Women's Rights & Issues

niyad

(113,301 posts) Sat Dec 10, 2016, 02:35 PM Dec 2016

"Get the girl to check the numbers" said John Glenn. If she says the numbers are good...

Bend Over Here It Comes Again

"Get the girl to check the numbers" said John Glenn. If she says the numbers are good...

I’m ready to go.

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The “girl” was Katherine Johnson, one of the “colored computers” at NASA. Her story is just one told in the book "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race" by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Before John Glenn orbited Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and entering the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
. . . . .

Excerpt from the NY Magazine
It was on a trip to the post office during the spring of 1943 that Dorothy Vaughan spied the notice for the laundry job at Camp Pickett. But the word on another bulletin also caught her eye: mathematics. A federal agency in Hampton, Virginia, sought women to fill a number of mathematical jobs having to do with airplanes. The bulletin, the handiwork of Melvin Butler and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ personnel department, was most certainly meant for the eyes of the white, well-to-do students at the all-female State Teachers College there in Farmville. The laboratory had sent application forms, civil-service examination notices, and booklets describing the NACA’s work to the school’s job-placement offices, asking faculty and staff to spread the word about the open positions among potential candidates.

…

Dorothy Vaughan carefully filled out and mailed two job applications: one to work at Camp Pickett, where the need for labor was so great, so undifferentiated, that there was virtually no possibility that they would not hire her. The other, much longer application reviewed her qualifications in detail. Work history. Personal references. Schools attended: high school and college. Courses taken, grades received. Languages spoken (French). Foreign travels (none). Would you be willing to accept a position abroad? (No.) Would you be willing to accept a position in Washington, D.C.? (Yes.) How soon could you be ready to start work? She knew the answer before her fingers carved it into the blank: Forty-eight hours, she wrote. I can be ready to go within 48 hours.

. . . .

"Hidden Figures" trailer--movie to be released in jan 2017