What the World Needs Now is Women Who Inspire
Slow Factory’s Fall 2016 Collection “Women Who Inspire” pays homage to great women behind great scientific progress. Growing up, girls are not exposed enough to female role models: in fact, in 2016 a survey asked children to draw a firefighter, a surgeon, and a fighter pilot to which the students drew 66 pictures in total — but only five of them depict women. In the same way that the movie Hidden Figures (about the life of Katherine Johnson) aims to shed light on the already rich history of women’s contributions to science, Slow Factory created 8 scarves, each celebrating a woman who inspires in her own right:
Amelia Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for this record. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. In 1935 Earhart became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University as an advisor to aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to women students. She was also a member of the National Woman’s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.
During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10 Electra, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. There has been mystery and speculation about her death ever since. Fascination with her life, career and disappearance continues to this day.
Sharon McAuliffe was an American from Concord, New Hampshire, and was one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
She received her bachelor’s degree in education and history from Framingham State College in 1970, and also a master’s in education supervision and administration from Bowie State University in 1978. She took a teaching position as a social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire in 1983.
In 1985, she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project and was scheduled to become the first teacher in space. As a member of mission STS-51-L, she was planning to conduct experiments and teach two lessons from Space Shuttle Challenger. On January 28, 1986, the shuttle broke apart 73.124 seconds after launch. After her death, schools and scholarships were named in her honor, and in 2004 she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
Born August 26, 1918) is an American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician. She made fundamental contributions to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, her technical leadership work at NASA spanned decades where she calculated the trajectories, launch windows and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury including the early NASA missions of John Glenn, Alan Shepard, the 1969Apollo 11 flight to the Moon and continued work through the Space Shuttle program and on early plans for the Mission to Mars.
Astronauts Dr. N. Jan Davis (left) and Dr. Mae C. Jemison (right) were mission specialists on board the STS-47 mission.
Born on November 1, 1953 in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Dr. N. Jan Davis received a Master degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1983 followed by a Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1985. In 1979 she joined NASA Marshall Space Flight Center as an aerospace engineer. A veteran of three space flights, Dr. Davis has logged over 678 hours in space since becoming an astronaut in 1987. She flew as a mission specialist on STS-47 in 1992 and STS-60 in 1994, and was the payload commander on STS-85 in 1997. In July 1999, she transferred to the Marshall Space Flight Center, where she became Director of Flight Projects.
Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, was born on October 17, 1956 in Decatur, Alabama but considers Chicago, Illinois her hometown. She received a Bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering (and completed the requirements for a Bachelor degree in African and Afro-American studies) at Stanford University in 1977, and a Doctorate degree in medicine from Cornell University in 1981. After receiving her doctorate, she worked as a General Practitioner while attending graduate engineering classes in Los Angeles. She was named an astronaut candidate in 1987, and flew her first flight as a science mission specialists on STS-47, Spacelab-J, in September 1992, logging 190 hours, 30 minutes, 23 seconds in space. In March 1993, Dr. Jemison resigned from NASA.
The astronauts are shown preparing to deploy the lower body negative pressure (LBNP) apparatus in this 35mm frame taken in the science module aboard the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Endeavor. Fellow astronauts Robert L. Gibson (Commander), Curtis L. Brown (Junior Pilot), Mark C. Lee (Payload Commander), Jay Apt (Mission Specialist), and Mamoru Mohri (Payload Specialist) joined the two on their maiden space flight. The Spacelab-J mission was a joint effort between Japan and the United States.
Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan (born October 3, 1951 inPaterson, New Jersey) is an American geologist and a former NASA astronaut. A crew member on threeSpace Shuttle missions, she is the first American woman to walk in space. She is the current Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphereand Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 6, 2014.
Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African-American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space ShuttleEndeavour on September 12, 1992. After medical school and a brief general practice, Jemison served in the Peace Corps from 1985 until 1987, when she was selected by NASA to join the astronaut corps. She resigned from NASA in 1993 to found a company researching the application of technology to daily life. She has appeared on television several times, including as an actress in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She is a dancer and holds ninehonorary doctorates in science, engineering, letters, and the humanities. She is the current principal of the 100 Year Starship organization.
Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for theApollo space program.In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., inCambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Languagebased on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.
Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved.
Nancy Grace Roman (born May 16, 1925) is an American astronomer who was one of the first female executives at NASA. She is known to many as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in planning theHubble Space Telescope. Throughout her career, Roman has also been an active public speaker and educator, and an advocate for women in the sciences.
