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President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson meet in the Oval Office.
Nasa did not state publicly that it required astronauts to be experimental jet test pilots until the women came pressing for admission in 1961 . But the choice was difficult to dispute.
NASA got seven excellent pilots in its first astronauts, and the Mercury flights provided no end of tests for the mens lightning reactions and their icy calm in the face of crises. When John Glenns automatic control system failed two orbits into his trip,
Corbis/Mag
he used the manual controls to realign the capsule. Then, as the world held its breath and ground control tried desperately to figure out the problem with the lost heat shield, which seemed to have dislodged, Glenn negotiated a series of last-minute changes to procedure. Totally unrattled, he made a rough reentry, which might at any moment have seen him incinerated and landed nearly on target. In his Mercury mission in May 1963, Gordon Cooper was dogged with problems—he lost use of the key instruments, lost oxygen in the cabin, lost his automatic control and stabilization. But Cooper lined himself up perfectly for reentry; even flying manually, he managed to splash down closer than any of the other astronauts to the target of the aircraft carrier sent to pick them up. Both flights were stunning testimony to the peerless skills and the nerves of steel the two men had acquired in their years as experimental test pilots.
Their years of test piloting gave them an inside advantage, as well: men such as Bob Gilruth in the brand-new NASA office in Langley in 1938 wanted test fliers because they already spoke the language of engineering. Test pilots knew the specifications and the technical terms. They knew the designers and engineers, they were all used to working together and they integrated quickly into the Mercury project.
And, of course, these men were military pilots. There is an argument that military aviators have a set of skills that even civilian jet test pilots cannot match. “Combat flying requires an intensity and skill far beyond anything in peacetime aviation,” astronaut Buzz Aldrin wrote in his memoir. “Years later those of us who’d served in Korea were prepared for the hazards and uncertainty of space flight because we had already come to terms with fear.” Military test pilots had also provided the largest body of data then extant on how the human body functioned in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. They had shown they could work in secret and under discipline. History had accidentally prepared this small group of fliers—they had been winnowed to
an elite band by the military selection process and had already made clear that they accepted the attendant risks in the service of their country It is not hard to understand why President Dwight Eisenhower saw them as a quick solution, as the easiest pool from which to draw Americas astronauts.
None of the Mercury women had anything like that kind of flying experience. The only woman in the United States who did was Jackie Cochran, and she had never flown in combat.
Wally Schirra, pilot of the fifth Mercury mission, is still irritated today by the assertion that a group of female civilian pilots could have done as well. “I had over four carrier deployments [in] combat in Korea. [I was a] graduate of the U.S, Navy Test Pilot School, [I had] over three thousand hours in jet fighters,” he says. ‘And some of those women have the gall to say they were not given a chance to be part of the Mercury program!”
No, the women did not have military jet time. They countered that what they did have was thousands and thousands of hours in the air—in some cases, four times as many hours as the men. And in those thousands of hours, they had developed an intuitive understanding of the functioning of an aircraft, a sixth sense for problems and the unflappable calm a pilot needs to bring an ailing craft of any size safely back to ground. It was the same essential skill set in a single-engine prop plane or an F-86, the women said, and they could have learned to apply those skills to the more complicated aircraft.
This is the key point: the Mercury astronauts were taught. This was all new, this business of flying a spaceship, and whoever did it had to be taught. The Mercury men trained almost seven days a week for two straight years before their first flight. They were taught, among other things, propulsion, astrophysics, trajectory calculations, astronomy and desert survival. And they spent hundreds of hours in simulators designed to mimic spaceflight. Even so, the systems in the Mercury capsule were fully automated. There was some basis to
the jibes of test pilots such as Chuck Yeager that the astronauts were u Spam in a can.” Robert Voas, the astronaut training officer, constructed his curriculum around the idea that the astronaut would in fact be involved only if the regular system failed. Voas’s primary goal in training was to desensitize the astronauts to stress induced by the immense G-forces or weightlessness.
Could female civilian pilots have learned to fly the capsule? Would they have needed more training than jet test pilots? Would their simulator tests have stacked up as well as the men’s? There is no way of knowing, for despite Jerrie Cobb’s years of requests, no female pilot ever got to make even one simulator run.
When the House hearings were over, after Jackie Cochran had delivered her damning testimony and all the snide headlines about “Astro-nettes” were written, it was easy to forget that there was ever any serious reason to include women in the United States astronaut program.
Randy Lovelace and Donald Flickinger began the project for sound scientific reasons in 1959. And yet the letters collected in the NASA archives, in Jackie Cochran’s vast trove of papers, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s files all make it clear: the Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees were never going into space—not on an American rocket. Early on, the men who ran the space agency made their decision. They wanted no women involved. And they let the whole drama play out over several years in the public theater without ever reevaluating that decision.
So what grounded them, these thirteen dedicated women in prime physical shape, with thousands of hours flying all kinds of aircraft in all types of conditions? What really kept them out of the space program? Why couldn’t they change NASA’s mind? Sexism, certainly—but also the lethal combination of the personalities involved.
Jerrie Cobb was not a natural leader of women. She was shy, never comfortable in public and very much a loner. She saw herself as leader of the group, but she did the tests ahead of and apart from them, and after the congressional hearing she narrowed the focus of her campaign to her own spaceflight. In truth, she believed that she was best qualified. And while there can be no doubt that her desire to see the United States have this space first was rooted in entirely genuine patriotism, she also wanted desperately to be that woman herself. To make that flight, to see the curve of the earth and the black daytime sky, just as she had dreamed since her first flight as a child. While she tolerated reporters and their inane questions, Jerrie had by her early thirties developed an addiction to her public profile, to achievements and to recognition. She wanted this one for herself. Had she been willing to keep the terms framed around a research project on a large group of women, had she even been able to bring herself to work with Jackie Cochran (accepting, initially, more circumscribed terms for the project than she herself thought best), the rest of the women might have got much further.
Jerries naivete and her intensely personal response to the denial also helped to ensure that the idea of female astronauts was increasingly marginalized by the political figures who might, when the initial uproar died away, have been willing to entertain the possibility. Jerries correspondence with James Webb, Hugh Dryden and Lyndon Johnson through her years of lobbying is almost painful to read. She was deaf to, or chose to ignore, the all-but-overt dismissals from the men. Her letters grew more and more obsessive and desperate—until there was an almost audible “not again” tone in Webb’s replies as he was obliged, once more, to tell Jerrie she still could not be an astronaut. Aides in Kennedy’s and Johnson’s offices immediately shunted her letters to the space agency for handling; Webb eventually started passing them to flunkies in the public relations office. The miracle, in fact, is that after the first year anyone was answering
her at all. She was relentlessly persistent, and her pleas were impassioned, colored with an emotion and a religious fervor quite out of step with NASA’s formal scientific tone. “I hope you don’t mind if I keep trying, ’cause this means more to me than life itself,” she wrote to Webb in October 1962, a letter with a sort of sweet innocence to it that was entirely alien from the rest of the brisk, professional correspondence that crossed his desk.
Even had NASA been willing to concede that Jerrie had a point about including women in the astronaut program for scientific purposes, it is doubtful the agency would have handed the controls of a Mercury capsule to someone with her mono- maniacal ardor. Her relentless faith-fueled campaign reinforced the men’s preconceived ideas about women’s reactions and their place in a serious scientific endeavor. While the Mercury men’s practical jokes and prodigious drinking were seen as confirmation that they had the character for this kind of job, Jerries emotions played right into the then-popular idea of female “hysteria” and lack of control.
Jerrie was further discredited by her miscalculations of the politics involved. Her constant emphasis on the idea that the United States needed the “first” launching a woman—which seemed to her more politically palatable than anything based on charges of “discrimination” or even the need for scientific assessment of female response to space travel—simply served to underscore her distance from NASA. The space agency, of course, was emphatically denying that it was in a race. NASA’s historian, Roger Launius, explains that while the intention of the Soviet space program was constantly to one-up the Americans (as, for example, in 1965, when the Russians sent cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov on the first space walk just weeks before a long-planned, publicly announced space walk by American Ed White), the United States eschewed any such game. “They said this from the top right down to the bottom, over and over and over and over again,” Launius says. “Everybody in a management position
said this: we are not trying to match one for one what the Soviets are doing. We have a program, it’s well established, it looks out several years, its got missions associated with it, it’s got different spacecraft, and were going to systematically pursue that program. And whatever the Soviets do, they do.” Jerrie no doubt thought she was arguing on NASA’s terms, with her earnest talk of propaganda value, but in fact she was only emphasizing her own remove from the agency’s thinking.
Jerries personality was one part of the equation that kept the women grounded. Another was the character of the man who first got her involved. In his letters to Jackie Cochran, Randy Lovelace placed more emphasis on the research nature of his undertaking, and to James Webb at NASA, he deliberately downplayed its seriousness. But to the thirteen women directly involved, he talked about “women astronauts.” Almost certainly, Lovelace was not intentionally misleading; he likely did not realize the impact of his words on the women to whom he wrote. The idea of testing and training women had sound scientific underpinnings and seemed reasonable to him, certainly worth pursuing, so he did. Working from his fiefdom in Albuquerque, Lovelace had little patience for the bureaucracy and departmental rivalries that consumed Washington. At a time when NASA was plagued by politicos (and some flight surgeons) who questioned the wisdom of launching even one person, Lovelace was talking to his staff about a near future when large crews of men and women would live for extended periods of time in space and carry out all manner of scientific experiments. He was thinking big.
In a tribute to Randy Lovelace six months after his death, Brig. Gen. Ernest Pinson said the space doctor “had a rare talent for visualizing the significant actions required to be done now— for future needs.” University of New Mexico historian Jake Spidle, who has written a history of Lovelace and his foundation, says Randy had “a sure grasp of the structure and workings of the
nations military establishment” and a was able to move swiftly and easily through (and sometimes around) the government bureaucracy relying on his knowledge of the system as well as the assistance of his personal acquaintances.” It might have been those qualities that prompted Lovelace to gather a group of the country’s top female pilots for testing in I960. He was also a man with a keen appreciation for his own sense of vision, and so he began almost immediately to talk to those women about his a women-in-space program,” detailing future plans without any confirmation he could in fact deliver on them. But Lovelace was no social revolutionary: when the issue heated up, he ducked out of the fight, intent on preserving his personal interests. And he was killed before he ever had a chance to show if he would resume his plans for women in space.
And of course it was Lovelace who brought the incendiary element of Jackie Cochran into the mix. As intensely patriotic as Jerrie Cobb, Jackie wanted to see the United States victorious in the space race. She genuinely believed it was right that men should go first, and women follow, and that to insert women, simply because they were women, into the space program might damage the national interest. Jackie might also have been concerned, as she was with the WASP, that a rush program to put women into space would not really open doors, but rather only be, in her words, a “flash in the pan.” Jackie was both politically astute and intensely conservative. She saw only negative repercussions from a public fight over an obviously doomed issue, and she saw no point in pushing a program that had opposition at the highest levels.
But Jackie also had more personal motives for the way she handled the women-in-space issue. She wanted her status as the country’s top female aviator to go unchallenged. When Sarah Gorelick heard Jackie yelling at Dr. Lovelace at the clinic, she certainly sensed the depth of Jackie’s frustration at not being part of the program herself, and her intention to keep control of it.
