They Did the Math
The forgotten female ‘computers’ behind America’s early aerospace breakthroughs.
Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars
By Nathalia Holt
Little, Brown and Company, 2016. 338 pages.
In the late 1940s, a band of young scientists and engineers fresh out of the California Institute of Technology was working on a pet project that eventually would become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Inspired by their faculty adviser, Theodore Van Kármán, the “Suicide Squad” aimed to build a functioning rocket plane—a goal widely disparaged in the scientific community as far too risky and “outlandish.” As MIT’s Vannevar Bush put it, “I don’t understand how a serious scientist or engineer can play around with rockets.”
Author Nathalia Holt tracks the development of JPL over the decades, from the first explosive experiments to greater achievement, expansion, and recognition. At the heart of her story, however, are the brilliant women who were there from the start. The first, Barby Canright, would be joined by other equally talented females, unusual for their advanced mathematical and science skills as well as their interest in joining a science lab. Armed only with lab notebooks and pencils in the early years, the small, tight-knit cadre performed all the computations needed. Dubbed “the computers,” a title that distinguished them from their male colleagues, the engineers and pilots, the women tracked data from rocket tests, measured results, calculated thrust, and built complex lines of text and numbers, plotting future flight trajectories. As precursors to the first computer programmers, this group would become responsible for “all the critical calculations at JPL that powered early missiles, rocketed heavy bombers over the Pacific, launched America’s first satellite, guided lunar missions and planetary explorations, and even navigate Mars rovers today.”
While their contributions were noted within JPL, the story of these women is largely unknown and forgotten—until now. Holt, a science writer who trained as a microbiologist, writes of her initial interest in the JPL computers and their struggles so similar to her own, only five decades earlier. “How did they handle the sometimes awkward, sometimes wonderful challenge of being a women, a mother, and a scientist all at once?” she asks in her preface. Rise of the Rocket Girls provides answers through an intimate group portrait of the women’s professional and personal lives. We learn of work in the lab and the camaraderie of the group; of the Miss Guided Missile contests, and sitting in the commissary next to rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. We read how many of the women departed after they married while others struggled to balance work and home life, and still others, like Barbara Paulson, got pulled up short by the inequities of the period, fired on the spot in 1960 when her pregnancy was detected.
The book also explores the women’s growing sense of professionalism: When Paulson returned a year later, she joined a rare minority of working mothers in America. As a supervisor, she and Helen Ling urged younger members to pursue further training, education, and advanced degrees. And in the 1970s, once JPL began requiring engineering degrees of new hires, Ling circumvented the demand by hiring promising candidates without degrees as “programmers,” urging them to attend night school to eventually qualify as a JPL engineer. Few women held degrees in engineering at the time, Holt notes, as most programs were only beginning to accept female students; Caltech opened its doors in 1970.
The book’s novelistic narrative style sometimes wears thin, with one too many descriptions of someone “running a finger through her new stylish bangs” or “swoon[ing] over the dress that perfectly hugged Helen’s figure.” Yet the detailed personal accounts, based on exhaustive interviews, contribute to a greater appreciation of this pioneering generation of women navigating challenges unique to their sex. As the author tracks their lives through courtship, births, and divorce, FORTRAN, lunar landings, and the Mars rovers, Holt recovers a history that is both informative and worth reading.
Review by Robin Tatu
Robin Tatu is Prism’s senior editorial consultant.
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