A Review, And A Reflection
I’m going to talk about this intriguing new book by Amy Shira Teitel, I promise. But first I’m going to digress into some background stories, because this is a subject I’ve been writing about for over two decades, and I recently learned some disquieting new details.
Back in 2007 my first book, “Into That Silent Sea,” was released. It chronicles the lives and flights of the first people to fly in space, both Russian and American. My co-author and I also chose to tell some stories of those who did not journey beyond our atmosphere, many of whom were just as vital to the success of those early missions. I included a pilot named Jerrie Cobb.
I’d met Cobb years before, and had been intrigued by what at first seemed like her straightforward story of injustice. She was a talented pilot who wanted to do what some American male pilots were getting to do — train to fly in space. Cobb pushed hard to make it happen, lobbying Presidents and Congress — but it didn’t happen. On the surface, it seemed like a straight case of equality denied.
As I researched further, the reality proved much more complex.
There was indeed discrimination against female pilots, but in this instance it wasn’t coming from NASA. As I explained in detail in our book, women had flown military aircraft in World War Two in vital non-combat roles. At the end of the war, in what was a clear-cut case of gender discrimination, they were told to go home. Women were pushed out of American aviation right at the moment that a new innovation — the jet — came into being. Female pilots who were able through sheer force of will to find work flying were relegated to the simpler world of propeller planes.
A decade and a half after the war, NASA came looking for people with the needed requirements to fly in space. While they didn’t specify gender in the job requirements, the only people who had the essential flying background were men.
Unfortunately for women, these requirements were vital for the job and couldn’t just be learned on the fly. They needed to be built up over many, many years of experience. NASA wasn’t blameless when it came to gender discrimination at that time, but in this case they truly had no choice. They could only pick the best qualified people for what would be a risky step into the unknown.
Because of a discriminatory decision made by others long before NASA existed, it would be a long time until women were able to prove parity in the air with men. As soon as they had the opportunity, naturally, they excelled. Today it is hard to imagine a time without women flying cutting-edge military and civilian jets.
The more I researched Jerrie Cobb for our book, the more she seemed — odd. She did not have flying credentials that came anywhere close to matching NASA’s needs. She was also shy, and socially awkward. She would have struggled to pass the psychological tests that NASA put its astronaut candidates through, which looked for a very different personality type.
What she did have on her resume was a few days undertaking a private series of medical tests, the same as those given to the male Mercury astronauts. By doing so, she had achieved something remarkable and important. She did better on these grueling tests than many of the men, and helped overturn a lot of misplaced prejudices about women’s abilities to withstand the kinds of stresses and rigor that spaceflight might demand. They weren’t NASA tests, and they were just one small part of a huge number of other tests and qualifications NASA looked at to select spacefarers. Nevertheless, Cobb passing these tests was an important step for women in aerospace.
The media, as we know, often love to take a story and run with it whatever the facts are. They declared Cobb to be the first female astronaut. Of course, she was not. Cobb could have told them otherwise. She chose not to. She not only rode the wave of tabloid sensationalism for all it was worth, she encouraged it.
I did a lot of looking into why. And here I found the carefully-crafted myth of Jerrie Cobb as unjustly-denied should-have-been-astronaut falling apart. Cobb, from everything I could find in research, played up the confusion for her own personal benefit. She talked about crusading for women in the space program, but from her actions, it was clearly only about her. It did not matter to her that she had no jet piloting time at all, something experts knew was an essential precursor for the demanding work of flying a spacecraft. She wanted it, for herself. She wanted to turn some misleading tabloid headlines into a shot at being the first woman in space.
Space experts, including the doctors who had tested her, told her it wasn’t going to happen. The job required qualifications that could not be wished away. But Cobb was relentless, writing over and over again to the same decision-makers no matter how often they told her no. She became an irritant to people she needed on her side. Her letters became more pleading, more desperate, and began to contain alarming statements such as saying she’d go into space even if it meant she would not come back. Suicide pilots are not what NASA was looking for — in fact, that was the kind of candidate NASA’s psychologists carefully weeded out. Even if she had been the best jet test pilot in the world, she was personally profoundly unsuited for the role of astronaut.
This has made me ponder Cobb’s place in history. Grit, determination, and a refusal to take no for an answer are often admirable qualities. They can be the trait we look for in those we admire. When it comes to overcoming prejudice, they can be vital. And Jerrie Cobb certainly did a lot to expose some long-standing prejudices against women in aerospace. Her refusal, however, to admit that she did not have the years of training needed for America’s most prominent and coveted job title, and the inability to see when constant needling was counterproductive and not courageous, have meant my feelings about her have always been mixed.
