Jerrie Cobb with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, Mexico City, 1963.
Break loose now the door is open now you can
HELP FURTHER OUR CAUSE. SUGGEST YOU CONTACT EVERYONE YOU CAN REQUESTING THEY WIRE PRESIDENT KENNEDY AT WHITE HOUSE, URGING IMMEDIATE PROGRAM FOR WOMEN IN SPACE. GOOD LUCK AND WE ARE ON OUR WAY, SITUATION LOOKS GOOD.
Jerrie sent this optimistic telegram to each one of the FLATs hours after the congressional hearing was adjourned. But not even Jerrie, with her relentless dedication to her “crusade,” could have believed the words she wired. The situation looked anything but good.
The hearing made great fodder for the evening news—what editor could resist a story that combined a guest appearance by America’s heroes with entreaties from a couple of good-looking women in heels who claimed to want to go into space? Much of the coverage was sympathetic. A headline in The Washington Post said, “2 Would-be Astronettes’ Plead: Let Us Beat Reds.” Janey’s lines, that space “shouldn’t be a stag club” and “for some women, the PTA just isn’t enough,” got big play. She and Jerrie were called “two dauntless blondes”; their many qualifications (including Janey’s eight children) were listed and the tests they passed were breathlessly detailed. Dozens of newspapers ran an AP photo of Jerrie listening intently, her shoes off beneath the witness table.
But Jackie Cochran got plenty of coverage, too: “The world’s best-known woman pilot noted that girls tend to get married and have babies—and if women get into spacework this kind of thing could play hob with the countdown,” began a UPI wire story carried all over the country. The article went on to misrepresent a 40 percent washout rate of WASPs (parallel with that of male cadets) as a 40 percent dropout of women who ran off to get married and have babies. And John Glenn’s solemn declaration that they were just looking to get the best people for the job was widely reported. “Piero Dodges Women’s Ire,” said one headline, while another cracked that Glenn “Would Welcome Woman ‘With Open Arms.’” The Chicago Tribune said, “2 Astronauts ‘Scrub’ Bid of Women Pilots,” in a story that began, “Gently but firmly, a couple of America’s space heroes today drained the fuel from the proposal to train women astronauts.” The Tribune reporter said George Low “was chivalry itself as he
skated delicately around questions as to why women aren’t allowed in the program” by explaining it would inevitably slow the drive to get to the moon.
Deprived of a chance to rebut the NASA testimony by the hearing’s abrupt adjournment, Jerrie sent a supplemental statement to the committee members. In it, she pointed out that no expert witness had ever testified on whether women were as or better qualified for the stresses of spaceflight, that John Glenn cited only opinion. And she reiterated what she and the other women wanted: NASA had the money to train women; the committee members themselves had said so. “Understandably this would be a parallel program which would not interfere with work on the current programs. I do not think 1 woman of the 13 of us wants to interfere with the national goal of putting the first man on the moon. We only ask that we be tested and trained in order to be part of, not ahead of, the manned space flight program of our country.” The argument that they would hold things up was absurd, she said; of the thirty-two candidates in the second group of men NASA was screening, only five would be chosen, and the testing and training facilities were scattered over eight locations, which “must have some free time to schedule a small group of 13 or fewer women among the males.” The women wanted simply to complete the tests they had been scheduled for, she wrote, and for those who passed to go on for more rigorous tests and training. “All we need is the opportunity to prove that we are capable,’ qualified’ and ‘required.”’
Jerrie followed the appeal with a list of her test results, including the doctors’ conclusions that she had “much to recommend her” for spaceflight and would “qualify for special missions.” But in the congressional records, Jerries addendum is followed by another—from Jackie Cochran. Six days after the hearing, Jackie wrote to Richard Hines, the Space Committee’s chief staffer. She explained unapologetically that she missed the first morning of testimony because she was chairing a meeting of the National
Aeronautic Association, of which she was president. Thus she missed Jerries speech and the chance to “correct” her on many key points. Jackie wanted these points inserted into the record as if she had spoken them that morning—and if the committee wouldn’t do that, she wanted them appended at the end. Thus the record of the hearing ends with a forceful statement of Jackie’s position: “There is not now and to date has not been any women in space or women astronaut program. No woman to date has passed the Mercury astronaut tests.” Jackie entered a totally revisionist version of events into the record: Dr. Lovelace, she said, wanted to test a lot of women and asked the 99s for names, but “only one, Miss Jerrie Cobb, showed up.” So Jackie was brought in to find more women. And, Jackie insisted at the end, Jerrie had no right to speak for the others.
As far as Jerrie was concerned, she was leader of the group, and she was waging a campaign on their behalf. On August 15, she wrote to the FLATs: “The Congressional hearings are over, and all in all the results were encouraging. The subcommittee recommendation has been written and will go before the full House Space Committee sometime this week or next—then straight to NASA.” Since she had read the names of the women into the congressional record, their astronaut ambitions were now public, and each of them was deluged with calls from local newspapers and radio stations. “I have seen some of the publicity on some of you and generally I think you did a fine job in fielding the reporters’ questions,” Jerrie wrote. “I’m real pleased the way we have all stuck together and expressed similar, serious views— please continue to do so, in the interest of unity for our cause. As you are well aware, Mrs. Hart and I presented this program to the subcommittee on a sound, serious and harmonious basis— the differing testimony by the other woman pilot present was certainly no help, and was resented by most of the subcommittee members and some of the press.” And Jerrie said they should be hopeful: “I’ll continue to do everything I can for this program
and will appreciate your moral support and help. The more letters and wires coming into the White House urging an immediate program for women in space the better, so keep working on that angle. Letters to your Senators and Representatives will also help. After all, this country IS still run BY the people!”