Jerrie Cobb says today that she felt it, too, in her rare face-to-face meetings with Jackie. “I knew her help could be beneficial to the program. But she considered me a stumbling block since she really wanted to be the first woman in space and be in charge of the whole program. . . . Her whole attitude was, I’m going to be in charge, and if I don’t get to go, no woman will, for a long, long time.” Jackie’s scheming on behalf of the Dietrich twins, and her campaign against Jerrie, suggest a relentless determination to manage the program if she could not herself be the first female astronaut. Jackie had been a generous and devoted friend to Randy Lovelace, and had done much to engineer the advancement of his career. But as he discovered on the subject of women in space, there were some things on which Jackie brooked no opposition. For all that she was warm and protective of Lovelace, she was also jealous and spiteful.
And powerful. She pushed all the right buttons, setting herself up in contrast to Jerrie when she was troublesome and making sure all the men in power knew Jackie was on their side. In her lobby against allowing women into the astronaut program, she carefully chose palatable language, then exploited her personal connections to make her views known. She had her positions vetted by NASA and the air force before she made them public, and she went over Lovelace’s head to take control of the issue, putting herself forward as an alternative to Jerrie Cobb as NASA’s public face on the issue. Her letters to the space insiders from that era are masterful, making casual reference to her connections and her positions of influence, combining powerful arguments with invitations to vacation at her ranch.
Jackie cherished her membership in the boys’ club. Women had less power, and so she eschewed their company. She didn’t race women, she didn’t fly with them and she didn’t like spending time with them. She wrote candidly in her autobiography that she “preferred the company of men. Men liked me. I liked being with them.” Glennis Yeager, the wife of pilot Chuck Yeager,
and one of Jackie’s few female friends, said “[Jackie] couldn’t stand women . . . [she] would get annoyed if any women’s groups invited her to give a talk. ‘What do I have in common with a bunch of damned housewives?’ she would complain.”
Certainly Jackie saw herself as unique in the field of female pilots. “The chances were that if a woman had been selected for [training as a professional pilot], before she had returned any profit on the heavy investment in such training, she would have converted herself into a wife and mother and stopped working.” She chose, she said, to be one of the rare women who dedicated herself entirely to flying—a statement that disregards the vast personal fortune that allowed Jackie to maintain her role as Floyd Odium’s wife and her business obligations and still keep flying.
Jackie’s performance in the hearing on qualifications for astronauts was not unique. She worked against her fellow women in aviation in 1950 in a report on women in the air force, saying that she didn’t think they belonged there at all, but if they did, then they had to be “attractive” women (in the same way that she screened her WASPs, lest anyone get “the wrong idea” about them). And in 1975, Jackie went to Congress once more, to lobby against the opening of the military academies to female students. This, too, was a position supported by her male friends in the military brass—although it put her in direct opposition to Jeanne Holm, director of the Women in the Air Force. Jackie told the hearing that the proper role for women in American society was “mother and housewife” and, invoking her experience with the WASP, said that women had no role in the military in peacetime. (On this issue, Congress didn’t listen to her.) Jackie later spoke out repeatedly and forcefully against women serving in combat roles in the armed forces—while she stated at different times that women could fly as well as men, she constantly emphasized gender differences. “If for no other reason than because women are the bearers of children, they should not be in combat,” she said in 1978. “Imagine your daughter as a ground
soldier, sleeping in the fields and expected to do all the things that soldiers have to do. It presents to me an absolute horror.”
Jackies own identity was built on her rare admission to the power brokers’ inner circle. Presidents consulted her, generals were afraid of her and everybody saw the advantage of having her on their side in a fight. That power, calculated on the most traditional of scales, gave her a great sense of gratification. She clearly relished the attention that came with her public persona: her entries in Who’s Who and Current Biography grew year by year to cover several columns, listing every award and every record. In her collected papers, housed today in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, she has saved what appears to be every single article that ever mentioned her name, including copies of the same wire service story from hundreds of different newspapers. Wielding the influence she did came with a price, and it was one Jackie was willing to pay. In the hearing on qualifications for astronauts, she belittled her WASPs as prone to running off and getting married just as soon as she was finished training them—she sold out the project that had been one of her great accomplishments, in defense of NASA. To continue to be in the club, to fly the big air force planes and to be able to get the president on the line when she wanted him, she had to toe their line. It is doubtful that Jackie herself recognized, or allowed herself to recognize, any distinction between her own position and that mandated by the Washington power brokers. She certainly never saw herself as a pawn.
The idea that the FLATs were stabbed in the back by one of their own plays conveniently into the popular notion of a “cat fight,” of the stereotype of conflict between powerful women. But in many ways Jackie was as much a pawn as any of the thirteen: she had to play by the rules if she wanted to stay in the boys’ club. Could she have done more? If she had been able to see past her own emotional response, and her need to defend her insider status, she might well have made some difference to the
twenty years it took to get an American woman into space. Jackie had, as she made very clear, peerless political connections. She had repeatedly demonstrated in the past (as one of the first women in the Bendix, with the WASPs, with her flight through the sound barrier) that she could make extraordinary things happen when she wanted to.
If Jerrie Cobb had been more politically astute, if Jackie Cochran had been less conservative and more generous, if Randy Lovelace had lived—the drama of the women-in-space program might have played out differently. But it is nonetheless unlikely that the women would have realized their dream of spaceflight. In the larger picture, the women were grounded for one simple reason: they stepped outside the boundaries of the accepted roles for women in their time.
