Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps: Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972–2004

• Essay on Sources
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 193-197
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Essay on Sources

Because this work tells the story of integrating women into the astronaut corps from multiple perspectives, the sources are equally varied. The majority of the book discusses some of the everyday tensions and issues that arose during selection, training, and the actual flights of the first female astronauts, making oral histories vital. Oral history interviews conducted with some of the first class of female astronauts, their male colleagues, and members of NASA management have been a key element of the research for this project. Astronauts Shannon Lucid, Rhea Seddon, and Kathy Sullivan were generous with their time and willingness to share their perspectives and experiences during their careers at NASA. In addition, the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Oral History Project has conducted interviews with JSC director Carolyn Huntoon, which were valuable in their own right, as well as helpful in preparing for specific discussions with her about the selection and the experiences of the Group VIII astronauts. Several human factors engineers at JSC generously gave their time and resources to this project. They introduced me to the NASA Standard 3000 volumes, which helped identify the factors and procedures involved in designing and maintaining the Space Shuttle and International Space Station for human occupation.

Finding archival material about the integration of women into NASA requires sifting through diverse collections. As an agency, NASA has kept good records of its activities related to equal employment opportunities in its various centers. Valuable documents that show how NASA was improving as a work environment for women and racial minorities generally exist in the NASA Headquarters History Office in Washington, D.C., in the NASA JSC archives at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and in the George M. Low Papers housed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Joseph D. Atkinson, Jr., and Jay M. Shafritz’s book The Real Stuff: A History of NASA’s Astronaut Recruitment Program (New York: Praeger, 1985) provided a compilation of data about each astronaut class, including selection criteria, through the selection of Group VIII.

In addition, NASA Headquarters and the center archives have an expanding collection on women in space. These files contained newspaper articles, transcripts, and correspondence dating from the women’s attempts to join the astronaut corps in the 1960s through the Shuttle era. The History Office also maintains a biographical file on each astronaut, containing news releases, articles, and photographs. The files for the first six women astronauts were enormously valuable. There are no biographies on or by the first six women astronauts, save a handful of children’s books on Sally Ride; the children’s book Ride wrote with Susan Okie, To Space and Back (New York: HarperCollins, 1986); and one children’s book on Shannon Lucid. In fact, only two books address the history of women in the entire history of NASA: Laura S. Woodmansee’s Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier (Burlington, ON: Apogee Books, 2003) and Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles’s Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space (New York: Basic Books, 2003). That makes the materials collected by the NASA HQ History Office and the oral history interviews all the more important. The JSC website posts biographies of the astronauts as well. These bios, while brief, highlight the flight experience of each astronaut, which made it possible to compile data on all the women astronauts selected since 1978.

The integration of women into the astronaut corps coincided with the design and construction of the Space Shuttle itself. Finding answers to the technical questions about how to design the Shuttle to accommodate women and mixed-sex crews meant sifting through documents related to the Shuttle design process. The George M. Low Papers contained correspondence about the new agenda for NASA leading into the Shuttle era, the Shuttle design, and the preparations for the selection of the first class of Shuttle astronauts. The collection included Administrator James Fletcher’s speech in which the word “women” had been crossed out.

While not as compartmentalized with respect to women’s history as NASA Headquarters, the JSC Archives at the University of Texas-Clear Lake housed technical documents and memoranda that influenced women in the program. The Shuttle files located there contained materials about the astronaut training program, management directives associated with the Astronaut Office, engineering correspondence, and flight crew reports. In all the files I have examined, I found the “chastity belt” schematic only in Houston. While the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s Division of Space History has the actual drainage conduit in its collection, the entire workings would not have come together without that sketch.

The National Archives and Records Administration in Fort Worth, Texas, provided information about the astronauts’ training and engineering work that was otherwise difficult to find.

Because cultural influences and social mores play a strong role in this story in terms of how people within NASA, as well as taxpayers, viewed the propriety of introducing women into the astronaut corps, the popular media—in particular, newspapers, science fiction literature, and film—offer a telling insight into what people thought at the time about women in space. The idea that women should or should not work as professionals in any given field represents a historic conflict in women’s labor history.

As a way of examining the influence of science fiction on popular conceptions about women in space, it was important to examine works and writers who were significant to the science fiction genre but were also recognized outside its typical readership. Focusing on authors such as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as popular comics and television shows such as Buck Rogers and Star Trek, ideally provides a cross-community representation.

The groundwork for this project required examining the history of women’s opportunities in the workplace, particularly in the pipeline careers of aviation, science, engineering, and medicine. There is a growing body of literature on women in aviation and science, less so about women in engineering and medicine. Leslie Haynsworth and David M. Toomey’s Amelia Earhart’s Daughters: The Wild and Glorious Story of American Women Aviators from World War II to the Dawn of the Space Age (New York: Perennial, 2000) and Deborah Douglas’s American Women and Flight since 1940 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004) provided a solid foundation in the history of women aviators in the second half of the twentieth century. Joseph Corn also discusses how women in the early twentieth century used aviation to create new opportunities and gain some semblance of equality in his book The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Margaret Rossiter’s two-volume series, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) and Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), represents the preeminent works on women in American science.

