A Different Point of View - Women & Computers by National Women's History Museum

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Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Museum Happenings...........................3 Feature: Women and Computing.....7 Biographies.........................................11 Contemporary Perspective................15 #WeHearYou.......................................18

VOLUME 24

Women and Computing

A Message From NWHM President Joan Wages Looking for a unique gift for a family member, a friend or someone special this holiday season? Give a gift that will keep on giving all year long — while helping a worthy cause and helping to bring women’s amazing and untold history to life!

Dear Friends, With the arrival of fall, the National Women’s History Museum is at an exciting time in its evolution. We are weeks away from a crucial deadline. As many of you know, for the last 18 months, a congressionally appointed commission has been researching the need, location and governance of a national women’s history museum. In November, the commission will present its recommendations to Congress and the President, and we are confident that its report will move us to the next stage of securing a site.

A NWHM gift membership is a truly meaningful gift. Depending on the level of your tax-deductible gift membership donation, your recipient will receive: NWHM’s quarterly newsletter, “A Different Point of View” which is filled with biographies, stories of trail-blazing women in different genres, new exciting programs NWHM is working on and much, much more A personalized Certificate recognizing them as a Charter Member A NWHM Membership Card

IN THIS ISSUE

For gift memberships of $50 or more, your recipient will receive all the above plus a “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History” button

VOLUME 23

Women in Fashion

For gift memberships of $100 or more, your recipient will receive all the above plus a silver “NWHM” pin to wear so that any time NWHM’s President and Board see them when they are wearing their pin, they know your recipient is a “Cornerstone Member” and can acknowledge them accordingly Their name will be recognized in NWHM’s physical Museum once we have our permanent site

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Library of

Meanwhile, we continue our important work of increasing support and awareness around the country about this important effort. This past September, we held our 5th annual Women Making History event in Los Angeles. It was a resounding success, drawing more than 300 guests and raising almost 50 percent more than in preceding years. This event continues to grow, providing a significant opportunity for NWHM to raise its profile and spread the word about the need for a women’s history museum in Washington, D.C. For more information about our event and honorees, please see page three. While we push for a permanent home, we know the value of learning women’s history. This newsletter is an important tool in that effort, ensuring that as Charter Members you stay connected and are inspired by the wonderful contributions made by women. In addition to updates, each issue focuses on an area of women’s history that we know deserves greater exposure. This edition explores the role of women in the history of computers. As you will learn in the pages that follow, women were central to early computing. The early pioneers who worked on the electrical machine were called “computers.” As historian Sarah McLennan explains, it was a job title for individuals with astute skills in mathematics. Many of these early computers would chart the path for women’s involvement in computing programs underway by the U.S. Navy and on university campuses.

Congress

Women and

VOLUME 24

Computing

Access to NWHM’s “Members Only” section on our website where they can read and get inside information and updates on additional things happening at the Museum they can’t get elsewhere So why wait until the holiday rush? Avoid the massive crowds hunting for that unique gift — give a NWHM gift membership instead! Go online today and sign up for as many gift memberships as you’d like. We will make sure each person you list receives their special gift membership on or very close to the holidays. Festive holiday gift memberships are available via this link, http://tinyurl.com/nwhmdonate, or you are welcome to call NWHM at (703) 461-1920 (ext. 110). Our staff is happy to help you process your tax‑deductible memberships.

We are grateful to our author, Sarah McLennan, a visiting assistant professor at Virginia State University who gives you a history of the role women played in the development of early computing. In addition, I hope you enjoy the interview with Nathalia Holt, who offered NWHM an insider’s view into her research for her book, Rise of the Rocket Girls. What a great book! I hope you enjoy reading about their groundbreaking contributions, and that you enjoy this issue. As always, thank you for your support, which has been essential to our success so far. We look forward to sharing the next stage of our journey with you. Gratefully,

Joan Wages

WOMEN MAKING HISTORY LA HONORS DIVERSE GROUP OF WOMEN AND SURPASSES FUNDRAISING GOAL The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) hosted its 5th Annual Women Making History Event in Los Angeles on Saturday, September 17. The event commemorated the achievements of women, while generating awareness of the importance of preserving women’s history and building a national women’s history museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The event honored a diverse group of accomplished women representing the many facets of the entertainment, lifestyle and beauty industries. The 2016 honorees were Oscar-nominated actress and Project Sunshine Ambassador Abigail Breslin; founder and CEO of Perverse (lowercase) Sunglasses and founder of NYX Cosmetics Toni Ko; Emmy-nominated actress Tracee Ellis Ross; and fashion designer and entrepreneur Rachel Zoe.

