“Girls don’t go to the meetings,” Katherine’s male colleagues told her.
“Is there a law against it?” Katherine retorted. There wasn’t, in fact. There were laws telling her where she might answer nature’s call—a law she ignored at Langley—and which fountain to drink from. There were laws restricting her ability to apply for a credit card in her own name, because she was a woman. But no law applied to the editorial meeting. It wasn’t personal: it was just the way things had always been done, they told her.
Restricting the computers from joining the editorial meetings wasn’t a rule: it was a rule of thumb. It was rooted in practice and widely implemented, but it did not apply without exception to every situation. Langley gave each division chief, and every branch head and section head below them on the ladder, a certain amount of leeway in the management of their groups. Whether or not a woman was promoted, if she was given a raise, if she had access to the smoky sessions where the future was being conceived and built, had much to do with the prejudices and predilections of the men she worked for.
In 1959, six of Langley’s female employees—Lucille Coltrane, Jean Clark Keating, Katherine Cullie Speegle, Ruth Whitman, Emily Stephens Mueller, and Dorothy Lee—assembled around a table in a Langley office to sit for a group photo, their elegant, well-made suits amplifying the confidence in their gaze. “Women Scientists,” the photographer labeled the picture, though the particulars of the occasion would be lost to the passage of time. They had rated inclusion in the photograph because of some combination of rank, research contributions, and general esteem in the eyes of their bosses. Five out of the six women in the photo worked in PARD.
One of the women in the photo, Dorothy Lee, had accepted a position as a computer in PARD in 1948, fresh out of Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia, just after East Computing was disbanded. When branch chief Maxime Faget’s secretary took off for a two-week honeymoon, Dorothy was asked to sub for her. She answered the phones and distributed the mail in addition to her regular duties, which at the time involved solving a triple integral for an engineer in the division. At the end of the two weeks, she had so impressed Faget with her math (not her secretarial skills, as she didn’t know how to type) that he invited her to become a permanent member of his branch, apprenticing her to men who showed her the ropes of aerodynamic heating. By 1959 she had authored one report, coauthored seven more, including one with Max Faget, and, like Mary Jackson, been promoted to engineer.
Early in her career at Langley, Dorothy Lee was interviewed for the Daily Press, in all probability by Virginia Biggins, the female reporter assigned to the Langley beat. “Do you believe,” she was asked, “that women working with men have to think like a man, work like a dog, and act like a lady?” “Yes, I do,” Lee said, who was then mildly mortified to read her words in the Sunday paper.
It was the “acting like a lady” term of the equation that was so vexing. A little bit of coyness, like wormwood, could be pleasantly intoxicating, smoothing interactions with the men. Too much politesse, however, might poison a woman’s prospects for advancement. Women were “supposed” to wait for the assignments from their supervisors, and weren’t expected to take the lead by asking questions or pushing for plum assignments. Men were engineers and women were computers; men did the analytical thinking and women did the calculations. Men gave the orders and women took notes. Unless an engineer was given a compelling reason to evaluate a woman as a peer, she remained in his blind spot, her usefulness measured against the limited task at hand, any additional talents undiscovered.
Some women did indeed spend their days in rote service to the day’s task, plotting data with blithe indifference, routing torrents of numbers as nonchalantly as the calculating machines they cradled. But the average level of interest in the work among female employees was no lower than it was for their male counterparts, the “inveterate wind tunnel jockeys” and the mediocre “can’t-hack-it engineers” who managed to carve out a comfortable place for themselves in the bureaucracy despite modest talents or ambition. For the women who had found their true calling at the NACA, like Dorothy Lee, like Katherine Johnson, they woke up dreaming of angles of attack and two-body orbit equations and ablation processes no less than did Chris Kraft and Max Faget and Ted Skopinski. They matched their male colleagues in curiosity, passion, and the ability to withstand pressure. Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. First, however, they had to get over the high hurdle of low expectations.
Whatever personal insecurities Katherine Goble might have had about being a woman working with men, or about being one of the few blacks in a white workplace, she managed to cast them aside when she came to work in the morning. The racism stuff, the woman stuff: she managed to tuck all that way in a place far from her core, where it would not damage her steely confidence. As far as Katherine was concerned—as far as she had decided—once they got to the office, “they were all the same.” She was going to assume that the smart fellas who sat across the desk, with whom she shared a telephone line and the occasional lunchtime game of bridge, felt the same. She only needed to break through their blind spots and make her case.
“Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Katherine Goble asked again, undeterred by the initial demurral. She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer. Her requests were gentle but persistent, like the trickle of water that eventually forces its way through rock. The greatest adventure in the history of humankind was happening two desks away, and it would be a betrayal of her own self-confidence and of the judgment of everyone who had helped her to reach this point to not go the final distance. She asked early, she asked often, and she asked penetrating questions about the work. She asked with the highest respect for the natures of the brainy fellas she worked with, and she asked knowing that she was the right person for a task that needed the finest minds.
As much as anything, she asked with confidence in the ultimate decision.
“Let her go,” they finally said, exasperated. The engineers just got tired of saying no. Who were they, they must have figured, to stand in the way of someone so committed to making a contribution, so convinced of the quality of her contribution that she was willing to stand up to the men whose success—or failure—might tip the balance in the outcome of the Cold War?
In 1958, Katherine Goble finally made it into the editorial meetings of the Guidance and Control Branch of Langley’s Flight Research Division, soon to be renamed the Aerospace Mechanics Division of the nearly-ready-for-prime-time National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now, she was going to come along with the program.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN