The right stuff, the wrong sex: The science, culture, and politics of the Lovelace Woman in Space Program, 1959--1963 (William Randolph Lovelace II)

Drawing upon records from four presidential libraries, the National Air and Space Museum, several private archives, the Lovelace Foundation, and NASA's Historical collection, as well as from original interviews and questionnaires from seventeen participants, this dissertation analyzes Lovelace's Woman in Space Program, a research project testing whether women could withstand spaceflight's physical rigors. Adopting an abandoned Air Force program, Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II invited twenty-five women to undergo his namesake Foundation's Project Mercury physical, created for NASA. With financial support from Jacqueline Cochran, Lovelace's lifelong friend and world-famous woman pilot, thirteen women, dubbed the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs), passed the tests. When NASA and the Navy collaborated to cancel the testing's next phase, Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to pass Lovelace's tests, began a three-year campaign to convince NASA to fly a female astronaut. Despite July 1962 House Subcommittee hearings that publicized women's capabilities as potential astronauts, her efforts failed. The Lovelace Woman in Space Program never resumed.; Determined individuals carved out space for this program to exist at a time when social, political, scientific, and cultural forces all overdetermined its end. Lovelace administered the project driven by a visionary image of future spaceflight. Cochran financed the FLATs with an eye towards leading women into space. By the time Lovelace's program became public, however, Kennedy's lunar landing decision streamlined the space agency, making it wary of distractions. National political leaders, including vice President Johnson, opposed the FLATs. Cobb's persistent campaigning kept the issue alive long enough for it to receive a public hearing.; At a time when aerospace's cutting edge systematically excluded women through exclusive access and prohibitive cost, Lovelace's program permitted thirteen women to demonstrate women's capabilities for space. Although the FLATs received the most attention after Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 flight as the first woman in space, the real decisions about American women in space—a product of gendered assessments of what constituted a “dramatic” showing of Cold War strength—had already been made by 1962. The First Lady Astronaut Trainees' history reveals how gender ideology underlay Cold War decision-making about national prestige and technological prowess.