A week later Jerrie wrote to the FLATs again, to say that the House was in recess but that they should be doing all they could for publicity. Janey was going to write a piece for Town and Country and Jerrie asked the women to send in pictures. “Candid and glamorous, NOT in pants,” she added emphatically. And now Jerrie attempted to formalize her position as leader of the female astronaut candidates: “So that we can stick together as a group there should be a central contact for all publicity on a national level. I will handle it from here if you want me to; or if any of you think you could better take care of it, let me know. Also, there should be one spokesman for the group and I would appreciate your views on that. As my prepared statement before the subcommittee pointed out, I assumed that role more or less by default, and because I have worked three years getting this program started.”
Jackie Cochran, meanwhile, was sending out letters of her own. She sent a memo to James Webb and Hugh Dryden, reiterating the points of her House testimony. “I could not agree more with the testimony of Mr. Low of NASA and Astronauts Glenn and Carpenter before the House Committee,” she began. “I would not like any of my own sex to do or say anything that would lower, here or abroad, the prestige and dignity of our American women.” Then she outlined a nine-point plan for the kind of multiyear research testing of two hundred women she was proposing—and concluded with an offer to come in and discuss it with them. In her original draft of the memo, she included one additional paragraph: “A woman responsible to NASA, and working closely with the Armed Services, to the extent they are involved, should have direction of certain non-scientific
or medical aspects of the program such as discipline among the candidates and the problems of women as such in a group activity of this nature.” But that, she decided, was a little too obvious, and she dropped that point from the final copy. She would let the NASA chiefs make their own decision about appointing the best-qualified woman to run this show.
Hugh Dryden wrote her back, a polite brush-off—this time.
The same day, Jackie sent out another letter. Each of the FLATs but Jerrie received a copy. Jackie enclosed an offprint of her testimony to the committee, and then she gave the first overt sign of the conflict she and Jerrie were having behind the scenes. “I spoke only for myself without claim to represent any of the women who passed the Lovelace tests. Miss Cobb stated that she was the spokesman for all of the [eleven] not present. I am satisfied that this is not true as to some who had already expressed their views to me. Was she authorized to act as spokesman as to you? I ll be glad to hear from you.”
Inevitably, there were divisions between the Lovelace women: they were thirteen big personalities, thirteen women used to achieving things in the face of considerable opposition and, for the most part, to getting what they wanted. None of them was close to Jerrie before this business started, and a few were openly dissatisfied with her leadership: they felt that she wasn’t keeping them informed, that they should all have gone to Washington to testify, that Jerrie was too interested in making sure she was first. In June, after receiving her copy of Jackie’s long letter to Jerrie refuting the need for a women’s astronaut program, Gene Nora Stumbough had written to Jackie to tell her benefactor where she stood. “I agree with your thoughts expressed to Jerrie wholeheartedly and 100%. Women will travel in space, but there is no need to train women right now. And to frantically send up a woman immediately just to beat the Russians, is, in my thinking, totally invalid. ... It is my hope that Washington will one day soon recognize a need for further research on women in the
aviation and space vein; but I am not under the delusion that one of us next week or even next year will be shot off to the moon. I am only afraid that by nagging those who make the decisions, we are hurting ourselves.” (Jackie held on to this letter and submitted it to the House subcommittee as proof that Jerrie didn’t speak for the others.)
The twins, too, disavowed Jerrie. They used the sudden media attention to parrot Jackie Cochran’s position. On July 19, 1962, a day after the congressional hearings, an article under their joint byline went out on the UPI wire. “American women will go into space too, when scientists decide they are needed. But at present no American woman is in training and none has completed testing,” they wrote. “We believe the testing of women astronaut candidates should be continued immediately. Then if scientists determine women are needed for space work, qualified candidates will be ready.” But they said women would have to be slotted into the space program eventually—maybe as passengers. And in subsequent interviews, the twins hotly denied any discrimination. “Miss [Jan] Dietrich does not advocate training of women as astronauts until scientists decide they are needed,” said an article in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. “She explained that she does not feel women have been unfairly kept out of the astronaut program since there are no female jet test pilots in this country. All the astronauts chosen so far have been jet test pilots. ‘They have simply used the people who are qualified. There is no shortage of astronauts.’” Marion herself wrote, “There is no point in sending a woman just for a ride.” All of the reports noted that the twins’ view was “considerably different” from that presented by Jerrie and Janey in Congress. The Los Angeles Times quoted Jan: “Those who asked [for the inclusion of women in the space program] certainly didn’t speak for the group,” the petite, blue-eyed brunette told us, “and I for one am not in accord with their ideas.”
Jan responded obediently to Jackie’s query about whether Jerrie spoke for them. “Jerrie did not ask permission to represent
me at the hearings,” Jan Dietrich wrote to her champion. “I would like to see the testing of women continued, but I am concerned that the antagonism necessarily engendered by the hearings will preclude this for some time.” Marion echoed her twin sister.
The twins, of course, had their star hitched to Jackie. Most of the other women recognized that Jerrie had been through the tests first, had got furthest and had the most contacts at NASA— she was, after all, its consultant. Their hopes for reviving the program lay with her. Now, however, Jackie succeeded in taking the natural differences of opinion between the women and splitting the group up into camps—divisions that would widen over the coming years. B Steadman, who had always admired Jackie Cochran, answered her query about Jerries leadership by saying that she had spoken to Janey, though not to Jerrie; she implied in her letter that energy might be better used in organizing than in fighting over who spoke for whom. “For Heavens sake, Miss Cochran, if this Space Program has a meaning, why don’t you grab the reins and get it going,” B asked. “It needs one leader with wisdom, understanding and the ability to get people to work together. We are without this type of leadership now. If the program is not necessary then I’d like to forget it and get back to my own business.”
K Cagle was even more emphatic: “This is the way I stand. Miss Jacqueline Cochran (you!) paid my expenses at the Lovelace Clinic. ... I consider you my sponsor and spokesman. I believe in you, I trust your judgement in any situation. You have had a great deal of experience in dealing with government officials and important business people. I am sure I can’t even visualize the forest of important people you have influenced to your side. I like your seasoned judgement, your soft, feminine approach. You know what we can get, so why ask for the impossible and make enemies? You are asking for what we CAN get. Jerrie Cobb is asking for the impossible, I think. I wish I could orbit tomorrow,
and I know you do, too. ... I am on your team. I know we can get from ‘the men what we want, not by pushing, but by winning. You’ve got the know-how. S-o-o Take the reins, we are YOUR girls.”
