The book incorporates the history that coincides with the stories moving from WWII and aviation research to the Cold War and the Space Race. I was so inspired by the sacrifice, determination, and intelligence of these ladies. I particularly enjoyed how this book focused on the individual stories of each woman. What a day it must have been for those women standing in that room in 1969 as the culmination of their dedication and perseverance was about to peak as the first man made his way to the moon! Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden At a time when many parts of the United States still practiced segregation and racial prejudices were still widespread, their story is even more extraordinary. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly is a remarkable account of a small number of intelligent, hard-working, driven and admirable African-American women who made significant contributions to the Space Race and to the fields of math, science and engineering. “Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”
In 1943 there was a push to hire qualified black women because the demand could not be satisfied with white employees only.
These women essentially did the work of mathematicians but were labelled as subprofessionals in order to be paid less. NASA, originally known as NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) began hiring women during WWII as female computers. Hidden Figures tells the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African-American women who blazed the trail for others to follow in the fields of mathematics and engineering at NASA. Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.īook Review: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.īefore Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Genre: True Accounts, Society & Culture, 20th century American historyīook Summary: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
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