The Best Science Books of 2016
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12.
HIDDEN FIGURES
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“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But
a woman! What more can you ask to be?”astronomer
Maria Mitchell, who paved
the way for women in American science,
admonished the first class of female astronomers at Vassar in 1876. By the
middle of the next century, a team of unheralded women scientists and engineers
were powering
space exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Meanwhile, across the continent and in what
was practically another country, a parallel but very different revolution was
taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of black female
mathematicians, scientists, and engineers were steering early space exploration
and helping American win the Cold War at NASA’s Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia.
Long before the term “computer” came to
signify the machine that dictates our lives, these remarkable women were
working as human “computers” — highly skilled professional reckoners, who
thought mathematically and computationally for their living and for their
country. When Neil Armstrong set his foot on the moon, his “giant leap for
mankind” had been powered by womankind, particularly by Katherine Johnson — the
“computer” who calculated Apollo 11’s launch windows and who was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama at age 97 in 2015, three years
after the accolade was conferred upon John Glenn, the astronaut whose flight
trajectory Johnson had made possible.
In Hidden
Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly tells the untold
story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our cultural leaps
and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call history.
She writes:
Just as islands — isolated places with
unique, rich biodiversity — have relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so
does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past
turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life.
Against a sobering cultural backdrop,
Shetterly captures the enormous cognitive dissonance the very notion of these
black female mathematicians evokes:
Before a computer became an inanimate
object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed
the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme
Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established
that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics,
space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as
female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also
female.
Shetterly herself grew up in Hampton, which
dubbed itself “Spacetown USA,” amid this archipelago of women who were her
neighbors and teachers. Her father, who had built his first rocket in his early
teens after seeing the Sputnik launch, was one of Langley’s African American
scientists in an era when words we now shudder to hear were used instead of
“African American.” Like him, the first five black women who joined Langley’s
research staff in 1943 entered a segregated NASA — even though, as Shetterly
points out, the space agency was among the most inclusive workplaces in the
country, with more than fourfold the percentage of black scientists and
engineers than the national average.
Over the next forty years, the number of
these trailblazing black women mushroomed to more than fifty, revealing the
mycelia of a significant groundswell. Shetterly’s favorite Sunday school
teacher had been one of the early computers — a retired NASA mathematician
named Kathleen Land. And so Shetterly, who considers herself “as much a product
of NASA as the Moon landing,” grew up believing that black women simply
belonged in science and space exploration as a matter of course — after all,
they populated her father’s workplace and her town, a town whose church
“abounded with mathematicians.”
Embodying astronomer Vera Rubin’s wisdom
on how
modeling expands childen’s scope of possibility, Shetterly reflects on this normalizing and rousing
power of example:
Building 1236, my father’s daily
destination, contained a byzantine complex of government-gray cubicles,
perfumed with the grown-up smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. His
engineering colleagues with their rumpled style and distracted manner seemed
like exotic birds in a sanctuary. They gave us kids stacks of discarded 11×14
continuous-form computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic arrays of numbers,
the blank side a canvas for crayon masterpieces. Women occupied many of the
cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also
made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and
other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks.
That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother’s age,
struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in
Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
[…]
The
community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well
as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors,
black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several
black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child,
however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and
engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.
But despite the opportunities at NASA, almost
countercultural in their contrast to the norms of the time, life for these
courageous and brilliant women was no idyll — persons and polities are
invariably products of their time and place. Shetterly captures the sundering
paradoxes of the early computers’ experience:
I interviewed Mrs. Land about the early
days of Langley’s computing pool, when part of her job responsibility was
knowing which bathroom was marked for “colored” employees. And less than a week
later I was sitting on the couch in Katherine Johnson’s living room, under a
framed American flag that had been to the Moon, listening to a
ninety-three-year-old with a memory sharper than mine recall segregated buses,
years of teaching and raising a family, and working out the trajectory for John
Glenn’s spaceflight. I listened to Christine Darden’s stories of long years
spent as a data analyst, waiting for the chance to prove herself as an
engineer. Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only
black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the
chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern
workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on
the Moon.
[…]
And
while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at
the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA,
they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the
majority of Langley’s computing workforce over the years have hardly been
recognized for their contributions to the agency’s long-term success. Virginia
Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper,
covering the space program starting in 1958. “Everyone said, ‘This is a
scientist, this is an engineer,’ and it was always a man,” she said in a 1990
panel on Langley’s human computers. She never got to meet any of the women. “I
just assumed they were all secretaries,” she said.
These women’s often impossible dual task of
preserving their own sanity and dignity while pushing culture forward is
perhaps best captured in the words of African American NASA mathematician
Dorothy Vaughan:
What I changed, I could; what I
couldn’t, I endured.
Brain Pickings
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