In the Cold War era, foreign policy was based on a masculine warrior ideology. President Kennedy spoke to his advisers about the ‘Virility” of American engagement and the “emasculation” of the Soviets. He advocated aggressive action—as, for example, in his showdown with the Russians in the Cuban missile crisis. The political elite that drafted the policy, and the military and intelligence services that carried it out, were led by and almost entirely staffed by men. Womens patriotic duty, in this context, was to stay home and run comfortable homes, visibly demonstrating the merits of the capitalist system that brought them washing machines and dishwashers.
The aerospace industry, the pinnacle of scientific achievement in both civilian and military life in the early 1960s, was maintained as a male preserve—and, implicitly, as a field of the highest status. NASA wanted not just test pilots, but experimental jet test pilots from the military, the elite of fliers, to reinforce the new space agency’s own cutting-edge image. Astronauts, too, were from the moment of their invention essentially and incontrovertibly
male. They were the new warriors in the Cold War fight. In their book Moon Shot , two of the Mercury 7, Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, conclude a lengthy discussion of the necessary qualities for astronauts with the single line, “And, of course, no women, thank you.” The job and its requirements were hypermasculine— astronauts were portrayed as having almost mythic amounts of courage and extraordinary skill, an elusive package immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his 1979 best-seller as “the right stuff. ”
Where Jerrie Cobb and the FLATs saw an opportunity for their country to show off the strength of its women, Kennedy and the NASA chiefs flatly rejected the idea of sending a woman to do a job that had been institutionalized very much as a mans. They saw any such move as completely counterproductive in terms of the image they were trying to foster. CIA records show NASA had solid information about the Soviet intention to launch a female cosmonaut months before Valentina Tereshkovas flight, but this did not alter American plans at all. Fler flight was the first Soviet space “first” that the Americans did not push to match—unlike Sputnik or the Yuri Gagarin launch or the multiday missions, they let this one go. This wasn’t an achievement. “NASA thought the Russians were wusses,” historian Debbie Douglas says succinctly.
And it wasn’t just NASA that opposed flying women: many American citizens did too. James Webb got plenty of letters advising him to, in the words of one Miss Irma Reynolds of Alabama, “keep the women out of the space flight—damn crazy thing.” Many people thought the women who were petitioning to be allowed into the space program were unnatural and making highly inappropriate demands. When her involvement in the women-in-space program was made public, Jean Hixson, for one, suddenly found herself at odds with one of her closest friends, Betty Gillies, a founder of the 99s with whom Jean had flown as a WASP. In September 1962, Betty wrote Jean a long, heartfelt letter discouraging her from publicly pushing for the
program, saying the whole idea was in fact dangerous to American national interest. a J°fm Glenn, by his spectacular orbital flight and by his outstanding personality, has given the young men of our country a new world to enter and opened up a new field in which this generation can strive to become heroes,” Betty wrote. “To reach the top of accomplishment—to be able to wear with great pride the NASA wings—to be a part of a great expedition into the unknown—to be respected and admired for ones courage and ability—this is what our young men need. Somehow I feel that a great deal of the inspiration, the inspiration to be brave and strong, would be killed by the mere existence of women space pilots!!!! . . . Now we have a whole new generation of young men to work with and I cant help but feel that the field of space should be theirs and theirs alone for a while—it should not be ‘belittled’ by the intrusion of women.”
Betty’s stab at psychoanalysis may not have been far off: the men who ran NASA didn’t like the idea of including women, and their public comments suggest that the Mercury 7 didn’t care much for it either. The astronauts were men with big egos made even more arrogant by the wave of adulation that greeted their achievements. Even the suggestion rankled, that women, a group of female civilian pilots, might be able to equal their achievements.
The FLATs were trying to break into the tightest of the boys’ clubs. The Mercury 7 had pinups taped in the ready room and centerfold girls in their flight plans. They raced Corvettes, drank fiendishly and were wildly promiscuous. When Alan Shepard finally made it to the moon, he smuggled a golf club and some balls aboard the Apollo 14 and did a few unplanned putts in zero gravity—provoking much hilarity and head shaking back in Houston. Wernher von Braun, then at the Marshall Space Flight Center, cracked up an audience at Mississippi State College in 1962 with this line: “Another question that I am frequently asked is this: ‘Do you ever plan to use women astronauts in your
space program?’ Well, all I can say is that the male astronauts are all for it. And as my friend Bob Gilruth says, ‘Were reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.’”
Chief astronomer Nancy Roman, the only woman in an executive job at NASA in 1961, says that the people on her side of the shop were “open-minded and cooperative.” But in astronaut territory, almost everyone had come over from the military: “It was a boys’ club, it was a testosterone-fueled culture.” While she says the decision that military test pilots were best qualified was probably quite a sound one, Roman also says it would not likely have occurred to anyone in the Manned Space Flight department to consider flying women.
Once the successful launches of the men removed the need to fly a lighter woman, the idea was never raised again. Once a few men had survived the trip, the department of Manned Space Flight did not say, Now we should fly some women and see how they hold up, or, Now we need comparative data on female bodies. Debbie Douglas notes that while Gilruth and his colleagues made a logical decision that they wanted test pilots, there is inherent sexism in the fact that they never noticed they were stipulating qualifications that automatically excluded women. “It never occurred to them that women would want to be astronauts.”
Except, perhaps, for humor value. NASA’s astronaut training officer Robert Voas gave a speech to a YMCA gathering in February 1963 in which he derided the rumored Russian intention to fly a woman, then made a string of jokes about female astronauts. “If you made a woman leave her purse behind, you would achieve some weight-saving over using a man,” he cracked, then noted that telling a female astronaut she looked fat would probably also help to cut back the payload. Voas championed the role of secretaries in keeping NASA functioning, and concluded, “I think we all look forward to the time when women will be a part of our space
flight team, for when this times arrives, it will mean that man will really have found a home in space—for the woman is the personification of the home.” As historian Margaret Weitekamp explains it, NASA saw womens place in space coming only when it had been “domesticated—rendered safe and routine,” not while it was still a Cold War frontier.
Neither side in the Cold War battle was really prepared to see women succeed in this environment. When Valentina Tereshkova made her historic spaceflight, she was widely reported (in 1963 and for years afterward) to have been incompetent, to have been crippled by space sickness or to have “gone to pieces” in the air, to have been unable to complete her mission. But in reexamining of the Soviet space program in recent years, historians now concede the reports of her mission were “hypercritical.” She was nauseated for a time, had some trouble with an initial attempt to steer the capsule and disobeyed a few minor orders. But she experienced no truly significant problems. Space historian Asif Siddiqi writes that “part of this hostility toward Tereshkova was clearly because she was a woman. The standards by which all the engineers, physicians and military officers judged her performance were completely different than for the men. [Second man in space Gherman] Titov, who had suffered severe motion sickness and was unable to do many of the tasks assigned to him during his mission, was never considered a pariah after his flight.”
Roger Launius, NASA’s historian, does not dispute that there was gender bias within the agency in the early years. But he can also see the perspective that Robert Gilruth and other decisionmakers likely brought to the discussion about women in space. “To be kind, they’re doing something that’s never been done. This is really unprecedented. And they’ve got a whole lot of stuff on their plate. And they are saturated. They are growing very quickly. They are being asked to do tasks that are unprecedented both from a technical perspective and every other way you can
think of.” They did not know if they could get a man into space and then whether that man could survive there, and the clock was ticking. And after May 25, 1961, when John Kennedy pledged the country to a moon mission, NASA became streamlined and entirely focused on that goal. “And their response would be, okay, lets deal with what we’ve got on our plate and well worry about anything else down the road.” Launius cautions against evaluating the decision-making entirely on modern standards. “It was a different time and a different place and these people were doing a specific job and this [using women] probably didn’t necessarily enter into their thinking at the time. . . . They probably didn’t consider themselves social revolutionaries. That might be enough of a reason.” But as Launius himself points out, the only people who could answer those questions with certainty have died, and it is not the sort of discussion or idea that is preserved in the official record.
Additionally, of course, there was this whole question of losing a woman. The country might have been behind NASA in the space race, but the administrators never lost the sense that the public support and the federal funding were precarious. Losing an astronaut would be bad—but losing a female astronaut would be a complete disaster. Jerrie Cobb argued it would be no different than losing John Glenn or any of the men (just as Amelia Earhart had to argue, in the first Powder Puff Derby in 1929, that the death of a female pilot was no different from the death of a male one). But Jerrie had even less success with that argument than Amelia did: many people felt that a dead female astronaut would be very different indeed in the eyes of the American public. Military test pilots went to work every day with, to some degree, an expectation that they might not come home. There were periods in the early 1950s when almost a pilot a week was killed at Edwards Air Force Base. These were men expected to take risks, men who were in fact paid to risk their lives each day.
Scott Carpenter said in the 1960s, when asked about female astronauts, “were protecting the space program” by not risking women. Mercury 7 Flight Director Christopher Kraft elaborated forty years later. “What we wanted were people who were used to putting their lives on the line daily and making in-flight decisions that would not be tainted by fear. Had we lost a woman back then because we decided to fly a woman rather than a man, we would have been castrated.” Launius, drawing on the reaction to the 1967 fire in Apollo 1 that killed three astronauts and even on the reaction to the space shuttle Challenger deaths in 1987 (which heavily emphasized the loss of teacher Christa McAuliffe), says it is genuinely questionable whether the space agency would have survived the loss of a female astronaut in the climate of the early 1960s.
And there may be another clue in the fate of John Glenn. After his first successful orbital flight, Glenn repeatedly pushed to fly another mission. “But a flight assignment didn’t come,” Glenn wrote in his own autobiography. “I began to get frustrated sitting at a desk, so I asked Bob Gilruth when I might expect to get another flight. Bob said headquarters didn’t want me to go up again, at least not yet. Later, author Richard Reeves wrote that President Kennedy had decreed that I was too much of a national asset to risk on a second flight, but I had no inkling of that at the time, and have never known whether it was true.” Launius says there is no paper trail to support this, but that it is something Glenn might well have been told. The same president who would not risk losing a hero might have been equally reluctant to risk a dimpled pilot with a long, blond ponytail. Certainly the Soviets grounded Yuri Gagarin after his historic first mission, and made no secret of the fact that they were not going to risk losing an international symbol. His experience, and Glenn’s, suggest that the political decision-makers considered the composition of astronaut crews with the same gravity as did the technical planners in the Office of Manned Space Flight.
In the end, the decision that the FLATs would never get a chance to fly was made by James Webb, NASA’s administrator, and his deputy, Hugh Dryden. It was Dryden who penned the letter to the navy in October 1961 that canceled the testing at Pensacola: “the purpose of these tests was to indicate generally the potential of women as future astronauts. In confirmation of discussions that have already taken place between our staffs, NASA does not at this time have a requirement for such a program.” It is a telling phrase, that “in conversations between our staffs”: although there is almost no paper record of NASA’s role, the men in the most senior posts at the space agency had clearly talked about this issue.
NASA took the line that the agency knew nothing about the women-in-space program until suddenly its administrators were called to account for it in front of Congress in 1962. Chris Kraft articulated this stock position forty years later in his autobiography Flight. “Lovelace . . . allowed some female volunteers to go through his tests without our concurrence. One of them was the wife of a U.S. Senator, and before long we were being dragged through the ‘Why no woman astronauts?’ controversy. Nobody seemed to understand that President Eisenhower had ordered us to pick astronauts from active-duty military test pilots, and none of them were women. We had our orders, and the subject of including women never came up until it was raised by outsiders.”
