(Lynn Sherr, Simon and Schuster, 2014)
By Christine R. Riddiough
In 1970 I was a graduate student in astrophysics at
Northwestern University. Like many women of my generation in the 'hard
sciences' I was a 'Sally Ride wannabee' - although at that point we had never
heard of Sally Ride. One day I was heading to class in the Technological
Institute and spotted a flyer advertising a special program on 'Male-Female
Crews on Long-Range Space Flights.' I
went, of course. The leaders of the program - all male engineering and physics
students - started by saying that certainly there would have to be mixed crews
on flights to Mars or other distant planets. After all over the course of the
hundreds of days of the flight, the male astronauts would have to satisfy their
needs. God forbid, they should either do it themselves or with the other men;
thus women were a necessity. They continued by saying that at least the women
on the crew would also be able to cook and possibly take notes on the scientific
experiments carried out during the flight. The downside was the extra weight
due to the hair dryers and Kotex that would be required.
This was the world of women in the post-World War II baby
boom generation. A world where the Feminine Mystique held sway, where
middle-class girls often went to college not to get a BA, but to get an MRS.
Help wanted ads were labeled ‘Male’ and ‘Female.’ Often girls were required to
take home economics and were generally discouraged from studying science and
math.
The 1950s and 60s were also the time when Senator Joe
McCarthy held hearings to root out any communists in the federal government and
the only thing worse than being a commie was being a commie queer. In 1957
Frank Kameny was fired from his government job for being gay; raids on gay bars
were commonplace and most gay men and lesbians led extremely closeted lives. If
anyone knew they were gay, they could lose their jobs, their families and
sometimes much more. Their social lives were constricted and, for lesbians in
particular, there were often few places to meet one another.
This was the world that Sally Ride and the other five female
astronauts selected in 1978 inhabited. In her book Sally Ride: First American Woman in Space, Lynn Sherr does an
admirable job of describing that world, particularly as regards the situation
of women. Her years as a journalist
covering the space program and her perspective as a feminist serve her well.
They provide an entree into the world of NASA. Both her own experience over the
last three decades and her access to interviews with many of Sally Ride's
colleagues, provide a rich canvas on which she paints a striking picture of
Ride the astronaut. Her access to Tam O'Shaughnessy, who commissioned the book,
and the rest of Ride's family, adds a layer of color to that canvas.
The book follows Ride's life from her childhood through her
death in 2012 from pancreatic cancer. It tells the story of her liberal-minded
parents who encouraged Ride and her sister Bear to be whatever they wanted at a
time when most girls were only encouraged to get married and have children. It
also describes a family which was, at best, not very demonstrative emotionally.
Her sister has been oft-quoted as describing Ride as '"... a profoundly private person. It was just part of who she
was. We chalk that up to being Norwegian."
(I can testify to that Scandinavian bent toward non-communication - my
mother's family is Swedish and we'd often joke about how you know you've been in Sweden too long when
you think silence is a conversational gambit.)
Ride's first love was
physics. She started at Swarthmore in the late 1960s and later transferred to
Stanford where she got her Bachelor's degree and her PhD in Physics. It was not
an easy time to be a woman in physics. As Sherr points out 'When it came to
physics, the operative word was "him." In 1970, only 6% of all US
bachelor's degrees in physics were awarded to women; the percentage of female
doctoral candidates was half that.'
After Ride was selected as
an astronaut, she had to contend with the male/military environment at NASA. It
was, as Sherr says, 'a world still hung up on 1950s notions of femininity...'
Only about one-tenth of one percent of technical employees at NASA were women.
NASA was not only barely ready to deal with women astronauts, but, as Sherr
puts it, 'a notoriously homophobic agency. Long before "Don't ask, don't
tell” gave the US military permission to stick its head in the sand, NASA sent
out vibes that sounded more like, "Don't be."' Even as recently as
1990 NASA was looking for ways to actively exclude homosexuals from the astronaut
corps.
Sherr describes Ride's
post-NASA days and her lasting commitment to encouraging girls to learn and
enjoy science. Her final project was Sally Ride Science (SRS), which for over a
decade has sponsored science fairs and camps and provided programs for teachers
to enhance science education. Ride was committed to feminism and spent her life
fighting for both her own opportunities to advance as a woman and those of
other girls and women.