(Above) Women Making History LA Honorees: Rachel Zoe, Tracee Ellis Ross, Abigail Breslin, and Toni Ko (Right) NWHM Ambassadors Amy Brenneman and Kate Walsh

The National Women’s History Museum was invited to make a presentation to Fairfax County Social Studies teachers in Virginia as part of the county’s In-Service Day. The presentation focused on NWHM’s online resources for educators and students. NWHM Program Assistant Jeanette Patrick, Example of biography posters now available on NWHM website. who holds a masters in History, highlighted the Museum’s various resources on women in history. The presentation, entitled “Votes for Women: The Role Women Played in American Democracy” specifically focused on ways women have impacted America’s growth and development. Teachers were introduced to NWHM’s online Suffrage Resource Center which houses primary source documents, images and a timeline of the fight for the right to vote by American women. Patrick also told the educators about the Museum’s 300 plus biographies, exhibits and recently added biography posters that are available for free download from its website. Of particular interest were NWHM’s exhibits, “Standing Up for Change: African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement” and “First but Not the Last: Women Who Ran for President.” The educators expressed plans to use the resources as part of their teaching tools in the upcoming school year. Several also initiated engagement with the Museum on its social media platforms.

NEW BOARD MEMBERS ENHANCE MUSEUM STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP The National Women’s History Museum has appointed Ambassador Molly Bordonaro and Cheri Kaufman to its board of directors. Bordonaro is the comanaging partner of Gerding Edlen Investment Management and Kaufman currently serves as Vice President of Lifeline Organization of New York

This year’s event raised the most money to date, improving on previous year totals by more than 50 percent. “This year’s event was not only the best in its history,” said NWHM Board Chair Susan Whiting, “but it also helped us move closer to raising the money needed to build a national women’s history museum on the National Mall in our nation’s capital.” The event was made possible by presenting sponsors Glamour and Lifeway Foods.

NWHM PARTICIPATES IN FAIRFAX COUNTY BACK TO SCHOOL TEACHER DAY

Molly Bordonaro

Cheri Kaufman

Brunch attendee NeNe Leakes, honoree Tracee Ellis Ross, and actress Garcelle Beauvais

and also Founder and CEO of CiGive. Bordonaro oversees investment, finance and asset management groups, which include over $1billion of assets at Gerding Edlen Investment Management, a full-service real estate investment and development firm. She also served as a principal in the Portland office of The Gallatin Group, securing public financing for large private-public real estate projects. Concurrently, she was co-founding director of an investment fund specializing in the financing of real estate developments and re-developments in low and moderate-income areas. She served as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Malta from 2005-2009, becoming the first American diplomat to receive Malta’s highest award, the Medal of Honor or Gieh ir Reublicka, for significant contributions to Malta and the Mediterranean region. She also served as a member of the U.S. Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women in Science and Technology, a board member of Portland State University’s Center for Real Estate, and as a member of the board of directors of the Fannie Mae Corporation. Kaufman, an important, long-standing and recognized member of New York’s philanthropic community, is a business executive who has raised funds for non-profit organizations such as PS1, American Cancer Society and New York Partnership Association. As one of the founding partners of Kaufman Astoria Studios, she played a crucial role in starting the studio on the successful path to its prominent place today in the New York film and television industry. She headed the studio’s advertising and public relations and participated in leasing studio space to major corporate clients (i.e. Lifetime Cable, Paramount, Universal Pictures). Under her initiative, all the studio’s sound stages are named after women who filmed there, including Diana Ross, Claudette Colbert and Helen Hayes.

COMMISSION REPORT SCHEDULED FOR NOVEMBER The Congressional Commission to Study the Potential for a National Women’s History Museum is scheduled to present its report to Congress on November 16. Since its establishment in May 2014, the eight commissioners have been conducting a feasibility study on the need and location for a national museum on American women in history.