In truth, NASA knew much earlier. Lovelace had made the results of his tests on Jerrie Cobb public in August 1960. That made headlines—and in fact a month later NASA was moved to issue an official denial that it was actively training women. In addition, Lovelace almost certainly discussed his plans with his colleagues on the Life Sciences Committee. In April 1960, Jerrie Cobb was tested on the MASTIF at a NASA facility. In May 1961, Jerrie herself wrote to Webb to update him on the progress of the tests. A month later, NASA’s own public relations department had received enough questions about women and their
acceptance into the space program that the staff wanted to know the official position. G. Dale Smith, assistant director for program planning in the Office of Life Sciences, appealed to George Low, the director of Spacecraft and Flight Missions, explaining his problem: ‘women fall within the physically qualified; therefore, there must be other valid reasons why or why not we are to use women in our space flight program.” Low directed him to explain that women were not de facto excluded but that no women who were test pilots had applied. Finally, Lovelace provided Webb with an exhaustive description of his program and its purposes in a letter in September 1961. By then, of course, the space agency had already acted to stop the program, but it is clear that NASA knew all about it long before the subject ever got to Congress in 1962.
Neither Webb nor Dryden is still alive and they left no record of their thoughts on this subject, other than their letters in reply to Jerrie Cobbs petitions. And so one must take the explanation in those letters at face value—that NASA had all the astronauts it needed and saw no reason to bring women, whose qualifications were considered inferior, into a program already under great pressure. But the thinking of the space agency czars was right in line with that of their own bosses: neither Kennedy nor Johnson wanted to see this happen. Jerrie Cobb might have come away from her meeting with the then vice president optimistic about his support. But in truth, Johnson was deeply offended by this campaign by a couple of pushy women who thought they should get into the space program.
While he would later move forward a number of pieces of legislation aimed at combating discrimination against women, the idea of female pilots in the space program did not sit well with LBJs vision of what women ought to be doing. He was raised in the rural South, and he once wrote an editorial that said the highest form of emotion was the love a man should give his mother. He was an inveterate philanderer, who regularly
seduced his young aides and secretaries. He liked women who were pretty and stylish—but his world of politics and power was entirely male. Jerri Sloan saw LBJ at a Democratic party function her mother dragged her to shortly after the congressional hearing. “I braved the chauvinist pig in his den, I walked up to him and I said, Sir, I’m Prissy Springers daughter.’” Here she does rather a good imitation of the former president. “‘Well, how-dee do, you’re as purty a little thing as your mother.’ I said, ‘You know, sir, that I was one of the women that passed the astronaut tests. You were head of the space bureau as vice president—I’m surprised that you didn’t back the program to include us. I was very disappointed, sir, in you.’ And so he said, ‘Well, well,’ in his way, ’cause he was a typical man of his generation, patted me on the back and looked down at me smiled and said, ‘Well, honey, I know yo’ daddy didn’t want you doing anything that dangerous—why, little lady, you could swoon\ ’ and I said, ‘Sir, with all due respect, and I think your daughters will bear me out, women haven’t swooned since they took off those damn corsets!’ And he just chuckled and walked off.”
Jerri didn’t know it, but Johnson had indeed once held in his hands an opportunity to give them crucial support—he might well have totally changed the course of the women-in-space program. On March 14, 1962, two days before Jerrie Cobb and Janey Hart were scheduled to meet with him, Johnson’s assistant Liz Carpenter prepared some background notes for him, explaining the women’s position: “They claim: 1) women have as much sense as Enos the monkey; 2) outer space is not for men only; 3) Russia is planning to put a woman in outer space and the U.S. should get there first.”
A dozen women had passed the grueling astronaut tests, Carpenter wrote. “But they cannot get additional training from Lovelace, the Navy or the Air Force, until NASA says it is okay to proceed with them. Jerrie Cobb saw Jim Webb and Mrs. Hart
describes him as ‘sympathetic but not willing to say yes or no at this time.’ She thinks a word from you would help.”
Carpenter had done her homework; she got a former Johnson aide who had gone over to work for the space agency to sound out Hugh Dryden on the subject. The aide reported that Dryden said orbital flight was still too dangerous for any but military test pilots who had the engineering background to allow them to take over the controls if they had to. Dryden sent word they would consider a woman who had those qualifications—and left the door open. “As orbital flight becomes more routine we can relax these rules.”
Carpenter had assessed this situation, given the growing tide of support for the womens movement, and she thought it was clear what Johnson ought to do. “I think you could get a good press out of this if you can tell Mrs. Hart and Miss Cobb something affirmative. The story about women astronauts is getting a big play and I hate for them to come here and not go away with some encouragement.”
She had drafted a letter from Johnson to James Webb, and she recommended the vice president show it to Jerrie and Janey and then sign it and send it off. “Dear Jim,” the letter began:
I have conferred with Mrs. Philip Hart and Miss Jerrie Cobb concerning their effort to get women utilized as astronauts. I’m sure you agree that sex should not be a reason for disqualifying a candidate for orbital flight.
Could you advise me whether NASA has disqualified anyone because of being a woman?
As I understand it, two principal requirements for orbital flight at this stage are: 1) that the individual be experienced at high speed military test flying; and 2) that the individual have an engineering background enabling him to take over controls in the event it became necessary.
Would you advise me whether there are any women who meet these qualifications?
If not, could you estimate for me the time when orbital flight will have become sufficiently safe that these two requirements are no longer necessary and larger numbers of individuals may qualify?