And Irene Leverton now repudiated Jerrie, blaming her for not getting the other women involved in the hearing, although she admitted she had meant to send Jerrie her views and not got around to it. “To beat Russia with a female astronaut was very poor thinking on Jerries part. I’m afraid the idea hurt us all a lot,” Irene wrote to Jackie. “Sure, I think the U.S. should be first—we must always strive to do things better and first. But to rush a sub-orbital flight is not wise. I’m sorry that a statement by each of us wasn’t read at the hearings. We might all have differing opinions but an overall picture would have been available to Congress.” But Irene was not enamored of Jackie’s position either. “I admit that I don’t agree with all that you were quoted as saying about marriage and our possible attrition rate . . . after weathering 18 years of ignorant prejudice against women in aviation, I wasn’t about to let domesticity keep me from a chance to enter such a program. . . . Perhaps sometime in the future we women will start pulling together.”
This certainly wasn’t that time. By lining up the opposing views, Jackie exacerbated tension between the women. They identified one another as the problem, and one anothers’ campaigns or lack thereof as the thing keeping them out of space. Jerrie knew what was going on. “I agree with you on the clipping you sent by the Dietrichs and I resent it also, but I really have no control over it,” she wrote in a frustrated letter to Jean Hixson after Jan and Marion publicly backed Jackie in their UPI wire story. “Either the group must work together supporting my efforts to get women included in the space program or Cochran will turn it into a debacle ... as you know she is trying to do so. I really feel sorry for her as she must be a pretty unhappy person.”
None of the correspondence between the women in these months mentions the testimony by the astronauts or George Low, or the attitude of NASA or the congressmen.
When the House subcommittee came back with its report a few weeks later, NASA was vindicated. “The requirements laid down by NASA, which all astronaut applicants must meet, are based on . . . sound scientific rationale and upon a wealth of knowledge gained in ultra-high-speed, high-altitude piloting experience. The astronaut criteria in no way were formulated with the intent to exclude automatically possible applicants because of race, creed, color or gender.” There was merit, the committee said, in “considering the possibility of establishing a scientific program of medical research upon which to base the training eventually of highly qualified women as astronauts. ...” But “the present urgency of our manned space flight program, the high costs involved, the limited and continuously used training facilities, and the foreseeable need for only a relatively few astronauts, preclude at this time the establishment of a woman astronaut training program in spite of the fact that it would establish a new space ‘first for the United States.”
The congressional hearing had not accomplished what Jerrie hoped it would—in fact, it hadn’t yielded anything except a few news stories. With that in mind, Jerrie took her campaign back on the road, and now she had nothing good to say about NASA. In October 1962, she went to the Air Force Association convention (the same meeting where she had met Randy Lovelace and Donald Flickinger three years earlier), and this time she gave a speech about “Project WISE”—Woman in Space Earliest. She was openly critical of the space agency:
The fulfillment of Project WISE was easily within our capability—did not require any additional funding— could be accomplished quickly and easily—and would shock the world! ... By now, Russia had put the first man
into orbit and American prestige was at a new low.
President Kennedy asked for any effort that could put the United States first in any new space endeavor. . . . [But] Project WISE died. It was just too simple and too spectacular to put the first woman in space. Administrator James E. Webb appointed me a consultant to the civilian space agency, NASA. Since Em not a Ph.D. with three different science degrees, I assumed my appointment had something to do with women in space. That was over a year ago and—believe me—Em the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency today. ... It didn’t take long to find out that the subject of women astronauts was taboo—and not even to be discussed by those who wished to stay in the good graces of NASA.
Jerries unhappy speech attracted some sympathetic publicity. In The Christian Science Monitor, for example, Neal Stanford wrote, “It can’t be said that Miss Cobb hasn’t knocked at the right doors to win the distinction of being America’s first woman astronaut. She is a one-woman lobbyist known to every space- minded official in Washington. It is not that she is hiding her ambition under a bushel. It is the space agency, it seems, that refuses to let her ride atop an Atlas.” There may have been more truth than he knew when Stanford observed that a space trip was not just Jerries ambition, but an “obsession.”
In November, Jerrie spoke to the Women’s Advertising Club in Washington. “We’re bypassing the one scientific space feat we could accomplish now—putting the first woman in orbit. It would be comparable to Russia putting the first man in orbit. But NASA says it has no need for women astronauts. It says it has enough astronauts already. With that kind of attitude, it’s no wonder we’re second in the space race.” This time the headlines were even closer to home. “NASA Program Winged by Aviatrix,” said The Washington Post.
Eventually, her media campaign provoked James Webb to the point of a formal rebuke. On December 17, 1962, he summoned Jerrie to his office in Washington. After reiterating that NASA had no intention of changing its qualifications for astronauts, he reminded her that her consultant appointment had not been renewed—she was no longer affiliated with the space agency, and frankly she was nearing the limit of what NASA would tolerate silently. In minutes taken of the meeting, Webbs assistant R. P. Young noted,
[Webb] pointed out, however, that the government has a very great stake in the success of the space program and he wondered what her motives could be in pursuing this further. Miss Cobb replied that she was only doing what she thought was right and what she believed in. Mr. Webb then suggested that by pursuing it in an irrational manner, she could harm herself more than help her cause. Mr.
Webb explained this to her by saying he has been asked several times to comment on her speeches and if he continues to be pressed for a substantive comment as a result of her speeches, sooner or later he would have to state that he had not consulted Miss Cobb because he had not found the occasion on which he felt her judgment would be of any assistance in solving the problem at hand.
