By Nicolle Zellner, co-Chair of the CSWA
We stand on the shoulders of giants! March is Women's History Month, and this blog has honored women in science with multiple posts. It's hard to forget the pioneering work of those early female astronomers who worked as computers at the turn of the 20th Century, whether in the United States at Harvard or abroad at the Vatican.
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| Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri mapped the positions and brightness of 481,215 stars for the Vatican. Photo Credit: On Being (Flickr) |
Other women tested the limits of aviation and space flight. Bessie Coleman, Jackie Cochran, Valentina Tereshkova, Sally Ride, Mae Jamison, Ellen Ochoa, and Eileen Collins flew fast, long, and high—breaking the air and space ceilings for all of us. Wally Funk, an original First Lady Astronaut Trainee, became the oldest woman to fly in space in July 2021. The next people on the Moon will include the first woman and the first person of color. Perhaps the final frontier really will be for everyone.
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| Bessie Coleman "dared to dream". Photo credit: Alamy |
But if it weren't for the calculations (and just plain physics!), humans wouldn't travel safely into space and home again. On her experience working as a 'human computer' at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Macie Roberts commented, "you have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog." Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were just some of the brain power behind those early NASA spaceflights.
Generations later, these women continue to inspire those of us who are reading their stories today. Those stories have been told in a variety of media, including The Glass Universe (review), Hidden Figures, Silent Sky, The Mercury 13, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, and Rise of the Rocket Girls. Do you know of others? Post them in the comments section.
We should continue to support and recognize women and the work we all do. Helen Ling, a software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1950s and 1960s, once said "...if you hire [men] under you, they're uncomfortable, you're uncomfortable. So I just hired women just out of college. I thought that if you didn't give them a chance, they'll never get a chance."
The same could be said when standing on the shoulders of giants. Thanks, pioneers, for giving us all a chance.
Read more about pioneering women at
4000 Years of Women in Science
First Lady Astronaut Trainees (blog post, support for a Congressional Gold Medal, video)
Women in Astronomy, A Resource Guide (Astronomical Society of the Pacific)
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