While Rossiter’s work touches on the role of women in engineering, that subject remains an underrepresented field in the historiography. Information about women in engineering for this project has largely come from Natalie McIntire’s Curtis-Wright Cadettes: A Case Study of the Effect of the World War II Labor Shortage on Women in Engineering (M.A. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993); Amy Sue Bix’s article “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’: A History of Women’s U.S. Engineering Education,” NWSA Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004); Judith McIlwee and Gregg Robinson’s Women in Engineering: Gender, Power, and Workplace Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Martha Moore Trescott’s New Images, New Paths: A History of Women in Engineering in the United States, 1850–1980 (Dallas: T&L Enterprises, 1996); and Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s-1990s (New York: Routledge, 2003), edited by Annie Canal, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karen Zachmann. Specific data about women who identify themselves as engineers were compiled from census data available through the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA), managed by the Minnesota Population Center.

While this work deals with women who were selected as mission specialists, not as pilot-astronauts, explaining why women were not selected as pilots until 1990 requires an understanding of the role of women in the military, particularly their opportunities to fly high-performance aircraft. Several works grounded the discussion about women’s opportunities in the military. Linda Bird Francke’s book Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997) draws on the history of women in the military from the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 through the revocation of the combat exclusion policies in the 1990s. Two articles, both addressing how exclusion from combat affected women in the military and both published around the passage of the 1991 Kennedy-Roth Amendment, which repealed the laws forbidding women from flying in combat, not only highlighted women’s limited opportunities in the military but encapsulated the culture of the 1960s that kept many women out of pipeline careers. They were Marilyn Gordon and Mary Jo Ludvingson’s “A Constitutional Analysis of the Combat Exclusion for Air Force Women,” Minerva, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 1991); and Cynthia Enloe’s “The Politics of Constructing the American Woman Soldier as a Professionalized ‘First Class Citizen’: Some Lessons from the Gulf War,” Minerva, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1992).

This work is more than just a history of technology; it also makes a contribution to gender and labor history. Understanding what changed—along with what still had to change—to make it possible for women to enter the astronaut corps requires some interpretation of the social expectations of women in the period leading up to the Group VIII selection. The works on gender that were most helpful were Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), edited by Joanne Meyerowitz; Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Linda Kerber’s “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History, vol. 71, no. 1 (June 1988). William Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) captured the culture of the 1960s.

Since women’s opportunities in pipeline careers were essential to their selection as astronauts, it was important to ground this project within a larger framework of women’s labor history. The works most influential to that framework were Alice Kessler-Harris’s Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) and In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sherna Berger Gluck’s Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, The War, and Social Change (New York: Penguin Books, 1987); and the article “Women and the Paradox of Economic Inequality in the Twentieth-Century” by Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, published in the Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005).

The FLATs’ story has become better known over the last decade, thanks in part to a number of scholars and journalists working on their story. Recounting that story here is necessary only in terms of understanding why those women were unsuccessful in their pursuit of becoming astronauts in the 1960s and what changed in subsequent years to open opportunities for women in the 1970s. In addition to newspaper articles from the era and the Women in Space files at NASA Headquarters, Margaret Weitekamp’s Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) was essential. It ranks as the most balanced book on the topic. Other works, such as Martha Ackmann’s The Mercury Thirteen: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight (New York: Random House, 2003) and Stephanie Nolan’s Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (New York: Basic Books, 2004), offered additional interpretations.

Two of the greatest challenges facing NASA and the astronauts were changing attitudes about women as astronauts and equals and moving beyond peoples’ concerns about sexuality and propriety. Several works facilitated a clearer understanding of sexual politics and the tenuous position NASA was in trying to navigate that road without ostracizing American taxpayers. Donald Critchlow’s Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) describes the return to conservative values in the 1970s, particularly as they relate to women. Mark Byrnes’s Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994) highlights NASA’s identity as a federally funded agency and the limits that places on NASA’s ability to push social agendas. Roger Launius’s “A Western Mormon in Washington, D.C.: James C. Fletcher, NASA, and the Final Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (May 1995), emphasizes the conservative characteristics of NASA administrator James Fletcher during the 1970s that may have contributed to the agency’s hesitance to push for a more progressive role for women in the astronaut corps and risk the public image of the entire program. The essay “Sexuality in the Workplace: Organizational Control, Sexual Harassment, and the Pursuit of Pleasure” by Christine L. Williams, Patti A. Guiffre, and Kirsten Dellinger, which appeared in Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 25 (1999), discusses the propensity of sexual harassment and sexual relationships in the workplace. Finally, Alison Weir’s Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996) was irreplaceable when it came to constructing a final analysis of NASA’s effectiveness with regard to the integration of women into the astronaut corps.