Still Jerrie pressed on. She made more speeches, and she petitioned both President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. In April 1963, Webb wrote to her again, bluntly advising that none of this was going to change his position—and again reminding Jerrie that her relationship with the space agency had been severed. “It is certainly fine with everyone in NASA for you to work toward any goal that you believe in. The only point of my conversation previously was that your association with NASA had come to an end, that I did not think it would help you work
toward your goal to criticize this relationship under which you had been asked to serve as a NASA consultant, and that this relationship had not proved of the value I had hoped it would.”
In fact, Webb had a new consultant on the issue of women in space: he swore Jackie Cochran into the job in early June. It was a reward for her own public campaign—while Jerrie was talking up the need for an American first, Jackie had toured ladies’ clubs and symposiums pointing out that she had funded the research into women’s qualifications for space and thus that she was well placed to say there was no need to start training them. Her payoff appointment gave Webb a convenient new public face for the issue, someone to point to when pressed by reporters on the subject of female astronauts.
And suddenly, this was a very hot topic indeed.
On June 16, 1963, the Soviets launched Vostok 6. The capsule carried a cosmonaut wearing dozens of sensors, a seamless knitted sweater and culottes, paper socks, a blue pressure suit and a bright orange flight suit. Her name was Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, and her call sign was “Chaika”—Seagull.
Tereshkova’s worker credentials had, in the end, beaten out the better-qualified Valentina Ponomareva, and she was Sergei Korolev’s choice for the first woman in space. Valya, as she was known, had a model Soviet biography: her peasant father was killed fighting the Germans in World War II, and Valya was raised in suitably humble circumstances by her mother in Yaroslavl on the Upper Volga. After high school she went to work at Red Perekop Factory No. 2, a fabric plant where her mother and sister also worked, but she continued to study at night school. In 1959, at age twenty-two, she made her first parachute jump with a local aviation club and then organized the Textile Mill Workers Parachute Club. She made dozens of jumps of increasing difficulty, performing with the team at public fairs.
After Yuri Gagarins flight, Tereshkova was one of thousands of Soviet citizens who wrote to the Central Committee and volunteered for future space missions. Those letters were stored away in boxes—until the politburo approved the plan for a female cosmonaut. A committee plowed through the letters and drew up a short list of women. Tereshkova passed the medicals and the interview, and a few weeks later she was sent to the cosmonaut training center in Star City, outside Moscow. She was instructed to tell her mother and her collective that it was part of training for the national parachute team.
Tereshkova had some instruction in how to fly a plane during her year of training, but it was her skill as a parachute jumper that was most important for the Vostok flight. Unlike the Mercury astronauts, whose capsule landed in the sea, the Soviet cosmonauts bailed out at ten thousand feet and came down by parachute on their own (for they had to reenter over land within the Soviet Union, and the cosmonaut would not survive the capsule crash). At Star City, she and the other four female candidates rode the centrifuge repeatedly, and each spent a full week in isolation rooms, a closed-circuit camera trained on them the whole time. According to Tereshkovas official biography, the male and female cosmonauts got along well together and joined in informal games of ice hockey. Male reporters with the news agency TASS would later say that the men did not take their female counterparts seriously, and indeed Tereshkova herself quoted Korolev as greeting the arrival of the women with “I ask for cosmonauts and they send me a bunch of girl parachutists.’’
Regardless, a bit more than a year later he deemed her well- enough qualified to entrust a Vostok capsule to her. Cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky went up on Vostok 5 on June 14, and Tereshkova joined him in orbit two days later. Shortly after she launched, her voice was broadcast to millions of Russians on Moscow Radio: “Here is Seagull. Everything is fine. I see the horizon; it’s a sky blue with a dark strip. I see the earth. Everything is in order. I’m
feeling fine. The machine is working well.” Television pictures were broadcast back of Valentina laughing and smiling in her helmet. In her logbook, she wrote of just the kind of pictures Jerrie Cobb so longed to see. “On the sixth orbit, I saw a storm over the Indian Ocean. The sky was lightened by bright flashes. The nocturnal horizon was rather uniform even before sunrise. Before each sunrise there is a unique sight. The clouds over the ocean have the form of ridges and more often, of streets with small breaks in them.”
Khrushchev made much of her flight. Shortly after Korolev confirmed that Tereshkova had been successfully launched, the premier sent a telegram, read to her by mission control.
DEAR VALENTINA VLADIMIROVNA, MY HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU, THE FIRST WOMAN COSMONAUT IN THE WORLD, FOR A REMARKABLE FLIGHT IN OUTER SPACE.
THE SOVIET PEOPLE ARE PROUD OF YOUR TRIUMPH. WE ALL FOLLOW YOUR HEROIC FLIGHT WITH GREAT ATTENTION AND FROM THE BOTTOM OF OUR HEARTS WISH YOU GOOD HEALTH AND GOOD LUCK AND A SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF THE FLIGHT. WE WILL MEET YOU WITH GREAT PLEASURE ON OUR SOVIET HOMELAND.
Then, on her fourth orbit around the earth, Khrushchev was patched through to Tereshkovas radio. “I hear you very well,” he boomed happily. “Your call sign is Seagull, I believe. Permit me to call you Valya, Valentina. I am very happy, and it gives me fatherly pride that our girl, a Soviet girl, is the very first in the world to be in outer space and to be the master of a very advanced technology.” The cosmonaut (at least in the version released to TASS) thanked “Nikita Sergeyevich” for his kind words and pledged to see him soon again on earth.
There was speculation that Tereshkovas craft and Vostok 5 might actually dock, a maneuver vital to the success of a future
moon landing. They came to within three kilometers (two miles) of each other, so that Tereshkova caught sight of Bykovsky’s craft, but they did not attempt to dock—neither Vostok ship had rocket thrusters that would allow the pilots to alter the trajectory of their orbits. Tereshkova and Bykovsky took a series of photographs of the sun and of its transitional spectrums; made astronomical observations of constellations; measured ion fluxes in fields of radiation and made observations of the earth. In addition, of course, Soviet scientists closely charted the impact of the spaceflight on their different (or, as it turned out, not so different) male and female physiologies.