NWHM’s efforts were key in advocating for the passage of legislation to create the Congressional Commission. The Commission is a key step for museums seeking a location on the National Mall. Other museums like the recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Holocaust Museum, which had a presidential commission, were authorized by similar efforts.

NWHM PARTICIPATES IN WALKING TOWN DC This fall, National Women’s History Museum participated in Cultural Tourism DC’s Annual Walking Town DC. NWHM’s suffrage walking tour, In Their Footsteps, attracted 30 individuals who were led by NWHM Program Assistant Jeanette Patrick on the route of the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, DC. Attendees learned about the key women, organizations, and events of the suffrage movement. Walking Town DC is a NWHM’s In Their Footsteps DC Walking Tour weeklong event, where local tour guides offer more than 50 free tours of the DC area.

MUSEUM LAUNCHES PARTNERSHIP WITH FIELDTRIP ZOOM The National Women’s History Museum has launched a partnership with education provider, FieldTrip Zoom, a live hosting stream service that brings video-based experiential learning into the classroom. NWHM will offer two online programs through FieldTrip Zoom to highlight women’s history. As a partner, the Museum will serve as a content expert and host multiple 40-50 minute web-based sessions with students. NWHM will host sessions in February and in March.

Women and Computing: a Brief History by Sarah McLennan 1832

Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, befriends Charles Babbage and translates his text for his new invention, the Analytical Engine, providing earliest sketches of computer programming.

1933

Telex message networking comes online

1939

Elektro and Sparks, relay‑based robots premier at the World’s Fair in New York.

1939-1940

Bell Laboratories completes the Complex Number Calculator (CNC) considered the first example of remote access computing.

In the mid-1950s, Kathleen Wicker received an assignment to work with one of the first electronic computers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “At that time, I hardly knew what a computer was,” she recalled in an interview 40 years later. “I thought it was a woman.”1 Wicker’s statement might seem surprising today, but in the mid-twentieth century, the term “computer” referred to people, not machines. It was a job title, describing someone who performed mathematical equations and calculations, and NASA employed hundreds of women as “human computers” in this era. The history of women’s involvement in computing work, however, began much earlier. Historian Mary Croarken found examples of female computers employed in the eighteenth-century: Mary Edwards, who supported herself and her family for decades computing astronomical tables for the British government’s annual Nautical Almanac, and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, who gained standing in French scientific circles doing similar calculating work. Though exceptionally rare, female computers like Edwards and Lepaute demonstrate women’s early engagement in the field. One of the most famous figures in early computing is Augusta Ada Lovelace. Trained in mathematics, Lovelace collaborated with Charles Babbage while he was designing his prototype computing machine, the Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace published a set of “Notes” describing how the engine could be set up to solve mathematical equations (the process now known as programming), and considering the range of capabilities it might have. The engine, she suggested, had Augusta Ada Lovelace the potential to do more than calculate numbers—if it could manipulate numbers, then it could manipulate other kinds of data (like musical notes or letters of the alphabet) represented by numbers. Lovelace was the first to propose a use for computing machines Quoted in Kirk Saville, “What was the First Computer Model? A Woman,” Daily Press (Newport New, VA), December 14, 1990.

that went beyond mathematics, and her statement marked a fundamental shift in thinking about the way computers could be applied. By the late nineteenth-century, women began finding jobs in computing offices. In the United States, both men and women were employed as human computers to calculate large amounts of data in astronomy, the social sciences, statistical research, and ballistics testing. All this work was done by hand, using slide rules, curves, or basic desktop calculating machines. World War II marked another watershed moment for computing, in terms of both labor and technical innovation. Wartime labor demands opened more positions to women. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, for example, 200 female computers calculated artillery-firing tables for the U.S. Army. Even so, it took about a month to complete one table. It was in the interest of making this process quicker that John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert suggested building the ENIAC, the first fully electronic digital computer in the United States. In 1943, the Army gave Mauchly and Eckert a contract to develop the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at Penn. A year later, six women were hired to program it. Often referred to as the “six women of ENIAC,” Jean (Jennings) Bartik, Betty (Snyder) Holberton, Frances (Bilas) Spence, Kay (McNulty) Mauchly Antonelli, Computers work on the UNIVAC. Marlyn (Wescoff) Meltzer, and Ruth (Lichterman) Teitelbaum were chosen through a two-stage selection process. All of them had college degrees, most in mathematics, and some were already working for the military as human computers. The ENIAC, however, presented an entirely new opportunity. At the time, no one knew exactly what programming and operating a computer would involve. There were no manuals until 1946, when Adele Goldstine, a programmer and instructor with the project, wrote one. By that point, the ENIAC women had “trained themselves,” learning about the computer and its components through trial and error. The ENIAC filled an entire room, used almost 18,000 vacuum tubes, and had to be configured manually for each calculation it performed. Programming was a multi-day process that began with converting a mathematical problem into a form the computer could solve, and designing the series of instructions used to configure the machine. Next, the women set the computer up, plugging in wires and setting switches. Finally, they ran the program, debugging

