Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Shetterly Margot Lee

Author:Shetterly, Margot Lee [Shetterly, Margot Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Science, Biography, feminism, Adult
ISBN: 9780062363619
Amazon: B0166JFFD0
Goodreads: 29555236
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2016-09-06T07:00:00+00:00

As the clock ticked down on the NACA, only nine West Computers remained in the pool: Dorothy Vaughan, Marjorie Peddrew, Isabelle Mann, Lorraine Satchell, Arminta Cooke, Hester Lovely, Daisy Alston, Christine Richie, Pearl Bassette, and Eunice Smith. With one terse line of text, NASA crossed a frontier that had not been breached by its predecessor. The memo heralded the end of an era, the swan song of the Band of Sisters. The story of West Area Computing—how Dorothy Vaughan and her colleagues found their way to Langley, the tragedy and hope of World War II, the tyranny of the signs in the Langley cafeteria and on the bathroom doors, the women’s contributions to one of the most transformative technologies in the history of humankind—would get passed along as family lore, but leave barely a fingerprint in the histories of the black men and women who fought for progress in their communities, of the women who pushed for equality for their gender in all aspects of American life, or of the engineers and mathematicians who taught humans to fly. For the rest of their lives, the former West Computers reminisced with one another and with the East Computers and the engineers they worked with. They told tales at the retirement parties that crowded their calendars in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, but with the modesty characteristic of women of their generation, they were reluctant to describe their achievements as anything more than “just doing their jobs.”

The end of the West Area Computing section was a bittersweet moment for Dorothy Vaughan. It had taken her eight years to reach the seat at the front of the office. For seven years after that she ruled the most unlikely of realms: a room full of black female mathematicians, doing research at the world’s most prestigious aeronautical laboratory. Her stewardship of the section had supported the careers of women like Katherine Goble, who would ultimately receive her country’s highest recognition for her contributions to the space program. The standards upheld by the women of West Computing set a floor for the possibilities of a new generation of girls with a passion for math and hopes for a career beyond teaching. Just as the original NACA-ites would forever hold on to their identities as members of that venerable organization, the black women would always feel an allegiance to West Area Computing, and to the woman who led it to its final day, Dorothy Vaughan.

Dorothy was forty-eight years old in October 1958, with more than a decade of work still stretching out before her. Her older children, so tiny when she had first come to Hampton Roads, were now entering college. The younger boys were adolescents following fast in the path of their older siblings. Her work at Langley had enabled her to make good on her promise to her children and their futures. With their educations on track and a house of her own in her name—the Vaughans also left Newsome Park, in 1962—there was nothing stopping Dorothy from making the final years of her career about her own ambitions.

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