After Valyas forty-eighth orbit, the capsule was realigned and she was pulled back down toward earth—by a force nine times that of than gravity, which flattened her into the seat of the capsule. She ejected right on target and landed in a field in the Kazakh highlands, in fine condition but for a cut on her nose caused by flying capsule debris as she was parachuting away from it. Farmers working nearby ran to greet her with the traditional Russian welcome of bread and salt.
Tereshkova was in the air for two days, twenty-two hours and fifty minutes—more flight time than the six male Mercury astronauts combined.
How did she do, this first female astronaut? The accounts vary wildly. There were rumors—seized upon in the United States— that she suffered terrible space sickness (intense nausea and disorientation caused by weightlessness), that she could not carry out her mission as intended and that Korolev ordered that the machine be controlled entirely from the ground. There were reports that her mission was canceled early (Bykovsky stayed in space almost five days) and also that it was extended from the one day initially planned to almost three, when it was discovered that she was coping well in space. In an event reported in great detail in The New York Times on June 18, she could not be reached by ground control for some time during her first night
in orbit, later telling Korolev, “I fell asleep for some time contrary to schedule. I shall do better. I feel fine.” Space historian Asif Siddiqi, however, has made an extensive study of the once-secret records of the early Soviet space program and says that while Tereshkova had a few problems, none was critical. Tereshkovas brief space sickness passed, and she completed the planned duration of her mission, Siddiqi says.
The Soviets always said publicly that she had made a perfect flight. Just as Jerrie Cobb had predicted, the first woman in space was a hero. Thousands of people turned out when she and Bykovsky were paraded in Red Square, and the premier gave them the country’s highest honor, the Order of Lenin. “Bourgeois society always emphasizes that woman is the weaker sex,” Khrushchev thundered to the crowd. “That is not so. Our Russian woman showed the American astronauts a thing or two. Her mission was longer than that of all the Americans put together!” He pointed one thick finger at Tereshkova. “There is your weaker sex!” Then the feared Soviet leader pulled her into a bear hug and planted a big smacking kiss on her cheek. Tereshkova was dispatched on a global tour; she met the Queen of England and was honored at the United Nations. Rapturous crowds greeted her in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma.
The primary reaction in America was shock—and an almost titillated fascination. “Russian Blonde Spins Around Earth Toward Possible Rendezvous,” screamed a headline across the front of The Dallas Morning News that Jerri Sloan picked off her front step on June 17. A headline in the Berkshire Eagle of Massachusetts demanded, “Why Valentina And Not Our Gal?” And in Life, Clare Boothe Luce, wife of the magazine’s founder, Henry Luce, wrote a stunning article. She was a former Republican Congresswoman and a virulent critic of Communism, but this time, she said, the Reds had it right. The article—headlined “But Some People Simply Never Get the Message”—is a telling sign that NASA had failed to keep pace with the changing attitudes
to womens role in society: one of the most powerful conservative voices in the United States was left praising the Russians for their female cosmonaut. “Why did the Soviet Union launch a woman cosmonaut into space? Failure of American men to give the right answer to this question may yet prove to be their costliest Cold War blunder. But already they are giving the wrong answers,” Boothe Luce wrote. U.S. space experts “hold—to a man—the view that Valentina Tereshkova was fired from the launching pad as a Soviet space program female guinea pig, and that the experiment is useless, at least for the foreseeable future. The right answer is that Soviet Russia put a woman into space because Communism preaches and, since the Revolution of 1917, has tried to practice the inherent equality of men and women.” The progress of women in the U.S.S.R. was “spectacular,” she wrote, and rattled off the statistics to prove it—74 percent of Russian doctors were women. In 1917, the country had only six hundred female engineers; by 1961 there were 379,000. “The astronaut of today is the worlds most prestigious popular idol. Once launched into space he holds in his hands something far more costly and precious than the millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in his capsule; he holds the prestige and the honor of his country.” An astronaut is “the symbol of the way of life of his nation. In entrusting a 26-year-old girl with a cosmonaut mission, the Soviet Union has given its women unmistakable proof that it believes them to possess these same virtues. The flight of Valentina Tereshkova is, consequently, symbolic of the emancipation of the Communist woman. It symbolizes to Russian women that they actively share (not passively bask, like American women) in the glory of conquering space.”
In the same issue of Life , America met its female “astro-nots.” Under the headline “The U.S. Team Is Still Warming Up the Bench,” there they were, the thirteen abandoned candidates from the Lovelace experiment. There was a photo and a brief biography of each of them. “The U.S. could have been first to
put a woman up in space merely by deciding to do so,” the introduction said. “All of [these women] were experienced pilots with qualifications far more impressive than Valentina Tereshkovas. To a woman, they were eager to go into orbit.”
No doubt many Life readers thought Clare Boothe Luce had lost her marbles. If the Soviets were crazy enough to put a woman in a spaceship, well, thank heavens NASA had more sense. At a time when only 25 percent of women in the United States had paid jobs, the thirteen women presented in Life y pilots and would-be astronauts, appeared unusual in the extreme. And yet, at the same time, few Americans were oblivious to the way the country was changing, to the new debates about discrimination and what fields should be open to women. A few politicians saw the situation the way Jerrie did—on June 27, 1962, Ernest Gruening, senator for Alaska, entered the Life article into the Congressional Record. He bemoaned another Russian space first, when this was one the Americans could have won “but for the narrow exclusiveness of our space agency.” Sputnik was bad, he said. “But the sending of a woman into space—and as it happens, she was not even a flier—is, in my judgement, a far greater defeat for us, because its implications are far wider.” But for most Americans, the launch of Tereshkova only served to reinforce the merits of their own society, with its clear-cut gender roles. The NASA position—that this was a job for men—was still the predominant one.
A few days after Tereshkova’s mission, a couple of reporters from the Soviet daily Lzvestia were allowed into the area where she and Bykovsky were being held in quarantine. They brought a book with them to show Valentina. She couldn’t, of course, read the English title—but she puzzled over the picture of a woman’s face in a space helmet on the cover.
