Space Oddities

Women and Outer Space in Popular Film and Culture, 1960-2000

Marie Lathers

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781441172051
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441148209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Space Oddities examines the representation of women in outer space films from 1960 to 2000, with an emphasis on films in which women are either denied or given the role of astronaut.  Marie Lathers traces an evolution in this representation from women as aliens and/or "assistant" astronauts, to women as astronaut wives, to women as astronauts themselves. Many popular films from the era are considered, as are earlier films (from Aelita Queen of Mars to Devil Girl From Mars) and historical records, literary fiction, and television shows (especially I Dream of Jeannie).  Early 1960s attempts by women pilots to enter the Space Race are considered as is the media drama surrounding the death of Christa McAuliffe. 

In addition to its insightful film scholarship, this is an important addition to current reassessments of the Space Race. By applying insights from contemporary gender, race, and species theories to popular imaginings of women in space, the status of the Space Race as a cultural construct that reproduces and/or warps terrestrial gender structures is revealed.

Chapter 1

It’s About Time: A Brief History of Women in Space

It’s about two astronauts; it’s about their fate;

It’s about a woman and her prehistoric mate.

(It’s About Time)

I’m sorry to have gone female on you, Major.

(Colonel “Bright Eyes” in Project Moonbase)

At this writing, we are still waiting.

(Jerrie Cobb)

I. Arrows of Time

Stephen Hawking’s 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes was a cultural phenomenon. Although there have been other examples of the marketing of science as popular, or lay, culture, Hawking’s is probably the best known. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University until his retirement in 2009, Hawking has written several popular books on cosmology. I begin and end this book with comments on certain aspects of A Brief History because the text leads to a consideration of the effect that popular science writing has on our notions of origins and origin stories. It does this by revealing some of the ways in which history (that of an idea, a nation, a gender) may be constructed with models of the history of the universe in mind. Hawking offers a history of time—a history of the universe—and thus provides a seductive stage on which to examine the history of the popular representation of women in outer space in the second half of the twentieth century. His book also reveals how science may be popularized—how it may itself sit on the border between “fact” and “fiction”—and how language is used in very concerted ways to facilitate this crossing of genres.

The success of A Brief History of Time is due in large part to Hawking’s stature in the physics community; it is also due to his ability to transform difficult concepts into readable sentences and, surely, his (or his editor’s) choice of a title: A Brief History of Time. What could sound more important, more concise, more romantic, and at the same time more readily approached? The three words of the felicitous title—“brief,” “history,” and “time”—are caught in a tight interdependence that endlessly rewrites itself. Thought given to the meaning of the title leads invariably to new thoughts and new meanings, if not finally to utter confusion, for in the end the catchy title is an oxymoron. How can a “history” be brief? How can there be a history of “time,” when the concept of history itself is dependent on the concept of time? How can we be brief when we discuss time, which seems shorter or longer depending on one’s perspective, and which in any case is infinite? Is 1988 meant to be the end of time, since Hawking appeared ready in that year to sum it all up? More to the point, why a summing up of time in the decade of the 1980s?

Hawking does not appear to have consciously set out to inflect his study with gender trouble, but readers attuned to the history of women in the west cannot remain so oblivious. Having first read Hawking’s book in the same month that I read Denise Riley’s ‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, also published in 1988, I found myself wondering about the following: What of women, time, history, space, and the universe?; is gender, a category constructed in the west in the nineteenth century, a meaningful addition to a discussion of space and time?; is gender a product, even a by-product, of space and time?; do women experience space and time—and thus the universe and history itself—differently than men and, if so, can this difference yield clues about the traditional exclusion of women from space?; what of feminism?—are we really in what some call a “post-feminist” age, a post-history, or at least a radically new era?; what is the relationship between feminism as a historical construct—as political movement and individual experience—and scientific and/or popular models of time, history, space, and the universe?; is feminism (potentially) “universal”?; is gender universal?; is it coincidence that debate among humanists about the terms universal and universalism have arisen at the same time that space science seeks a new understanding of the universe and space engineering seeks to propel (some of) us into space?; is “women” a “universal” category, or merely a modern, western, and limited concept?; what does it mean to try and place “women” in space, either in reality or on film?; and what, on the other hand, does it mean to restrict “women” from space?

As an academic, I consider myself to be a member of the educated reading public. I can’t admit, however, to have understood much of A Brief History of Time. (The Riley book is also difficult, I’ll admit.) I will assume that Hawking is sincere in his desire to reach a broad audience, and I note that a second reading, completed a full year after the first aborted one, was helpful. On my second reading, I noted that at least three concepts described in Hawking’s book are useful to a discussion of the representation of women in space. They are: “sum over histories,” “allowed orbits,” and “arrows of time.” These terms are used in this study as figures of speech, with the goal of sketching out connections between the seemingly disconnected worlds of culture (including gender) and science. In addition, I borrow the force of gravity from physics, and use it as a metaphor for the cultural constraints (what John Glenn called the “social order”) that have bound women to earth and kept them from blasting off. Gravity and the related gravidas (indicating the weighty state of pregnancy) have pulled woman to earth, made her weighty, allowing men to escape earth’s orbit more readily.

