…this nation should commit itself to the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon…

                                                                   -J. F. Kennedy, May 1961

My very first career goal was to be an astronaut.  I remember watching the launches of the early Mercury and Gemini rockets on our big black and white console TV.  John Glenn was my first hero.   I was a child of the 60’s, growing up under the influence of JFK’s grand vision to reach the moon.  It took NASA until 1969 to achieve that goal but my friends and I spent the summer of 1961 traveling to the moon every day.   I suspect my dad, hardly a proponent of feminism, bought this space helmet and built this  “control panel” complete with switches, lights and dials for my older brother, but nonetheless, I knew that I too was destined for space.  A couple of lawn chairs completed our space ship and I needed nothing else to fulfill JFK’s master plan.

 

The space program inspired my interest in science which lasted throughout my early childhood.  Fickle, as children can be,  I next wanted to be a geologist.  While other little girls collected Barbies, I collected rocks, but by  high school I had all but forgotten about my “childhood” interest in things scientific.  I hated high school chemistry and math, probably because of a couple of genuinely bad teachers in those subjects.  If someone had told me, while I was still in high school, that I would end up as a research chemist, I would have thought they were eating some pretty crazy mushrooms (it was the 70’s after all!)

So, I explored other options- music, writing, education- in fact, all things that interest and inspire me to this day.  But, I kept coming back to science. As a woman,  I was a bit of an anomaly 1970’s and 1980’s and in the early days of my career, it was not at all unusual for me to be the only pantyhose in a room full of pinstriped suits.  Things have changed.  Women are still underrepresented in engineering but are approaching parity in many of the sciences. 

We have the Sally Rides (b. 1951), Marie Curies (b. 1967), Rosalind Franklins (b.1920), and Dorothy Hodgkins (b. 1910) of the world to thank for that.  They (and others) were the ground breakers for my generation of women scientists.

Sally Ride fulfilled my childhood dream of traveling in space, and I would still give anything to see our beautiful blue planet from space. Dr. Ride was a woman of many talents. She nearly became a professional tennis player, but instead “settled” for two Bachelors degrees from Stanford (physics and English literature), and a Masters and PhD in astrophysics. She was in the first group of NASA recruits that included women. She was the first American woman in space, flying on the space shuttle Challenger in June 1983. Sadly, she died too young from pancreatic cancer in 2012. As a woman in a very-heavily male dominated field, she dealt with a lot of nonsense.. She handled it with strength, grace and humor; prior to her shuttle mission, she was subjected to a barrage of questions primarily focused on her gender, as opposed to her outstanding qualifications. Among those questions was “Will you wear a bra in space?” She replied “There is no sag in zero-g,” a clever retort to a very sexist inquiry. She was pioneer, a scout, a true Renaissance woman, and she inspired girls around the world. To this day, she still inspires me.

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