1944

The Harvard Mark I computer is completed. It was built as a partnership between Harvard University and IBM. One of the first females to work on it was Grace Murray Hopper.

1943-45

Work to create the first general purpose electrical digital computer. It was called the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).

1945

Grace Hopper credited with discovering the first computer ‘bug,’ a moth stuck between relay contacts on the Harvard Mark II computer.

1946

The first ‘computers’ were selected to work on ENIAC. Six women out of a group of 100 were chosen.

1946

Adele Goldstine authors the manual for the ENIAC. It detailed the machine down to its resistors. She was also one of the first programmers of the ENIAC.

it as needed until it worked perfectly. The women developed numerous programming techniques as they worked, and Holberton and Bartik created the Computer programmers working on ENIAC ENIAC program for calculating ballistic trajectories, the original purpose the computer had been designed for. Despite these important contributions, the ENIAC women received no public recognition at the time. The programmers were not mentioned at the big publicity event held for ENIAC in 1946. It was not until the 1990s, when the 50th anniversary of the computer prompted historians to look at the records, that their work on the project became widely known.

1953

Twenty percent of programmers working on Whirlwind, the first computer capable of real-time calculations, were women.

1953

Grace Hopper creates the first high-level computer language known as ‘flowmatic’ which was a predecessor to COBOL.

1959

Mary K. Hawes (not pictured) calls a meeting of computer users and manufacturers to discuss a common business language (CBL) for digital computers.

At the end of World War II, many computing jobs, like wartime jobs for women in general, were cut. However, the ENIAC programmers had skills and experience that were in demand. The field of electronic computing was expanding, and because it was so new, there was no existing workforce to staff it. Holberton and Bartik, for example, joined the commercial company that produced the UNIVAC computer. There, they worked with another pioneering figure, Grace Murray Hopper. A math professor and U.S. Naval Reserve officer, Hopper had programmed an early computer at Harvard, the Mark I, during the war. Hopper supervised programming for UNIVAC, invented the first complier, and developed the FLOW-MATIC and COBOL programming languages for business computing. Women also pursued post-war computing in the fields of aeronautical and aerospace research. Beginning in the late 1930s, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) hired hundreds of women to work as human computers, taking on calculating work originally done by the engineers. Recruiters targeted white and African American college graduates with degrees in the sciences, emphasizing the value of their education and the service they could provide to their country. At NACA/NASA, female computers participated in cutting-edge projects from supersonic aircraft to space flight. Many sought out additional training and education, and some even became engineers. Yet, they found they had to prove that women could successfully do the task and seek out their own opportunities for advancement. Helping devise methods and techniques specific to the field of aeronautical and aerospace research, these women defined a central role for themselves in computing technology as it

developed from calculating with slide rules to programming and operating the first electronic computers. Katherine Johnson, awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 for her computing work, was one of these women. Johnson began working at NACA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia in 1953, when segregation was still policy across the South. As an African American woman, she was first assigned to the segregated “West Area” computing group, but only spent a few weeks there. Reassigned to the Flight Research Division, Johnson went on to join NASA’s Space Task Force in 1958. There, she calculated trajectories for Alan Shepherd and John Glenn’s space flights, as well as the 1969 Apollo 11 trajectory to the moon. Johnson famously recounted how John Glenn requested that she double-check the computer calculations for the 1962 Friendship 7 mission. It took her a day and a half to run the calculations by hand, but she ultimately came up with the same numbers the computer had produced.