The woman was Jerrie Cobb. Her close friend Jane Rieker had ghostwritten Jerries story, from her first flying lessons at twelve to her crusade in Washington. Woman into Space was published
by Prentice Hall weeks before Tereshkovas flight, and it ended with the hope that the United States might yet be first with a woman in space.
Well, now the first woman in space held the Americans book in her hands. Tereshkova had heard of Jerrie (at least, a Soviet journalist was willing to report that she had). “I sincerely sympathize with her,” Tereshkova said. “I think of her as a courageous and daring woman. It is really too bad that the American leaders have disgraced her so. They shout on all the street corners about their democracy and at the same time announce they will not let a woman into space. This is obvious inequality.” At this, according to Izvestia “the commander of the ship Vostok 6 became excited. Fires of indignation burned in her eyes.”
She also offered a condescending sympathy to her American rival. “Yes, I have sincere pity for Jerrie Cobb. She is an excellent pilot and a brave woman. It is not easy to fly a jet plane; it requires a great willpower, good training and lightning reflexes. When I think about Jerrie Cobb’s failure, I see not just a personal failure. We and Jerrie Cobb have different wings. That’s the main thing.”
K Cagle put her faith in her hero. At home in Macon, Georgia, K read the news about the congressional hearing, she read Jackie’s statement and she prepared to bide her time. If this was as far as Jackie thought things could go now, well, she would just wait. “Jackie had presented her case, and it wasn’t over,” K says. “We just weren’t going to be used now—that was the thing.” K waited, but there were no more letters from Jackie. And no call from Jerrie, or Dr. Lovelace. A year or two went by, and she realized with a start one day that no one had mentioned women in space for quite some time. Maybe it was over, after all. K decided, at least, that she no longer needed to honor her promise to Dr. Lovelace to put off having children, and she and Walt had a daughter, Joy.
Many of the other women knew from the day of the hearing that their dreams of space travel were finished. “I did not believe that Jerrie was going to be powerful enough to change things,” B Steadman says. One by one, the women went back to their lives. Some were left scrabbling: Gene Nora Stumbough, Sarah Gorelick and Irene Leverton had all quit jobs to go to Pensacola. And Jerri Sloan had a divorce on her hands. They scrambled, but they managed. They pasted the telegram from Dr. Lovelace into their scrapbooks, beside clippings about Valentina Tereshkovas flight, and the first Gemini missions—already yellowing. Some saw the space episode as a good tale to tell at 99s meetings—and some didn’t speak of it at all. “That was past,” Rhea Hurrle says simply.
But it wasn’t over for Jerrie Cobb.
Her updates to the FLATs trickled off after the hearings but her one-woman campaign in Washington continued. She tried repeatedly to see President Kennedy, and sent him a wistful appeal shortly before Tereshkova’s flight. “It is difficult to write this letter knowing it will be read by your secretaries and assistants and the chances are slim that it will get through to you. I feel compelled to do so anyway, in the faith that the matter will in some way be brought to your attention. ... I have worked, studied and prayed for this over three years now and could not give up without one last, final plea to the commander-in-chief.”
But the president’s office, as she had expected, shunted her to Webb. In August, she sent the NASA administrator a letter with a newly desperate note of appeal:
If I went back to college and got an engineering degree and managed some way to get some jet test pilot experience, could you tell me if I’d be acceptable as an astronaut candidate then? I would do this, or whatever is in my power, to qualify myself but it would take several years and Russia would beat us again. If you would just give me
a chance to work out on the simulators when they are not busy, then we would know if I needed to go back and get the degree and jet test time. I beg of you, just for the opportunity to prove myself.
It sometimes seems ironical to have to fight so long and hard for something that would accomplish so much for the United States and for which I would willingly give my life.
A month later, Webb addressed her appeal in just two lines: “I am sorry but I just am not able to give you the kind of commitment that your letter of August 7th requests.”
Thus Jerrie decided to try a new route: if she couldn’t go up with NASA, could she fly the X-15, the astonishing aircraft that air force pilots were now taking up as high as fifty miles? That would give the Americans a woman technically “in space” even if it wasn’t a rocket ride. In some ways, in truth, it would be better—for no one disputed that the X-15 pilots had full control of their ships.
But Raymond L. Bisplinghoff, the man who ran the X-15 schedule, was directed to write her back and turn her down for, as he himself pointed out, the same reasons she could not be an astronaut. “The number of X-15 flights which we can undertake is limited, and the costs incidental to each flight are substantial. As a consequence, participation in the program has been restricted to engineering test pilots with extensive experience in jet aircraft, and even these must undergo months of training before piloting an X-15 flight. If we are to continue to extract the maximum benefit from public funds invested in this program, we believe that it is essential that the existing standards of training and experience be maintained.”
No matter whom she asked or what she asked for, nobody in the American space program wanted anything to do with Jerrie Cobb.
After Tereshkovas flight, Jerries frustration began to deepen into bitterness. Much of the publicity in the United States featured her, and she made no effort to temper her scorn for NASA. “Exactly two years and one day after I recommended that NASA begin training women for space flight, Valentine [sic] was sent into space by the Russians,” she snapped to reporters. “That’s kind of ironic.” And the space agency had only itself to blame, she said. “Mr. Webb appointed me two years ago and I haven’t heard a thing from them since then.”
When astronaut Gordon Cooper, asked about matching the latest Russian first, said that the number of American women qualified for spaceflight was “absolute zero,” Jerrie responded, “That’s the same old NASA line he’s using.”
Still, she told the Houston Post on July 1, she had hope. “If they think a woman ought to be a parachute jumper, I will become a parachute jumper. If they think it is necessary to be a jet test pilot, I would be happy to become one if I could. ... I am disappointed and frustrated that they were able to have the first woman in space. It seemed to me that this was one area in space where we could have beaten the Russians if NASA hadn’t been so prejudiced against women. ... I don’t have any more hope, I have the same hope, which is all the hope there is. It means more to me than anything else, and I am not going to give up.”
