Publisher's Synopsis
On June 17, 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. Unlike every previous milestone in the "space race," however, this event did not spur NASA to put an American woman into orbit. There were suitable candidates: two years earlier thirteen female pilots recruited by the private Woman in Space program had passed a strenuous physical exam and were ready for another stage of astronaut testing. Yet American women did not escape Earth's orbit for another thirty years. In Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, Margaret A. Weitekamp shows how the Woman in Space program - conceived by Dr. William Randolph Lovelace and funded by world-famous pilot and businesswoman Jacqueline Cochran - challenged prevailing attitudes about women's roles and capabilities. In examining the experiences of the Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees (as the candidates called themselves), this book documents the achievements and frustrated hopes of a remarkable group of women whose desire to serve their country fell victim to their country's suspicion of - and hostility to - such aspirations.;Through archival research and interviews with participants, Weitekamp traces the rise and fall of the Woman in Space program within the context of Cold War American history: the thriving women's aviation culture of the 1950s, Jerrie Cobb's efforts to gain public and political support, the mysteriously abrupt cancellation of the testing program, and the 1962 congressional hearings that effectively denied women a role in America's space program for the next three decades. Weitekamp's study sheds light on a little-known - but compelling - chapter in the history of the U.S. space program and the rise of the women's movement in America.