1980

Women accounted for 37 percent of American college students receiving a bachelor’s degree in computer and information science.

2010

Only 18 percent of American college students receiving a bachelor’s degree in computer and information science is women.

2015

Only 25 percent of computing workforce is women; less than 10 percent are women of color. SOURCES:

Katherine Johnson in office

The opportunities and challenges faced by women in computing at NACA/NASA mirrored those in other areas of the computing industry, as women moved into areas of software development, programming, and computed science. Recovering the presence and key role women played in the development of computing can shift the historical understandings and perceptions of the field in the present. Sarah McLennan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Virginia State University. Her current research focuses on the role women played in the development of early computing at NASA, examining how gender and race shaped their experience in the workplace, as well as our perceptions of this technology today. McLennan can be reached at semcle@email.wm.edu.

http://courses. cs.washington. edu/courses/ csep590/06au/ readings/p175-gurer. pdf http://historycomputer.com/ ModernComputer/ Electronic/ Whirlwind.html https://www.women. cs.cmu.edu/ada/ Resources/Women/ https://www.ncwit.org/ http://www. computerhistory.org/ timeline/1933/ http://www. computersciencelab. com/ ComputerHistory/ HistoryPt3.htm

SOURCES & FURTHER READING: Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012. Grier, David Alan. When Computers Were Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455-483. Misa, Thomas, ed. Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010.

Computer) and UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), one of the earliest commercial computers. She met her husband William John Bartik who was an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania. The couple married in 1946 and had three children.

Betty Jean Jennings Bartik Betty Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the first computer programmers and a forerunner in the technology that became known as software. She was among the group of women who programmed the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), which is credited as the first all-electronic digital computer. Born in Alanthus Grove, Missouri, Jennings Bartik was one of seven children. She came from a family of teachers and worked on the family farm as a child. Following graduation from Stanberry High School in 1941, Jennings Bartik attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, now Northwest Missouri State University, and majored in mathematics where she was the only female in her classes. One of her professors told her about the Army’s recruitment of math graduates for a project in Philadelphia. Jennings Bartik applied and was accepted. In Philadelphia, she was asked to calculate by hand the firing trajectories of artilleries. In June 1945, she was one of six women chosen by the University of Pennsylvania to program and debug ENIAC. She later went on to program BINAC (Binary Automatic 11

Jennings Bartik moved to Washington when her husband was offered a job there and went to work for Remington Rand sales office. At Remington, she trained the Census Bureau programmers, worked with the salesmen selling Remington Rand equipment, and worked on programs for the Aviation Supply Office for the Navy on the UNIVAC. When her husband took a new position in Philadelphia and she was not allowed to go with him, Jennings Bartik left Remington. She pursued a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania before returning to work with computers. When she returned to the work force, Jennings Bartik shifted from programming to publishing and writing for the next 10 years. She edited technical reports for the Auerbach Corporation, then Interdata, Systems Engineering Labs and Honeywell. She was inducted into the ‘Women in Technology International Hall of Fame’ in 1998 and received a Museum Fellows Award from the Computing History Museum located in Mountain View, California in 2008. She was also awarded the prestigious ‘Computer Pioneer Award’ in 2008 from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society. Jennings Bartik died in 2011 at 86. SOURCES: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/ business/08bartik.html?_r=1 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Bartik School of Mathematics and Science, University of St. Andrews. http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/ Biographies/Bartik.html

In 1921, Clarke took a leave of absence to teach at Constantinople Women’s College in Turkey as a professor of physics. When she returned to GE in 1922, she was hired as an engineer in the Central Station Engineering Department. This had been Clarke’s lifelong goal — to work as an engineer. She became the first professional female electrical engineer in the United States and the first woman to be accepted as a member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE).

