23 April 2009  ALMOST ASTRONAUTS: 13 WOMEN WHO DARED TO DREAM by Tanya Lee Stone, Candlewick Press, February 2009, 134p. ISBN: 978-0-7636-3611-1

"'It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.'"

-- John Glenn, July 1962, testifying before Congress in opposition to women being part of the U.S. space program.

When I read the publisher's catalogue copy describing ALMOST ASTRONAUTS, I was shocked. I had no idea that women had sought out and been denied the opportunity to participate in America's Mercury space program. Not that it doesn't make perfect sense that experienced women pilots would have sought to participate, but why had I never heard anything about it or read anything about it in high school or college American history classes? I got on the computer, tracked down a copy of ALMOST ASTRONAUTS in a distant library, and submitted a request to have it be transferred here to my branch in Sebastopol. The other day, when I went downtown to pick it up, the female librarian working the circulation desk went to scan the book, read the cover, and did a double-take. "I had absolutely no idea that women tried to participate in the Mercury program!" she exclaimed.

ALMOST ASTRONAUTS is a story whose telling is long overdue..

John Glenn was clearly not alone in his beliefs about a woman's place. He was speaking in an era when "women weren't allowed to rent a car or take out a loan from the bank without a man's signature; they could not play on a professional sports team at all. They couldn't report the news on television or run in a city marathon or serve as police officers. They weren't allowed to fly jets, either."

I now know (as John Glenn very well knew back then) that highly qualified female pilots had been around for a while. I recently read and wrote about Sherri Smith's FLYGIRL, a story of a fictional female military pilot in the WWII WASP program. Of course, the (99% male) WWII-era Congress failed to provide those women official military status and benefits -- despite their irreplaceable service to their country -- and the WASP program was disbanded by the end of the War. (It turns out that one of the real-life WASP pilots would become one of the women seeking to be part of the Mercury program.)

There is a real-life male hero in ALMOST ASTRONAUTS. Dr. Randy Lovelace was the doctor responsible for putting the Mercury astronauts through all of their testing, and he decided to instigate an unofficial process for women to "try out" for the Mercury program. "He was a scientist who believed that women are as capable as men, and he wanted to prove it." Dr. Lovelace was a smart guy who understood the times and so he recognized that the women pilots would have to be even more qualified than the men in order to have any chance of being seriously considered for the Mercury program.

Dr. Lovelace worked first with Jerrie Cobb, a woman pilot who already held a bunch of world flying records and had logged nearly as many hours in the air as John Glenn and Scott Carpenter combined. When Dr. Lovelace put Cobb through several long series of physical and psychological tests, she significantly out-tested the male astronauts (and complained less). In some notable instances, the tests she completed were several times more difficult than those the men had undertaken. Word began to get out to the media about Cobb's test results and she was featured in popular news magazines.

Lovelace and Cobb then developed a list of two dozen more women pilots whose resumes showed them to potentially have the right stuff. A dozen of these women accepted the offer and passed all of the tests they undertook before the patriarchs at NASA and the Navy got wind of what was going on and put a stop to Dr. Lovelace's testing.

The most bizarre aspects of ALMOST ASTRONAUTS involve the political intrigue that surrounded what then happened. You'll have to read the book to find out about LBJ's role in the scuttling of any plans for women astronauts. Just as shocking, we learn that in addition to John Glenn and Scott Carpenter's damaging testimony before Congress, the last nail in the coffin was hammered in by none other than Jackie Cochran, the woman who had run the WWII WASP program (and a real-life character in FLYGIRL). Unfortunately for the 13 potential female astronauts -- and for Sixties women in general -- Cochran had become a politician, and she was jealous of the publicity being given Jerri Cobb and angered by Dr. Lovelace's failure to permit her to tell him how he should be running things. And so Cochran put the kibosh on women astronauts for many years to come:

Committee chair Anfusco: "'Miss Cochran, do you believe that women belong in the space program?'

"Cochran: 'I certainly think the research should be done. Then I can tell you afterward.'"

"A ghost of aviation

She was swallowed by the sky

Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly..."

-- Joni Mitchell, "Amelia"

Anyone familiar with the nonfiction books of Tanya Lee Stone will be aware of the thoroughness of the research, sourcing, appendices, and indexing that characterize the author's work. This book is no exception.

Meet the 13 women who should have been real contenders for America's early space program. ALMOST ASTRONAUTS is a book that has me aware of the fact that I have never gotten on a commercial airliner and seen a woman captain in the cockpit. It is a book that gets me wondering about all of the other important stories of American history that I actually lived through but have, to this point, missed out on.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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