She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.” Of the 98-year-old maverick, Shetterly writes, “Her unencumbered embrace of equality, applying it to herself without insecurity and to others with full expectation of reciprocity, is a reflection of the America we want to be. Seven years later, the twice-married mother of three went on to work with Glenn again to calculate the trajectories for his Apollo 11 moon mission. Before John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962, he asked that Johnson do the math to ensure his safety. Katherine Johnson has become the most widely recognized among NASA’s black women pioneers. A wife and mother of two, Jackson also volunteered as a Girl Scout leader for 30 years and designed a sleek soap-box derby car for her son that helped him win first place. Then there was Mary Jackson, a “shrewd and intuitive judge of character, an emotionally intelligent woman who paid close attention to her surroundings and the people around her.” It was this shrewdness that cleared the way for Jackson’s ascent from human computer to aerospace engineer. As Shetterly writes, “Education topped her list of ideals it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return.” When the married mother of four wasn’t securing promotions for her fellow black and white female co-workers, she was orchestrating ingenious childcare arrangements for her progeny and fiscally pushing her family into the middle class. There was Dorothy Vaughan, who blazed more than a few paths as one of the first black women to work as a “human computer” at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. More precisely, it is a historical homage to the fearlessness of mathematical minds too brilliant to be hindered by racism and sexism - to women who walked away from traditional, low-paying teaching jobs and marched into a predominantly white, segregated work force that considered them, in Shetterly’s words, “invisible and invaluable at the same time.” MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY’S Hidden Figures is the story and celebration of the four dozen unsung black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from 1943 to 1980 for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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