Edith Clarke Edith Clarke was born in a small farming community in Maryland becoming one of the pioneers of electrical engineering. She would earn many firsts in her lifetime, including becoming the first female electrical engineering professor and the first woman elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, among others. Clarke attended Vassar College, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1908. She taught mathematics at a private girls’ school in San Francisco, followed by Marshall College in Huntington, West Virginia. In the fall of 1911, Edith enrolled as a civil engineering student at the University of Wisconsin. During the summers, she worked at AT&T in New York impressing her supervisor Dr. George Campbell who put her in charge of training other computers. Following her graduation, she was hired as a ‘computer’ or someone who did mathematical equations. In 1918, she enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering, the first woman to earn that degree from the department. She found opportunities for women in the engineering field limited and went back to work as a computer for General Electric (GE). While working at GE she filed a patent application for a graphical calculator to solve power transmission problems.

Throughout her career, Clarke authored 19 technical papers and was the first woman to present a paper at the AIEE. In 1941, she and a colleague were awarded ‘best paper of the year’ by AIEE. Clarke also authored a two-volume reference textbook, Circuit Analysis of A. C. Systems, one of the most comprehensive textbooks for engineering schools and colleges. After 26 years at GE, Clarke left to take up a professorship at University of Texas at Austin. She was the first female electrical engineering professor at the school and in the United States. She taught at UTAustin until she retired in 1956. After retiring from UT-Austin, she returned to her farm in Maryland. Clarke was the first woman elected a fellow of AIEE and also received the lifetime achievement award from Society of Women Engineers in 1954. She died on October 29, 1959. SOURCES: http://www.edisontechcenter.org/Clarke.html http://www.engineergirl.org/Engineers/ HistoricalEngineers/4399.aspx http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/ womenshall/html/clarke.html

All Photos Courtesy: Library of Congress

“Math. It’s just there ... you’re either right or you’re wrong. That’s what I like about it.”

“From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computer technology, was born in New York City in December 1906. She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1928 with a B.A. in Mathematics. She received a PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. While earning her PhD, Hopper taught math at Vassar starting in 1931 and she continued teaching there until 1943. In 1930 she married Vincent Foster Hopper, who died in 1945 during World War II. In 1943, Hopper resigned her position at Vassar to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). In 1944, she was commissioned as a Lieutenant (Junior Grade), and assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. Her team worked on and produced the Mark I, an early prototype of the electronic computer. Hopper wrote a 500-page Manual of Operations for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator in which she outlined the fundamental operating principles of computing machines. Additionally, while working on the Mark I, Hopper coined the word “bug” to describe a computer malfunction. After the end of the war, Hopper became a research fellow on the Harvard faculty and in 1949, joined the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation, continuing her pioneering work on computer technology. Hopper was involved in the creation of UNIVAC, the first all-electronic digital computer. She invented the first computer compiler, a program that translates written instructions into 13

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson codes that computers read directly. This work led her to co‑develop COBOL, one of the earliest standardized computer languages. COBOL enabled computers to respond to words in addition to numbers. Hopper also lectured widely on computers, giving up to 300 lectures per year. She predicted that computers would one day be small enough to fit on a desk and people who were not professional programmers would use them in their everyday life. During her career, she retained her affiliation with the Naval Reserve. By 1966, she attained the rank of Commander. The following year in 1967, Commander Hopper was called back to active duty and she was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations’ staff as Director, Navy Programming Languages Group. In 1973, she was promoted to Captain, to Commodore in 1983, and to Rear Admiral in 1985. Hopper remained active in industry and academia until her death in 1992. USS Hopper (DDG-70) was named in honor of Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper and she was buried with full Naval honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 7, 1992. SOURCES: “Admiral Grace Murray Hopper,” Department of the Navy, 6 September 1999, http://www.history. navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-h/g-hoppr.htm (22 February 2006). Blyth, Myrna Eed., 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century (Des Moines, Iowa: Ladies’ Home Journal, 1998). “Grace Murray Hopper,” Public Broadcast Systems, 1998, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/ entries/btmurr.html (22 February 2006).

Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The quiet, unassuming young girl with a penchant for numbers became one of the mathematical geniuses behind the U.S. space programs. In a time when most African Americans did not make it to high school, Johnson entered high school at 10 and graduated college at 18. Her father, acute to his daughter’s unique talent, drove 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia so she could continue her high school education. She skipped through grades, graduating high school at 14. She attended West Virginia State College, where her professor created a special course in analytic geometry for her. She was one of the first African Americans accepted into the graduate program for mathematics at West Virginia University. She taught for seven years before learning about an opportunity by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor.

