment campaign, it announced a 35-strong cohort in January 1978, which included four men of colour and “the six”; the US’s first female astronauts. The ‘six’ referred to were Rhea Seddon, Kathy Sullivan, Judy Resnik, Sally Ride, Anna Fisher and Shannon Lucid.
Grush’s book paints a fascinating portrait of the demands of the training for the six chosen female astronauts. The first of these to make it into space was Sally Ride in 1983. Russia however beat them to it by a few months, sending their second ever female cosmonaut to a space station, where she was greeted with flowers her colleagues had grown in orbit.
The delay in getting women into space, according to Grush, was the fact that in 1961, when the first male astronaut made the mission, you had to be a jet pilot. Since the only way to receive jet pilot training was through the military, and women were banned from flying jets in the military, there were no female jet pilots, hence: no female astronauts. Grush reports that getting women into the space programme was seen as a distraction at a time when they were so preoccupied with getting a male astronaut to the moon, quoting Lyndon B Johnson’s comment: ‘Stop this now’ on a document related to allowing women into the space programme.
As with many other narratives around the sensibilities of ‘allowing’ women to undergo pursuits occupied by men, there was fear around women becoming mentally unwell if allowed to go into space, as well as that age-old issue of the ‘distraction’ they may cause to the male astronauts.
When the final six women were chosen as the first of their kind, Grush reports that they were selected from an initial application which was eventually narrowed down to 8,000 applicants. These women attended a week-long trip to Houston where they underwent rigorous medical and psychological testing. They were also tested on their response to being in an enclosed space.
The media, of course, had a field day with these first female astronauts, reporting on them as ‘eye popping space gals’ and with even the atmosphere around NASA being a very masculine space, Grush reports that some of the male astronauts’ wives were unhappy at the female astronauts potentially flying with their husbands.
Some of the greatest insights of the book come from the women themselves.
As I have reported in previous newsletters on women’s experiences of being a parent, the usual questions arose, for example, when Anna Fisher was discovered to also be a mother, she reported that she faced questioning around whether being an astronaut was compatible with this, whereas she states that nobody similarly pressed the male astronauts who were also fathers. Sally Ride also reported that during a press conference before her flight, a reporter questioned whether she ever wept in the simulator if things went wrong.
Many of the first female astronauts flew multiple times, with Kathy Sullivan flying the mission that deployed the Hubble space telescope, and taking a voyage down to Challenger Deep in 2020, the lowest known location on the planet, on a submersible, making her the only person to have walked in space and travelled to the deepest part of the ocean.
Grush’s book also has some lighter tones of trivia of the women’s experiences in space, such as the complex role of adapting space toilets for women: they report NASA engineers asking them if 100 tampons per female astronaut would be enough for a week in space. An endearing highlight is Sally Ride, reporting to mission control that spaceflight was like a VIP pass at Disneyland. There were also the inevitable discussions on “appropriate” space wear for the biochemist Shannon Lucid when a Saudi prince was invited aboard a 1985 Shuttle mission.
Grush herself is a science reporter whose parents both worked on the space shuttle programme. She has said that despite not realising at the time how special her upbringing was, when she became a journalist, she found herself drawn to stories about space.
Other reviewers have commented on Grush’s tendency to ‘lurch’ between perspectives in the book, relating this to a possibly deliberate decision to mirror the perspective of the astronauts’ experiences. She blends experiences such as gazing at the division of night and day on the Earth’s surface with the tiny details that determine the outcome of a mission, such as the improvised tools the astronauts use to fix a malfunctioning satellite, or a potentially fatal chip in the Shuttle’s windscreen. Sadly, reference is even made to the cold, stiff O-rings that failed during the Challenger launch of 1986, which killed seven crew members including Judy Resnik, one of “the six”.
The 1986 Challenger disaster together with the loss of Columbia in 2003 reportedly changed NASA’s approach to spaceflight. The 21st century has shown a growing superpower rivalry in space, giving way to competition between tech billionaires, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX currently providing the only means for NASA astronauts to reach orbit. Grush is optimistic about this: she suggests that the growth of the commercial space industry will bring greater opportunities for female astronauts.
In an interview, Grush reported that whilst there is a much wider representation of gender and race in new classes of astronauts, there is still a way to go, with less than one sixth of the people who’ve gone to space being women, with the statistics reducing further for women of colour.
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Loren Grush, The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, Scribner Book Company, (2023); all quotations from this edition.
Loved this, Kate. I’m not science-y either, but I’m fascinated by Astro Physics. Maybe in another life, and with a much bigger brain... In the meantime, I’ll continue with my ‘Dummies Guide to the Universe’ :)
Hola. Excelente Relato , En 1909 La Baronesa Raymonde Laroche Fue La Primera Mujer Piloto De La Historia , La Primera Afroamericana Que Obtuvo Una Licencia De Piloto Fue Bessie Coleman 1921. Las Mujeres Desde El Comienzo De La Aviación Estuvieron Ahí. El Problema Cómo Siempre Era El Machismo Que Había En Estos Oficios Y En La Sociedad. Ellas Estaban Preparadas Para Pilotar , Cualquier Avion O Un Transbordador. Un Saludo.