Constance Bowman Reid presents several captivating observations and narratives about being a woman working in a World War II bomber factory in her memoir Slacks & Calluses. Reid and her friend and fellow teacher Clara Marie, referred to as C.M., decided to spend their summer vacation assisting the allied war effort by working the swing shift at a local aircraft factory. Because of their gender, Reid and C.M were forced to challenge many presumptions and biases that the factory supervisors had about their abilities. Despite proving to be strong workers, the duo had to deal with sexism within the workplace and in the world around them. Due to her unique social positioning, Reid offers an unparalleled perspective on several wartime issues that in total provide a comprehensive story with spectacular historical value.
announced that they would be spending their summer vacation building big bombers, people laughed (Bowman Reid, 1.) A year and a half before, women were brand new to working in factories like this one (Bowman Reid, 83.) Consolidated tried to begin hiring 80 women to every 20 men (Bowman Reid, 14.) Male workers still felt like women were mentally, physically, and morally incompetent to be factory workers and that men were more conscious of safety hazards than the women (Bowman Reid, 80-81.) C.M.’s pop asked if their work was checked before the ships went into the air (Bowman Reid, 83.)
Katherine Johnson was a strong African-American woman who isn’t often talked about. Only within the last two years at the age of 98, does she start getting recognition. A movie was released about her and the women working in the NACA´s branch in 2016. She is the woman who discovered the math that hadn’t yet been created, for launch and landing in the space race. Katherine made these amazing discoveries whilst dealing with constant segregation and oppression for being an African-American Woman.
Amelia Martinez Mrs. Aderholdt 8th Grade Language Arts 18 April 2023 Powerful Women in Science How did Katherine Johnson and the other women who worked with her at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) impact the Space Race? During the time of the Space Race, women were hired within the scientific field as computers. The “computers” were hired to calculate the complex equations that space travel and research entailed.
While both sources give an insight into the minds of women who worked on the Manhattan Project, the book examines the impact of women on the Project from an external perspective, whereas the interview provides an internal perspective on the event. Therefore, both sources can be compared to determine the significance of women in the Project. Howes, Ruth, and Caroline L. Herzenberg. Their Day in the Sun
Sometimes good and bad people come into the world, but Katherine Johnson was one of the great people. Katherine Johnson came into this world in 1918 in West Virginia. She was a mathematician and was the best at geometry. She was so smart she was able to graduate high school when she was only 15 and college when she was 18. Her first husband died from brain cancer.
Rise of the rocket girls is a book about the success of the Jet Propulsion lab and how women helped achieve success in the field of rocketry. It took place in the 1950’s, around the same time period of Hidden Figures. Hidden Figures is a similar story in the sense that it is also about women in STEM, but instead of the jet propulsion lab, it is about NASA. The one extra perspective Hidden Figures had was racism. Racism was a prominent issue in the 1950’s.
Initially, they were trained for clerical, administrative, and support roles, but they eventually came to work as parachute riggers, laboratory assistants, drivers, and within the electrical and mechanical trades (Chenier, 2006). Prior to World War 2, women mostly did “Women Jobs”. They took care of the home, cooked, cleaned, and cared for the children. Women went from mostly working in their homes to enlisting and doing mechanical jobs. Although women were not treated the same
How were women involved in the space race between America and the Soviets? In 1952, NASA hired black women to work as human computers. One of these women is Katherine Johnson. But things weren't always easy for these women, racial segregation and sexist segregation made it hard for these women to do their work and live their day-to-day lives. Just because Katherine Johnson and the other women at NASA faced challenges, it doesn't mean they didn't significantly impact history and the space race.
Also many women learned how to weld and learned many life skills. These women also made up Sixty-Five percent of all working women. Many of these women had children which made childcare a main priority. Over “101,000 women were working in the aircraft industries alone by 1943 and the existing child care facilities only served a fraction of the women’s children at that time” (Cherny, p.301).
Judy Wajcman: Judy Wajcman is a professor of sociology, she is one of the founding feminist contributors to the understanding of technology in society and thus is best known for her study of the gendered ways of technology. Wajcman discovers the ways in which technology can be gendered by both its design and by its use, simultaniously this shows us how our personality is shaped by the technoscience culture of the world which we live in. Wajcman writes about the important role which gender has in technology and she looks at the achievement of women 's technological successes in the past and she focuses on the major influence that gender and feminism have had on technology. She concentrates a lot on the roles women have had in producing and not just consuming technology and she also focuses on the lack of recognition women have received because of their undervalued skills.
More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry. One example is Rosie the Riveter, she was mostly known for helping the United States to recruit women to work. (document 1) She was in newspapers, movies, posters, photographs, and articles. Rosie the Riveter represents the American women who worked in factories and
This School is so full of Crap! The immediate impression when we consider young women, at University in the 1960s, is one of long hair, hippies, the summer of love, flower power, and the music of the time. And, of course, freedom; complete freedom from the constraints that might have existed in their homes; but was that the reality? By the time the decade was ending, the impression is closer to the truth, but the early years of the same decade were a different story.
This brings domestic females in STEM fields extra stress and negative academic performance in the United States. In the article, Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? (Written by Eileen Pollack, published at New York Times Magazine October 3, 2013), the writer illustrates the sex bias in the science field by providing the examples of female scientists in STEM fields. Meg Urry is a professor of Physics and astronomy at Yale University.
The late 1950's and early 1960's was a time of recovery, civil rights, and NASA. The Great Space Race between America and Russia was at its peak, both powers struggling to send men into space and later to the moon. However, Russia seems to be steadily approaching the finish line while America lags behind To complete the task, NASA will need math that doesn't exist yet, and mathematicians who can invent that math. Taraji P. Henson as west NASA computer Katherine Johnson and her two friends, Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monae) can complete the task and more. Each of their special traits of a mathematician, mechanic, and engineer (respectively) are needed in different parts of NASA to do the job and help America emerge as the victor of the Great Space Race.
