What would Susan B. say about “Hidden Figures?”

What a great movie about civil rights! I love movies that challenge and uplift,

but I have little time for those that focus on futility. It was also a movie about one of the most degraded group in American history-black women.

The three women depicted in this movie had two strikes against them in their work on the space program for NASA—not only were they women in a field of male mathematicians and scientists, but they were black in a field dominated by whites. Here are a few things I noticed:

Imagine Katherine Johnson of NASA, who had to run a half-mile IN HIGH HEELS every time she wanted to relieve herself! I can empathize because when I was admitted as one of the first women in a certain Catholic seminary, I had difficulty finding any ladies’ room and felt cut off when all my classmates retired to their dormitory rooms after lunch.
Mathematician Dorothy Vaughan fought an uphill battle among NASA women to get a much-deserved promotion for assuming the work of her supervisor who quit. Reminds me of a story from Susan’s childhood when her father would not promote women to supervisory positions in his mill even though the women knew more than the men.
Mary Jackson had to petition the court for permission to attend engineering courses because she was black—reminiscent of how the University of Rochester, in Susan’s hometown, would not admit women without a large financial contribution.
Early in life Susan was angered by the fact that she received only ¼ of a man’s salary for doing the very same job. In the movie we see Katherine Johnson struggling for acceptance among male colleagues who did not have as much mathematical acumen as she did.

Born into an era when women had access to only a few jobs (mostly to do with the upkeep of clothing and children), Susan would have rejoiced to see these women entering fields hitherto reserved only for men. As a staunch abolitionist who helped present 400,000 petitions to Congress asking for the end of slavery, the idea of African-Americans in prominent positions would have filled her with satisfaction.

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