I know we both are grateful for the desire to serve on the part of these women, and look forward to the time when they can.
Sincerely,
Lyndon B. Johnson
But Johnson did not show the letter to Jerrie and Janey. Nor did he sign it. In fact, Carpenters mild missive seems to have infuriated him. In heavy one-inch handwriting, he wrote “Let's stop this now!" across the bottom of the letter, and then beneath that, the preemptory instruction, “File .” The letter was diligently filed, and thus the one record that inadvertently shows the strength of opposition at the highest levels to the idea of women in space was preserved in Johnsons archives.
This was a time of great political change, and Johnson saw himself as a champion of equality for women. But what these women wanted fell far outside the bounds of what was acceptable. Space was the domain of astronauts, and astronauts were men.
There is an irony in this—for Lyndon Johnson was one of the first champions of the idea of affirmative action. If there is one lingering lesson from the FLATs’ story, it is that a talented individual, even an extraordinarily skilled individual, can get only so far if the system is stacked against her. These women achieved things few other women in their society did, often in the face of considerable obstacles. But at a certain point, they could go no further: they could not overcome the systemic discrimination. They could not, for example, qualify as jet test pilots when women were barred from the air force. Without recourse to legal
action, they could not change those rules. Without the lawsuits and the legislated changes that opened most of these fields to women (some, such as active ground combat, are still off limits today), it might have taken much longer than twenty years for the doors to space to be opened to women.
Astronaut Eileen Collins says kindly that she believes the women’s fight in the 1960s made the road a little smoother for her generation of astronaut candidates. “The Mercury women—they wouldn’t call it a success, but I would say there was some success in there,” she says. “Their success had a direct bearing on our generation of astronauts. They didn’t succeed in the end in getting selected as astronauts, but they showed that they could compete as well as the men.” But in the end it was not the women’s superior performance on the tests, or their fight in Congress, that opened those doors. It was the efforts of the larger women’s movement that eventually succeeded in making it illegal to keep women out of a job purely on the basis of their gender.
Janey Hart, an early feminist, saw this clearly in the sixties. But few of the other women did. Jackie Cochran preferred to manipulate the existing system, and keep herself defined as the one woman to whom the rules did not apply. Jerrie Cobb believed she could achieve her goal of spaceflight based purely on her own extraordinary qualifications and her force of will. Neither she nor the other Lovelace women seemed to realize, then, that they would not get the opportunities they wanted so badly until society, the whole system, changed—not just one office at NASA.
As one might expect of twelve different people, the FLATs hold a variety of views about what kept them grounded. Some blame the individual actors, and some blame the era. Most of all, they feel that in this, as in so many things in their lives, they were
ahead of their time. They were pushing to get into a club that was not ready to open its doors to women.
Irene Leverton believes it was sexism, pure and simple. “That’s why they kept us out of Pensacola: if we could have gone there and got a few hours of jet time and shown that we could do that just as well, that would have shown them up.” K Cagle blames Jerrie Cobb for irritating the powers that were; Jerrie was obsessed with the idea that NASA owed her a ride, K says, and alienated the space agency to the point that none of the others had a chance to get in the door later. Today she still believes that if the program had been turned over to Jackie Cochran, they might have got their chance.
B Steadman is one of the few women who knew Jackie personally; Jackie and Floyd used to travel in their mobile home (to accommodate Floyd’s arthritis) to visit B and Bob in Michigan. B had immense respect for Jackie and her accomplishments, and while she acknowledges that Jackie could be harsh, B always believed that was a “shell,” a cover for the insecure person inside. It still saddens B that Jackie did not come to their defense in Congress. “I was really disappointed with Cochran. I thought, Damn, you know, of all the times for her to act so stupidly, this was just not it. We needed her help, but she just backed away from it totally.” B believes Jackie was too accomplished to be jealous, that she must have acted on information she was hearing in Washington, that she really believed that incorporating women would somehow have jeopardized the space agency. And B thinks that Jackie was mimicking the prevailing attitude of the men, who did not want women involved. “In the testimony that Glenn gave, he gave NASA every reason to simply say no, and then when Cochran came in and said what she did, she just buoyed him up, and I think at that point they just said, well, okay, if the women don’t want it enough to fight for it, we don’t have to make that decision.” Glenn’s testimony, B says, reflected the predominant sentiment of the time. “Most of the men were
very much in favor of men only,’ and they said that it was because they didn’t want to kill women, but I think it was simply they didn’t want to share anything, at that time anyway. They were deities, practically.”
Jerri Sloan blames Jackie Cochran, for one. With typical frankness, Jerri calls Jackie “a self-serving, egotistical bitch” who would not brook the competition. “We were getting too big for her. She couldn’t stand it if some women were doing something she couldn’t do.” Jerri also believes the FLATs offended the egos of the men in the space program by asserting that they could do the job, and that they were fighting against the unified front of the boys’ club. She knew what they were up against: it was a long shot that they would ever be allowed to fly a spaceship in an era when she needed her husband’s permission to get a loan or buy property.
Like Jerri, Janey Hart knew Lyndon Johnson as a “Southern good of boy.” And she says James Webb, who was from Louisiana, had a similar mind-set. She was called upon to introduce Webb when he came to speak at the National Democratic Women’s Club in Washington a few years after the congressional hearing. “He gave a long speech about the dangers, all the things that could go wrong out there [in space] and at the end he said, And don’t you all worry—someday we’ll take care of you ladies.’ And I thought, You asshole.”