And yet.... Winston
Churchill's famous description of Russia - "It is a riddle, wrapped in a
mystery, inside an enigma..." could equally apply to Sally Ride, who, for
all her celebrity, remained unknown and, perhaps, unknowable even to close
friends. Sherr's chapter entitled 'The Secret' describes the very closeted life
that Ride led with her partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy. It is ineffably
sad to read of how the couple spent holiday celebrations at Ride's mother home
without saying anything about their relationship. Her friend from high school, Susan Okie says
"It haunts me that she was so closed-mouth, and it hurts." One day at
lunch Ride’s colleague at UC San Diego, Paula Levin asked what they (Ride and
O’Shaughnessy) were going to be doing over the summer and was met with dead
silence. Even this simple question came to close to saying they were a couple.
Sherr says that at SRS the truth was widely known but totally unspoken. And
friends like Sherr, who had known Ride for decades, did not find out about
their relationship until reading of it in Ride's obituary. Sherr does a pretty
good job of describing the relationship between Ride and O'Shaughnessy (and
Ride's earlier relationship with Molly Tyson), although this is clearly not
familiar territory for her. She does candidly discuss the '"internalized
homophobia" that led [Ride and O'Shaughnessy] to keep their relationship
largely to themselves.'
Sherr does hint at the basis for the restrictions that Ride placed on
her conversations and interactions with friends, coworkers and acquaintances.
The combination of the Scandinavian background reinforced by an early childhood
home life where there was little open display of affection and her
masculine-based/nerdy science field where everything is based supposedly on
logic and reason certainly resulted in a personality disinclined to share much
of her personal life. One also gets a sense from Sherr’s book that her
celebrity reinforced the need to preserve her privacy. Coupled with her innate
reserve it resulted in an unwillingness to share her personal life. In reading about
the demands placed on her by individuals, organizations and corporations, one
gains sympathy for her. In addition, her interest in working with girls and
encouraging them to pursue science most likely reinforced that unwillingness. But
Ride seems to have gone further in this regard than many others. Not only did
she never come out publicly – a decision that was certainly hers to make – but
she did not share her relationship with many friends. As friend and
psychologist Kay Loveland says, "I think it's one thing to be private, but
not to tell a friend that you're in a relationship that is meaningful to you -
there's something very sad about that."
Sherr describes the firestorm of
responses on social media when people read Ride’s obituary. There were those in
the LGBT community who felt that Ride should have come out during her life in
order to be a role model to young people. And she quotes others who thought
that coming out was just about sex. For example, “'Not everything should
about sex,' wrote [one blogger.] 'There really are important accomplishments
that people make without needing to bring sex into the picture.'”
Yet here Sherr falters a little because coming out – being gay – is not
just about sex, it’s about the whole spectrum of human relationships. Sherr fails to
recognize that and in doing so misses part of the story. There was another
group in that debate that, while perhaps disappointed that Ride had not come
out during her life, understood that it was her decision to make.
Sherr also quotes O’Shaughnessy as describing their relationship as
‘private’ not ‘secret.’ O'Shaughnessy says that they didn’t like labels. But
labels of one sort or another are a part of life – those labels might be
‘female’ or ‘physicist’ or ‘astronaut’ or ‘lesbian’ but they are ways that we
know people. Some of the labels are disparaging – while many young people use
the label ‘queer’ as a point of pride for many older lesbians and gay men it is
still a slur. '"The word lesbian still brings back those memories [of the
stigma of lesbianism on the tennis circuit]," O'Shaughnessy says. But she goes on to say "I don't even want
to be called gay. And Sally thought the same way - you know, straight people
don't have to say, 'I'm heterosexual.' so why should we have to.”
Except, of course, heterosexuals proclaim it every day in many ways -
with weddings and wedding announcements, with pictures of their children on
their desks, in casual conversation with neighbors and coworkers. Forty or
fifty years ago any indication that one didn't fit into that nice, neat
heterosexual box might have resulted in losing one's job, one's family or even
one's life. There are still those threats today and not nearly the protections
there should be. Times have changed, but there are too many older lesbians and
gay men (and even some not so old) who live constricted lives, unable to fully
participate in the world around them because of the fear and the internalized
homophobia resulting from years of oppression. Perhaps we now need not only 'It
Gets Better'(http://www.itgetsbetter.org/) to reach out to LGBT youth, but
'It's Gotten Better' to reach out to those gay and lesbian seniors who are
still living in the 20th century.
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