Women Beefing: A Space-Age Trope Deinfluenced
Two women pilots — both talented, but only one can reign in space. Or so this story has been told.
Jacqueline Cochran may have been the most decorated record-breaking pilot (not just as a woman pilot, but as a pilot, period), but one story about her life and career tends to linger the most, thanks to countless books and documentaries, and perhaps more so than her numerous awards, trophies, and record-breaking speed runs.
During the early 1960s, as the Space Race was heating up and the “Mercury 7” NASA astronauts began their jaunts into space, she single-handedly prevented the “Mercury 13,” the first-ever women astronaut candidates, from becoming astronauts and realizing their dreams because she was older than them, couldn’t qualify to fly into space, and therefore was jealous. Like a real-life Disney villainess except lipsticked and peroxided into a patina of mid-century glamour, she — the ultimate anti-feminist — kept these pioneering women away from space and is thus partly, okay MAINLY, responsible for U.S. women not entering the space world until the early 1980s, decades after the Soviet Union had flown their first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova — end scene.
Or so this story has been told. The book Fighting For Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight by Amy Shira Teitel…