The expressions “sum over histories” and “allowed orbits” are connected. Physicist Richard Feynman first proposed the “sum over histories” concept, which Hawking summarizes as such:

In this approach the particle is not supposed to have a single history or path in space-time, as it would in a classical, nonquantum theory. Instead it is supposed to go from A to B by every possible path . . . The probability of going from A to B is found by adding up the waves for all the paths. (A Brief History 60)

These paths constitute the “allowed orbits,” the second term that I borrow from Hawking’s book: “The waves for these paths will not cancel out. Such paths belong to [physicist Neils] Bohr’s allowed orbits” (60). As Hawking notes, in using the “sum over histories” approach one must include in the “sum” histories that take place in “imaginary time,” as opposed to “real time”:

To avoid the technical difficulties with Feynman’s sum over histories, one must use imaginary time. That is to say, for the purposes of the calculation one must measure time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on space-time: the distinction between time and space disappears completely. (A Brief History 134)

Time becomes merely another dimension of space; we live in four dimensions, not three.

May we speak, then, of a “sum over histories” to describe the various paths that women have taken on the road to finding their place in time and space? If so, the probability that U.S. women would ever get to space is the sum of all the possible paths of women to space, a sum that was reached when Sally Ride made her trip in 1983. Briefly put, what troubles feminists is that the sum over histories of women have seemed to lag behind the sum over histories of men, time and time again. Even worse, it has often occurred that by the time women catch up the event on the horizon is already over; thus, no woman has landed on the moon. In both real and imaginary time, it has been difficult to place women in space as astronauts, during the years period when the Space Race occupied much of the American imaginary.

The “arrows of time” approach offers a further means of understanding women’s place in space-time. Hawking identifies three “arrows”: the thermodynamic arrow; the psychological arrow; and the cosmological arrow. To answer the question “Why do we remember the past but not the future?” (A Brief History 144), he investigates whether or not the arrows can be reconciled. He answers that psychological time (memory) moves in the same direction as thermodynamic time (increase of entropy, or disorder) and cosmological time (the universe is expanding). Seen in light of arrows of time, the history of women in space becomes a thermodynamic ordering of disorder; a psychological time that insists on remembering the past, not the future; and a cosmological time that proposes the expansion, and not shrinking, of the universe. We can use these terms metaphorically in the following manner: the arrows of time that characterize the history of women in space create a slow but acknowledged order from the disorder of gender entropy; the arrows create the past as a memory that can then be used to reorder the future, which we can predict (by summing up all possible paths) but never fully know in the present; and continuing expansion may account for the bringing into orbit of previously marginal histories and categories of identity, as categories are revealed to be “universal.” This last example suggests a remembering of the future: we can know that women, people of color, lesbians and gays, will be brought into the orbit of history—into the universe—eventually; the problem is, perhaps, one of patience—but is the universe patient?

“Allowed orbits” is a useful expression because it suggests that there are multiple paths upon which one may found a particular history. If the actual history (that is, the past) is the sum of these paths, then that is also the path, or orbit, that is ultimately allowed. The passive “allowed” connotes the presence of a higher being—a God or a group of congressmen, scientists, or film directors—that permits certain orbits and not others. By combining this idea with that of “arrows” of time, we can propose that a particular history (of the category “women,” let’s say) follows a set of allowed orbits that themselves must fit the three arrows of time. But I do not mean this to sound quite so deterministic; instead, I propose that the moments when women produce an event that thrusts them into a new orbit (the moments in which they lose patience), although they follow the laws and arrows of physics (nature), are to some extent unpredictable and uncertain. The past (history) obeys the law in general, but sometimes it bends (or “curves,” to follow Einstein’s and Hawking’s vocabulary) that law into the future. Trepidation at these bends, twists, and turns in history can also stagnate the march of history for some, however. Time and time again, in the 1962 congressional hearings concerning qualifications for astronauts (discussed below), it was argued that women’s involvement would “interfere” with the current men’s program and thus impede it, slow it down. When women are seen as interference in the natural course of history, their participation in history is not just unwanted, but becomes a conceptual impossibility. In 1962, there was as yet no allowed orbit for the female astronaut.