But her letters grew more desperate. On February 10, 1964, she wrote to Lyndon Johnson, now the president, reminding him of their conversation two years earlier about the urgency of putting a woman in space.
As you know, no action was ever taken on this important subject (not even after a special congressional subcommittee recommended it) and Russia did indeed put the first woman in space.
I urge again your consideration to giving women an active part in our country’s space program. The longer we
wait the further behind we will be in this important aspect of space travel. I’m sure you are aware of all the reasons why women should be given an equal opportunity in astronaut training.
During the past three years I have done everything within my power (including passing three phases of astronaut testing) for the inclusion of women astronauts in our country’s space program. I have resigned my executive position in the aviation industry so that I might devote myself wholeheartedly to the service of my God and my country. If there is no possible way of utilizing my services in the astronaut program, would you please advise me if I might be of assistance in the U.S. AID or Peace Corps programs? I am quite serious about this and offer 20 years of varied aeronautical experiences as a pilot and administrator.
But the president likely never saw the letter. A memo from an aide in Johnson’s office directed it to NASA to draft a reply, and while the letter Jerrie eventually received conveyed the president’s folksy pleasure in hearing from her, the missive came on a multicarboned form from the space administration.
You are aware, I am certain, of the contribution women can make to the overall well-being and progress of the United States of America in almost every field of endeavor. Today, fewer restrictions based solely on sex are in effect than ever before. Fortunately for our country and for the world women are gaining their proper share of responsibility in many challenging jobs.
The number of jobs open to women is increasing each year. It is my hope that all restrictions against hiring or promoting qualified women workers will be ended as soon as possible. You are aware, probably, of my
personal efforts to expedite the implementation of this
concept among the Federal civil service.
But his position of two years earlier, that it was up to NASA to pick its astronauts, remained unchanged, Johnson wrote— and the space agency’s list of qualifications had not changed either. The same went for the X-15—its pilots had to be the best in the field, and the president wasn’t going to tell the air force who should get that job.
At the same time, Jerrie also wrote to Sen. Clinton Anderson, then chair of the House Space Committee, asking that he try to get her a chance to fly the X-15. Her goal at this point seems to have been a trip into space by any possible means. Anderson apparently checked this request with NASA, because Hugh Dryden, the deputy administrator, wrote him back in March, giving the stock answer—only test pilots. Anderson informed Jerrie that that route wasn’t going to work either.
She had indeed resigned her job at Aero, perhaps out of exhaustion. In late 1964 she moved to Florida and took almost a year trying to figure out what to do. Aviation consulting, she decided—and her First gig was delivering film and copy to Life headquarters in Chicago after a Gemini space launch. Life arranged for her to fly a jet for the job.
Jerrie was, at this point, resigned. “I have no doubt that women will go into space someday—probably as scientists—but I’ll be too old by that time,” she told The Miami Herald in April 1965. “I worked so hard to get through those tests and in my heart I very much want to participate in the space program. But my head tells me the chances are slim.”
A few months earlier she had volunteered to test a STOL (short takeoff-and-landing) plane in Peru and while she was there, had become interested in the work of Wycliffe Bible translators, missionary linguists. Now she thought about a way to
move down to South America—she had applied to a missionary organization in the late 1950s but been rejected because they only employed men; maybe this would be a way into the job. “I hope this consultant thing works out,” she told the Herald. “Instead of always worrying about making a buck, I’d like to earn just enough to live and have time to devote to these people in the jungle. I have a great love for Latin America and the people there.”
That year, Jerrie ran away.
“The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” With those words, John Glenn helped to seal the fate of the FLATs. The social order, however, was starting to change. In 1963, John F. Kennedy announced the findings of the presidential commission on the status of women, which reached the conclusion that women were in vastly unequal positions in the workforce. That same year, the Equal Pay Act became law— mandating that a woman must receive the same salary for doing the same job as a man. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in employment based on race—and gender. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order that prohibited discrimination in government contracting and established guidelines for affirmative action programs.
The laws reflected the transformation that swept the country in those years: the civil rights movement, womens liberation and growing protests against the Vietnam War demanded changes to the traditional systems and hierarchies. The pace of change was such that the same nation that looked at Life in 1963 and shook its head at the women who were would-be astronauts did not, five years later, find the idea nearly so strange.
NASA, through this period, made changes in its recruitment procedures. Mere months after arguing to Congress that it was vital that astronauts be military test pilots, the agency accepted
two civilian test pilots. A year later, NASA dropped the test pilot restriction and said regular jet pilots would be fine. This removed the official barrier to the participation of women, who were still prohibited from flying in the military and could not attend jet test pilot schools. And in 1963, NASA opened up the recruitment not only to pilots but also to scientists, who were taught to fly after they signed on. Sixty new astronauts joined the space agency in that period. All were men.
But now, the idea of female astronauts was without a champion. Randy Lovelace had stayed in the background of the congressional hearing and kept out of the womens political fight—in fact, he essentially dissociated himself from the women from the moment NASA’s displeasure became evident with the cancelation of testing in Pensacola. Lovelace had initiated the program, but he had an important position with NASA, one that provided his foundation with both income-generating contracts and prestige. At the time of the hearings, for example, his clinic was secretly doing the physical certifications for U2 pilots from all over the world (including the Greek, Turkish, Swedish, English and Canadian air forces) for the CIA. Lovelace did not intend to jeopardize any of that.
a He could read the handwriting on the wall,” says his friend and then employee Donald Kilgore. “He was a good poker player and he knew when to fold.” Lovelace’s strategy of ducking the initial fight seems to have served him, for he was not penalized for his key role in the women astronaut affair. In fact, in 1964 he was promoted to the post of chief medical adviser to the space agency.
Dr. Lovelace’s research on the women was used only for a short article by two foundation doctors in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in February 1964. In it, Johnnie Betson and Robert Secrest seized on menstruation, saying it made women unfit to be astronauts—because they would have to do flight tests at several different points in their cycles and
would have trouble functioning “in an environment of time tables and rigid schedules.” The doctors revived an argument that had been used since the start of the century to keep women from flying while they were menstruating; they cited studies that had found womens coordination and peripheral vision changed over the course of their cycle.