Moon. She helped calculate the path that took the first Americans into space. She charted Alan Shepard’s flight path and took the Apollo 11 crew to the moon to orbit it, land on it, and return safely to Earth. In 1962, NASA had a computer calculate astronaut John Glenn’s path, but not as trusting of the computer, Glenn asked Johnson to verify the computer’s calculations. In 2014, Johnson was honored by the National Women’s History Museum and in 2015 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She is also the focus of a new movie starring Taraji P. Henson. SOURCES: https://www.astrosociety.org/society-news/ katherine-johnson-to-receive-the-asps-newarthur-b-c-walker-ii-award/ http://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-thegirl-who-loved-to-count https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Qq8Y9rpm7Z4

Johnson was part of a small pool of women who were hired to do mathematical calculations. After two weeks, she was transferred to work, temporarily, with the all-male pool of technical engineers. That assignment would soon become permanent. Johnson would work on the early launch paths for the space program. Known for the accuracy of her orbital calculations, she determined the trajectory for Project Mercury and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the 14

Contemporary Perspective Author Q&A with Nathalia Holt: Rise of the Rocket Girls Nathalia Holt, Ph.D. is a science writer and the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars and Cured: The People who Defeated HIV. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Popular Science, and Time. She has trained at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and Tulane University. She lives with her husband and their two daughters in Boston, Massachusetts. In this Q&A, Holt shares thoughts on her most recent book, Rise of the Rocket Girls, which chronicles the stories of the women who worked on the space program helping to develop America’s first rockets. It profiles the women who broke the boundaries of both gender and science. Based on extensive research and interviews with the living members of the team, Rise of the Rocket Girls offers a unique perspective on the role of women in science. In describing her research into this book, Holt says, “It has been such a privilege to meet these women, write their stories and share their stories.” 15

many stories of women pioneers who just have not been given their due. It really shows that women have always been a part of our history. Especially for the American space program, there are these wonderful role models, what they were able to overcome and what they did. It is very inspiring.

Holt spent approximately six years researching and interviewing 17 women who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. It is NASA’s leading center for robotics exploration. Founded in 1936, many of the women featured in Holt’s book were hired in the very early days of rocket research at JPL. Holt continues her research with families of the women.

It’s just amazing when you look at the sheer number of women who were involved in the space program. I learned about the women at Langley but decided to focus on the women at JPL because so little attention was given to them and what they had there was so unique. They really were given a lot of respect. They became the first computer programmers and they were this group of women that had these very long careers and this didn’t really happen at a lot of other NASA centers. They were there for 50 years and one of them is still there. And that’s really why I decided to focus on this particular group.

What has been the response to the book?

How did you discover this story?

It’s amazing how surprised people are to hear about these women. No one had heard about this group. People are very surprised to learn about the role of women in the space program and the long careers these women have had, the number of missions they were a part of and the overall impact they have had. It’s been wonderful to share their stories. It has been really good to have a lot of young people, as young as 12, at these book talks.

You are the mother of two girls, what impact do you think a story like this has on young girls AND boys? I think it’s important, not just for girls, but for boys as well to learn this part of history. The contributions of female scientists really have been neglected. It is just a sad thing that we have had so

I came across this story by coincidence. It started in 2010. My husband and I were expecting our first child and having a very difficult time coming up with names. My husband came up with the name Eleanor Frances and I started researching the name. The first that came up was an image of Eleanor Frances Helin accepting a NASA award and I was just stunned by this picture. I had no idea that women worked at NASA at that time much less as scientists. Especially for me, I have a PhD in microbiology and I consider myself well versed on the contributions of women in history, it’s an area I am very interested in, and to suddenly learn about this group of women who had such an instrumental role in the space program, it was incredible for me. I became obsessed with finding out more about this group – and long before I knew this would be an article or book. I just wanted to know more about their lives.

What connected you the most to this story? When I first started researching it, I was lucky enough to find this group of archivists, historians, and librarians, who had all this information and pictures to share with me. But what surprised me is they did not have very many names and they did not have any contact information. It was really a challenge then to find these women and interview them. But when I did, the results were just so remarkable because their memories were so vivid of what their careers were like, the missions they worked on and even the personal struggles of what it was like to be a working mother during that era. I felt very connected to that, as a woman, as a mother, as a scientist. There were so many parallels between what they went through and what is happening today with women in science.