Had she truly pushed for women to be included in the space program by campaigning to change the underlying system that was denying them the needed experience, she would have been a champion of equality and could have made meaningful change. As it was, her increasingly desperate attempts to dictate that her personal ambition should be a matter of national priority make her more of a tragically misguided figure in my mind. As I explain in my book, it’s actually likely that she set the selection of women astronauts back a decade by making the subject so toxic to many people who were in a position to make changes.
I’m being harsher towards Cobb in writing than I have been before because I was recently hired to assist with educational material and experiences supporting an outstanding play by Laurel Ollstein named “They Promised Her The Moon,” telling Cobb’s story. The play revealed something I’d never known before. It wasn’t something I’d ever researched about Cobb: I’d assumed she had been truthful. It seems that she wasn’t.
In her 1963 memoir “Woman Into Space,” at a time when she was still campaigning to fly, Cobb recounts in detail a romance she has with a fellow pilot named Jack Ford. They seem destined to be together, and her account includes gushing descriptions of romance in the air and on faraway tropical islands, along with flowery thoughts of getting married. Then, tragically, Jack Ford dies in an airplane accident.
It’s a moving story of romance and loss that does a lot to humanize the shy and reserved Jerrie Cobb. There’s only one problem. As the play points out — Jack Ford was already married, and stayed that way until he died. Cobb’s idyllic romance was, in truth, an affair with her married boss.
The evidence had been sitting under my nose all the time in the papers of his widow, Mary Ford, archived at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. Mary Ford was also a pilot, who ran a flying company with Jack. They ferried planes together. It wasn’t exactly a secret marriage. In fact, it was so well known that in 1958 a romantic movie was released telling a fictionalized version of Jack and Mary Ford’s story, featuring legendary actress Lana Turner. A marriage doesn’t get more visible than that. Nor does the possibility of Jack having an affair with a fellow pilot — the character based on him in the movie appears to be doing just that.
I’d known that Jerrie Cobb had allowed a large number of myths and misperceptions to grow as she campaigned for a spaceflight. What I hadn’t known until now — and I’m profoundly disappointed to discover — is how she used someone else’s dead husband to bolster her own likeability in her memoir. How on earth she thought she’d get that one past NASA’s rigorous background-checkers is beyond me. The truth is, she wouldn’t have. I’d like to ascribe some other motive to it, to give her some benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, it fits in all too well with what else we know about her.
Which brings me, at long last, to Amy Shira Teitel’s new book, “Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight.”
When Amy told me she was writing a book about Jerrie Cobb, I wondered what else there was to say that others hadn’t said before. As my recent personal revelation shows, there’s quite a lot.
Teitel cleverly intertwines the stories of two women pilots — Jerrie Cobb, and Jackie Cochran. A generation apart, both pushed for inclusion in the “man’s world” of aerospace, but in very different ways and with different degrees of success. Cochran was a key player in getting women into flying roles in World War Two — something, as I mentioned earlier, that was swiftly pulled away once the war was over. She helped to sponsor and became involved in overseeing the medical tests Jerrie Cobb took. She became the first woman to fly faster than sound. She was friends with Presidents and titans of industry, and knew how to work the system to get what she believed in. It didn’t always work. But she was a scrappy streetfighter. And she worked out Jerrie Cobb and her motives right away. Their collaboration and eventual showdown is something Teitel builds up to with tact and verve.
I’m really impressed with Teitel’s level of original research. She hit up every archive she could and brought to light some very original materials. Stuff I’d only heard rumors about, she found. Stuff I had never heard of, she discovered.
Perhaps best of all, she allows the story to breathe and develop. Unlike my personal opinions shared earlier here, she doesn’t judge. She allows the lives of these two characters, each of whom did their share of self-mythologizing, to develop organically. Astute readers don’t need to be told the growing disparities in their accounts versus the verifiable facts — it becomes a part of who they are.
Most remarkably, Teitel allows us to feel personally engaged with two fascinating characters who each made pretty quirky decisions. They are characters who are frequently not easy to sympathize with. Interesting people in history are often that way. We get to know Cochran and Cobb as individuals. We feel for them when they triumph, and also when they make mistakes. Their individual complexities allow each to get far in life. They also hold each of them back.
The history of women fighting for a place in aerospace history is all the more fascinating because many of the key figures are not squeaky-clean role models. They are human beings, with motives and imperfections shared by many. In this account of two intriguing pilots, those character quirks make for a remarkable story.
Francis French is an internationally-recognized, bestselling space history author whose work can be found at www.francisfrench.com