II. No Official Requirement¹

The story of women in outer space is the story of being in the right space at the right time; it is also the story of the recording of the history of that particular space and time. An example of how women have endeavored to write themselves into time, history, and space is found in the transcripts of the 1962 House of Representatives hearings convened to determine whether or not there was gender discrimination in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) establishment of qualifications for astronauts. For two days in July 1962, a special subcommittee of the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the House met to consider the issue. One committee member stated that the committee’s work was to “once and for all settle this problem of women astronauts” (Report of the Special Subcommittee 63–4; hereafter, Qualifications). The “problem” was settled by one witness with the following statement: “The present qualifications are such that there appear to be no women who are qualified in the program” (64). There was no discrimination, he argued; there were just no women who qualified. Yet the hearings offered more than this simplistic approach to the problem. A careful reading of the transcripts reveals an alliance between language and institutional power made visible through rhetorical strategies used by committee members and witnesses. Specific terms foregrounded in the debate were molded by one side or the other to make its case, to reinforce or contest historical realities. These included broad categories of time and history as well as terms more particular to the hearings, including “experience” and “engineering,” “interruption” and “interference,” and “qualifications” and “requirements.” The history of the Mercury 13 recounted below is that of an aborted attempt to write women into space history, or a failure at the embodiment of the female astronaut. It was not until 1983 that a U.S. woman rode into space, and 1995 that a woman piloted the space shuttle. Between 1962 and 1995, the issue of women astronauts was debated at the same time that popular culture sold “women in space” to consumers. The choice to begin Space Oddities with the Mercury 13 arises from my belief that the U.S. public had first to imagine the woman astronaut on film and in reality—as an individual, a body—before it could begin to allow the notion of the female body as being “at home” in space.

Our understanding of history as both concept and discipline owes its rise in the nineteenth century to modern conceptions of origins and evolution, time as chronological (as opposed to cyclical), and progress. Feminist historians have remarked that “gender” as a category of analysis began to be used in its current form in the 1970s but that its history as category dates also to the nineteenth century. Liberal feminism has wanted to write women into history, and one powerful way of doing so has been to recover “forgotten” women and their contributions; these neglected individuals and events are greeted with a sense of triumph: “It’s about time!” NASA’s Herstory Project, part of the NASA Oral History Project, for example, uses interviews available to the public online to recuperate women who have worked for NASA, thus recovering women from and in history (http//www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/herstory.html). Yet the history of women in space is not only a celebration of women’s accomplishments; it is also a discursive history that defines the ever-evolving relationships among gender, chronological time, and the very notion of history. Joan Wallach Scott has summarized the conjoining of the subject, or discipline, of history with historical fact, or the past:

History figures in this approach not exclusively as the record of changes in the social organization of the sexes but also crucially as a participant in the production of knowledge about sexual difference. I assume that history’s representations of the past help construct gender for the present. (Gender and the Politics 2)

The House of Representatives transcripts examined here and this study itself work to solve the “problem” of women in space by considering it not as a question of statistics and dates but, rather, as a construction that is realized through language.

The special subcommittee on the selection of astronauts was chaired by Victor L. Anfuso of New York, and included 11 other members.² On July 17, 1962, three women pilots testified: Jerrie Cobb, Jane B. Hart, and Jackie Cochran. Cobb and Hart formed part of a group of women pilots that became known in the 1990s as the “Mercury 13.” Cobb, 31, was a single professional pilot who had broken several records and an aeronautic sales executive. Hart, 40, was married to Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, the mother of eight children, a captain in the civil air patrol, and was involved in women’s and civil rights groups (she convinced Congress to hold the hearings). Jackie Cochran, approximately 52 (her year of birth is unknown), married with no children, was the most acclaimed U.S. female pilot of her generation: she founded the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) of WWII, was the first woman to break the sound barrier, and was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve and the Civil Air Patrol. Cobb and Hart argued forcefully that the astronaut program’s qualifications led unfairly to the exclusion of women. In contrast, Cochran urged that NASA hold off on changing its qualifications.

On July 18, three men were questioned: John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and George M. Low. Glenn and Carpenter were Mercury 7 astronauts. Glenn was 41, married and the father of two, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, and a graduate of the Test Pilot School at the Naval Air Test Center (Patuxent River, Maryland). Carpenter, 37, married and the father of four, was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy and was also a graduate of the Navy Test Pilot School. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth (in February 1962), and Carpenter was the second (May 1962). George M. Low, 36 and the married father of four, was director of Spacecraft and Flight Missions in NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight. The three men argued that the time for a women’s program was not at hand.³

The transcripts reveal two familiar approaches to placing women in history. On the one hand, Cobb and Hart desired to see women participate in history as it happens, not in an appendix or afterword: “We seek, only,” Cobb pleaded, “a place in our Nation’s space future without discrimination. We ask as citizens of this Nation to be allowed to participate with seriousness and sincerity in the making of history now, as women have in the past” (Qualifications 5). In a similar vein, a sympathetic committee member, Waggonner, stated, “I think all you are asking is just to keep step in the march of history” (20)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction:  Space for Women: A Problem Deferred
• Chapter 1: It’s About Time: A Brief History of Women in Space
• Chapter 2: Bottled Up: Inner and Outer Space in I Dream of Jeannie
• Chapter 3: Staying Home: Astronaut Wives and Domestic Engineering
• Chapter 4: Chimpanzees in Space and Gorillas in the Mist
• Chapter 5: The Astronaut’s New Clothes: Naked in Space in Nude on the Moon , Barbarella , and Alien
• Chapter 6: Making Contact
• Conclusion: Black Holes and the Body of the Astrophysicist
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index