Many of the other women say they made a mistake by not all going to Washington to testify together. “I think in retrospect it would have meant more to Congress had we all been there,” B Steadman says. “Several of the girls had some good political contacts that could have been drawn on. . . . We should have fought harder. We had to hit them more than once. We had to prove to them with the information that was available at that time from the physicals that there was no reason to exclude women. It’s not politically good to say don’t let women in, so that was our [opening] to get in.” They should have fought all through the sixties, B says, for as long as it took. “There was no
reason why we shouldn’t have—looking back on it Janey and I both feel the same way, we just didn’t fight hard enough/’ She believes they could have changed something: “Fighting city hall, you know, that was an uphill thing, but I don’t feel we made a good enough showing. We should have just shook the paper sack until they got some sense in their heads, and then been the first with a woman in space instead of letting Tereshkova do it.”
Gene Nora Stumbough argues that the women were less qualified and there was no way anyone was going to overlook that when there were plenty of qualified men around. “I didn’t see any way that anybody was going to promote the idea of taking people basically off the street and making astronauts out of them when they had a bunch of men who were already well trained. . . . You’ve got test pilots who are engineers, so why would you go and grab a bunch of women who are not qualified and train them for seven or eight years?”
Sarah Gorelick summarizes it this way. “My theory is they just were not ready for a woman then. Public opinion at the time was that women should stay home and be protected— c My God, what if we lose one of them?’ This was the era of Kennedy and Camelot. And women were to be protected.”
They sat in the first row of the bleachers and held their breath while the night sky suddenly turned orange with flames and the ground shook beneath them. On February 3, 1993, eight of the surviving FLATs were finally at Cape Canaveral for the launch of an American rocket. They were there to watch, not to fly— astronaut Eileen Collins invited them as her guests—but thirty- five years on, the women found themselves warmly welcomed by NASA, given the highest level of clearance on their guest passes, fussed over and invited to receptions.
About the time that Collins’s shuttle pilot assignment was announced, a Hollywood movie producer named Jim Cross, who
knew Gene Nora Stumbough and had heard about the FLATs, decided to put together a documentary about their story. In the spring of 1994, he arranged for the women to meet at the 99s headquarters in Oklahoma City, the first time they had ever been assembled as a group. He also invited Collins. She came, and the women collectively fell in love with her—she is astonishingly likable: friendly, humble, easygoing and beneath all that presumably as hard as nails, as the second woman ever to earn the wings of a test pilot in the United States Air Force. Collins in turn got a kick out of the “Mercury 13,” as Cross, the producer, had taken to calling them.
“They had this magnificent thing, it was poetic,” he recalls about the Oklahoma City meeting. “They [the surviving FLATs] were fascinated beyond words to meet this woman who would carry their torch, and this was a woman fascinated to meet these women who had done so much to pave the way for her.”
The FLATs had also celebrated Sally Rides historic first trip in 1983. But Ride was an astrophysicist who performed scientific experiments on the shuttle. She was an astronaut, but she was also, to their way of thinking, a passenger. The FLATs did not feel vindicated until Collins rode the gantry elevator up the rocket and climbed into the shuttles pilot seat.
Collins was intrigued by the FLATs, NASA was finally interested, and the news media were fascinated: this was an irresistible story, these women of another era denied an opportunity. And it was a propitious time for just such a tale. There was a swell in interest in womens history in the 1990s, for one thing. A wave of anniversaries from World War II brought new attention to the WASPs, and the Mercury women were seen as their successors. The aviation industry was hurting for pilots (because with no major conflict since the Vietnam War there were far fewer coming out of the military) and, with the economic downturn, for business. A large effort to recruit women began, and that led inevitably to a revisiting of aviation
history, and the launch of several new publications devoted solely to female fliers. Eileen Collins’s attention to the FLATs was the catalyst, and there was now a wide audience eager to hear all about these women of another generation.
But that audience wanted a particular version of the story. Consistently, the press reports of the past decade say that the thirteen women were formally recruited by NASA; that they were tested and trained in secret, by order of the politically sensitive space agency; and that they were abandoned at the eleventh hour, just days from embarking on a space mission. None of this, of course, is accurate.
Why does the erroneous story endure, despite all the evidence to the contrary? “There are several things at play causing this enshrined narrative to be what it is,” says NASA’s Roger Launius, who has been obliged to consider this issue as the queries about the FLATs pour into the NASA history office. “There is a longstanding tradition in America of rooting for the underdog.” It’s a tidy, good guy-bad guy narrative, and it is easier to tell with a single, clearly delineated bad guy—NASA. In addition, the FLATs were victims of discrimination of the kind people now like to believe has been eliminated; the shocking story of their rejection allows for self-congratulatory comparison to the society that quashed them in the 1960s.
There is another little puzzle to this process of public mythmaking. The story of the FLATs was not new in the 1990s. They were all in Life in 1963. Janey Fiart attended Sally Ride’s first launch in 1983 and was quoted as one of the women denied the chance in I960. (“It is not true that we’ve come a long way, baby,”’ she told reporters. “We’ve been there all the time—it’s NASA that’s come a long way.”) A cover story in Ms. magazine in 1973 proclaimed, “Yes, We Do Have Women Astronauts”— that story was a response to frustration that women were still not being included in the civilian scientist astronaut recruitment, and it presented the dropped-by-NASA version of the story as a
shocking expose. All of this preceded the wave of attention when Eileen Collins singled them out. After that, the FLATs became the subject of two fictionalized plays, a photo exhibit, innumerable newspaper and magazine articles. A major Hollywood production company paid almost half a million dollars for the rights to tell their story (though never made the movie). Their story was discovered over and over again.
In the end, the question is not why nobody knows this story. The question is why no one can remember this story. It seems to vanish from the collective national memory each time it is told, and every time it is retold it is a revelation. “That’s societal sexism,” says aviation historian Debbie Douglas. “It’s precisely our inability to recognize these women in these positions—we can’t see them, even when we know they’re there.”