How many of the women were alive when you started your research? Unfortunately, many of them had passed away. I was able to find 17 that I tracked down and got their stories. I focus the book on three women in particular. In the process of writing this book, a few others have also passed away. The women that have read it that were part of this amazing team, have been very excited and it is pleasing to them to finally have some recognition of their careers and what they accomplished. They have been very excited about the book.

When first approached, what was the response from the women to your interest in their lives and story? They loved it. From the very beginning they were so excited. I almost felt like they had been waiting for someone to come and get their story. They loved talking about it. In 2013, I organized a reunion and brought in women 16

from all over the country. They were so excited to see each other again and to be in this lab where they had spent so many years. There was something magical about it. They were very close with each other. They had to work long hours. They leaned on each other quite a bit. The friendships they formed were very important.

Did you see this book as a contribution to women’s history? I really wanted to fill in that gap in our women’s history on the American space program that was missing by not including these women. At first, I was concerned about putting in too much of the women’s personal lives. I worried that perhaps I should just focus on their careers and make sure we put as much emphasis as possible on the contributions they have made scientifically and culturally to the American space program. But as I was writing and interviewing these women, I realized it was important also to include their personal lives, because that is also something very special they were able to accomplish. They were able to do all of this at a time when it was very uncommon for mothers to work outside the home. In 1960, only 25 percent of mothers worked outside the home. And for that reason, I wanted to combine that story. I definitely see it as an important part of women’s history.

Why do you think a story like this has been so forgotten? For me, it’s quite shocking. These were not women who had worked there for just a few years. For women who had worked at a place for 50 years and to have their stories lost is very tragic. And it seems particularly with our female scientists, their stories are frequently lost. It’s been very nice to me to see there has been so much interest in finding them. So I hope that is changing. It’s a good lesson for today that we should hold on to the women making contributions so they are not lost in the future. 17

What is one surprising fact that you learned? This is such a hard question. There are so many. What I really loved is that by doing these first person interviews you get all of these details about missions that have never been published. In terms of space history, one of the surprising facts is that we could have launched the world’s first satellite a full year ahead of the Soviet Union. I was also really surprised about the history behind the Voyager Mission. The planning for that mission was all done in secret over a weekend, due to NASA budget cuts at the time. However, if I really had to pick one thing that was the most surprising it would be, unfortunately, the sad fact about how forgotten these women really were. And I saw this a few times. In 2008, NASA held this big gala in honor of the 50th anniversary of Explorer I, this was America’s first satellite. They did not invite any of the women who were a critical part of that mission and not even one woman who was mapping out the route of the satellite that night and is the real reason we know the mission was a success.

#We

R A E H You

Connie Barclay

So many important women in our country’s history, and they rarely teach about them in our schools.

Liz Dennery

@SheBrandLiz

The First National @womenshistory Museum needs your help. Every dollar counts! ow.ly/kfDn304re9s #NWHM

Irene O’Connor

Yay! More news with this kind of history pleeze! Thank you!!!

Yara Shahidi @YaraShahidi

Introducing Mama T, the trailblazer we know & love! @traceeellisross is definitely one of the @womenshistory 1/2 #womenmakinghistory

Michelle Torres-Carmona Wow, I didn’t know this story...

Did you get to ask NASA about these women and how their stories got lost? I did. And it was clear that with the anniversary, there was no malintent. Their stories really were simply lost.

Her Hat

@HerHat1920

Check out @womenshistory exhibit on women who ran for #POTUS, including Woodhull & Lockwood #wmnhist

Why do you think a women’s history museum is important? It’s hard to believe it does not exist already. It’s very sad that this is where we are today. Having this museum is critical. It is important that we recognize these pioneers of our history. It is only by doing so in a museum like this you can recognize their contributions properly and I think by doing so, you really have the opportunity to inspire generations. The work you are doing is critical.

H Pressman @HLPressman

@womenshistory and i look forward to YOUR opening weekend! I’ll definitely be there when you do!

First but not the Last: Women Who Ran for President – Google Arts & Culture

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