Rise Of The Rocket Girls Essay

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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. Everything was segregated and african americans usually did not receive any jobs that a white person would want. In hidden figures, both of these issues are dealt with as it is a story about black women working for NASA and beating white men in what they are doing. Despite talking about the topic of women in STEM, by leaving out racism, Rise of the Rocket Girls left out one of the biggest issues of its time.
Racism was a huge issue in the mid 1900’s perhaps even larger than gender equality. Rise of the Rocket Girls completely omits this issue and is only about women in STEM. Women in Rise of the Rocket Girls was about women calculators(Chapter 6). It only talks about colored people once and that is when Marie said that she is not comfortable working with colored people(Chapter 4). Other than that vague mention of colored people, there are no other references to …show more content…

The whole book was about women helping build rockets and doing all the calculations that men wouldn’t do. Rise of the rocket girls also involved women more on the field instead of in the background. They were there during the testing of their rockets(Chapter 1). The women were also portrayed as super smart mathematical geniuses as they could solve any math problem and figure out all the formulas and do all the calculations extremely quickly. Conclusively, I feel like Rise of the Rocket Girls addressed one major issue of the mid 1900’s which was