The short academic article, emphasizing womens physical differences, was much in keeping with the thinking in NASA, still very much a male-dominated institution. Randy Lovelace, however, did not lend his name to it. He might well have continued to consider the idea of testing women, of perhaps incorporating women into the astronaut corps, waiting for tensions to ease before he introduced it again. But Lovelace, with his wife, Mary, was killed in a plane crash on December 12, 1965. Almost two thousand people attended their funeral in Albuquerque. Astronaut Scott Carpenter headed the dignitaries; Drs. Charles Mayo I and II were there and so was Sen. Clinton Anderson, head of the Senate Space Committee. Jackie Cochran, of course, was there, grief-stricken and trying to comfort the Lovelaces’ suddenly orphaned daughters. Randy Lovelace died the day after the successful in-space rendezvous of Gemini 6 and Z President Lyndon Johnson addressed the event, saying, “A day of great achievement in space was marred by news of the death of Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II. His life was too short, although his legacy to space medicine will endure and will be a resource of assurance to future astronauts whose names and deeds are yet unknown.”
Even though Lovelace’s death and Jerries departure for South America relieved NASA of the two previous champions of women in space, this sticky issue of female astronauts kept popping up in the media. In fact, in November 1967, a pair of female would-be astronauts once again made the cover of Parade magazine, this time with the headline “No space for them.” The article interviewed a half-dozen women—including
a mountain climber who had written eleven scientific papers on orbital flight and a woman with a Ph.D. in biology doing research on the poisoning effect of high concentrations of oxygen for astronauts—none of whom had made the grade in the latest round of applications. Successive waves of astronaut candidates were being taken into the agency to train for Apollo, candidates who were both scientists and pilots, but none were women.
Dogged by the female astronaut issue, NASA went on a public relations campaign to highlight some of the other roles women were filling with the agency. They made chief astronomer Nancy Roman, the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA, their showpiece. She gave dozens of speeches and wrote numerous magazine articles about the handful of female engineers and physicists at the space agency. The tone of NASA’s campaign, however, remained one of marveling at a few extraordinary women. ‘Apollo Project Engineer Is a Pretty Grandmother,” said a headline in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1964, describing Catherine Hock, a reliability engineer on the moon project.
Despite the public relations campaign and the new laws, NASA’s thinking about who could be an astronaut was not changing. In 1972, the Equal Opportunity Act was extended specifically to include government agencies. That same year, NASA administrator Chuck Berry told a space medicine conference in Nice, France, “For long-duration space flights such as Mars, the crews would be confined inside their spacecrafts for nearly a year. With so much time on their hands, they’d react like . . . other normal human beings, they’d want sexual diversion. It is therefore unrealistic to plan future flights without coming to grips with the problem of women. Naturally the women would be fully operational crew members . . . not only there for sex.”
But pressure on the agency mounted steadily. In 1972, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People publicly called it “shocking”
that there were no black astronauts. Ruth Bates Harris, director of NASA’s new Equal Opportunity Office, advised the director of spaceflight that she faced “constant” questions about the all- white, all-male composition of the astronaut corps. The Civil Rights Commission asked NASA to investigate the issue; the agency said that was the commission’s job. By 1975, the political haggling resulted in another congressional hearing on diversity in the space program. This one produced no more conclusive or binding results than that of 1962—but the public heat was so intense that NASA’s deputy director of public affairs, Ken Donnelly, sent his superiors a memo advising that “it may be time for us to go out and get ourselves a black astronaut from the Air Force or Navy (assuming these branches have qualified pilot candidates).”
In 1976, NASA finally acted in response to the pressure and took steps to make its astronaut corps reflect the country it served. The agency launched a campaign targeting historically black colleges and drew up lists of qualified women to be wooed. In 1978, from 8,037 applicants, of whom 1,142 were women, NASA chose its first six female astronauts. (There were also three non-white men in the group of thirty-five candidates selected.)
One of the women in that group was Shannon Lucid, who had a doctorate in chemistry and would go on to international fame in 1996 when she spent 188 days on the Russian space station Mir . Lucid vividly remembers the introduction of the Mercury 7 in 1959, when she was a college chemistry student. “I couldn’t believe it when they selected the first seven. It was incredible, the feeling of anger, because there were no females included in the selection. Even though they were all military people, that didn’t justify anything. There was absolutely no reason not to have any females.”
Lucid and the other five women began astronaut training in 1978, but as NASA rotated through its astronauts (including those who had been in the agency before their recruitment) it
was five years before NASA finally employed one of them on a space mission. Astrophysicist Sally Ride was launched on the space shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983. There was massive public interest in her flight; NASA had never before faced anything like the volume of requests for media accreditation for her launch. Ride tried in vain to keep the discussion to her mission, not her gender. She insisted she was just one of the crew, and indeed she performed exactly as the other astronauts did on the mission. But when she landed, NASA had a protocol officer on hand to present Ride (and only Ride) with a bouquet of roses and carnations as she stepped out of the shuttle. An angry Ride refused to accept the flowers, and then was criticized for her surliness in the press.
NASA’s subsequent rounds of new astronaut candidates always included at least one woman and one visible minority. Slowly the astronaut corps began to diversify, and there was rarely a shuttle mission without either a woman or a nonwhite man on the crew. In 1992, Mae Jemison (a medical doctor who is also a chemical engineer) became the first woman of color in space. But Jemison, and all the American women who went into space before her, were “mission specialists”: scientists and researchers. They flew on the shuttle. But they didn’t fly it.
Then in 1994, there was big news indeed: NASA announced that a United States Air Force flier decorated for service in Grenada and elsewhere would pilot a mission the next year. Her name was Eileen Collins, and she was the first woman to take the controls of an American spacecraft. The FLATs heard about her assignment on the evening news and thought, finally.