Six decades after her death, Marie’s ashes were enshrined in the Panthéon in Paris; she was the first woman to receive this honor for her own achievements. In her life, Marie was single-minded. She sacrificed much in service of her work: friends, living near her family, her health. In the end, she wrote, “I appreciated the privilege of realizing that our discovery had become a benefit to mankind, not only through its great scientific importance, but also by its power of efficient action against human suffering and terrible disease. This was indeed a splendid reward for our years of hard toil.”
Hedy Lamarr
Chelsea
When I was growing up, my Grandma Dorothy didn’t share my interest in peering into space and trying to understand the world above us. She always said there was so much to learn about here on Earth and inside us. Next to reading good history and fiction, she loved gardening, flowers, plants, trees—really anything that grew. She also loved movies from the 1930s and ’40s. Her favorite actresses were always those who were great at their craft and lived useful—or at least interesting—lives off-screen. When she told me about the many lives of Hedy Lamarr, our shared interests found a fascinating common ground. My grandma could never understand why more people didn’t know Hedy for more than her beauty or acting.
Hedy was born in Austria in 1914 into a well-off Jewish family. When she was little, her father would take her for long walks, pointing out the inner workings of streetcars and other machines around them. At five years old, she already loved to take apart her music box and put it back together, trying to understand how it worked.
Hedy was “discovered” at age sixteen and began acting in smaller European films. One of her early fans became her first husband, though the marriage didn’t last. He was in the arms industry and did business with the Mussolini government in Italy and had ties to the Nazis in Germany. She hated having to play the doting host to her husband’s business partners and eventually fled to London. There, she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios, gaining her entrée to Hollywood.
“Improving things comes naturally to me.”
—HEDY LAMARR
In the United States, she would work on her designs and inventions while in between movies and even in her trailer between takes. She pioneered new technology, inventing new wing designs for planes, creating a new kind of stoplight, and developing a tablet that dissolved in water, turning it fizzy. When my grandma and I were watching The Golden Girls, nature documentaries, 60 Minutes, or any of her favorite shows and saw an Alka-Seltzer commercial, she’d mention Hedy! (Even though Hedy didn’t invent the actual pill known as Alka-Seltzer; Maurice Treneer did in 1931.)
During World War II, Hedy didn’t want to just continue to make money in the movies (this was always what most impressed my grandma). She wanted to do something to help the war effort. She wanted to put to good use her own talents as well as the things she’d overheard in her home, absorbed at dinner parties with Nazis, and learned at scientific meetings she had attended in Austria. She hoped to join the National Inventors Council but was rejected and told to use her star power to sell war bonds. She did—but she didn’t stop there.
Hedy began working with George Antheil, a composer friend on a frequency-hopping system that could prevent military radio signals from being bugged or interrupted. She knew that would be important for general communications, and to ensure that the Germans and other Axis powers could not interfere with American and Allied radio-controlled torpedoes. When she first approached the U.S. Navy, they ignored her. Maybe it was because she was a woman, or because she was a beautiful woman (my grandma’s theory). Maybe it was the fact that she wasn’t yet a naturalized American citizen, or wasn’t in the navy. Or maybe it was because Hedy and George’s system was challenging to use consistently and effectively. While the patent on their invention expired before their invention was used, Hedy never lost faith in what she knew was groundbreaking technology.
It wasn’t until much later in her life that Hedy’s talent was recognized. Eventually, her work was used by the U.S. Navy, first in the early 1960s. She was finally honored in 1997 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. As for the frequency-hopping technology she developed, its impact is all around us today: Hedy and George’s invention paved the way for modern-day cell phones, Wi-Fi, and GPS.
Sylvia Earle
Hillary
On September 19, 1979, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, wearing an armored diving suit, descended 1,250 feet with the help of a research submersible to the seafloor, where she spent over two hours exploring. (Talk about pressure—Sylvia withstood six hundred pounds per square inch!) No human being had done that before or since.
As a little girl growing up on a small farm in 1930s New Jersey, Sylvia noticed the way her parents treated all living things with respect and empathy. She was fascinated by wildlife, and later, when her family moved to Florida, she loved investigating the creatures living in salt marshes and seagrass beds. Learning how to scuba dive in college at Florida State University, where she majored in botany, opened up a new frontier for her. As America entered the “space race” with Russia, Sylvia cast her sights downward, into the still-mysterious depths of the oceans. For her PhD, she collected more than twenty thousand samples of algae. In 1968, she discovered a landscape of undersea dunes off the coast of the Bahamas. The more she saw, the more she felt the inextricable connection between life on land and marine ecosystems, which were essential and needed to be protected. As she would later put it: “No ocean, no us.”
“I think if others had the opportunity to witness what I have seen in my lifetime… from thousands of hours underwater, I would not seem like a radical at all.”
—SYLVIA EARLE
Sylvia made national headlines in the 1970s, when she led the Tektite II experiment off the U.S. Virgin Islands. The first all-women’s team of aquanauts lived and worked fifty feet underwater for two weeks, exploring both the marine world and the possibility of future habitats at sea or even in space, with its similar environment. Their predecessors, the Tektite I team, had been all men. Sylvia and her crew did the same work as their male counterparts, with the same rigor and expectations. The all-women’s team of accomplished scientist-divers was seen as a novelty—one local paper kept referring to them insultingly as the “aqua-naughties.” Sylvia wasn’t losing sleep over the misogyny; she was too busy exploring the deep. The experiment led to important discoveries about aquatic life and human behavior: Crews living in the undersea habitat developed fierce bonds and became unusually cooperative with one another, while sometimes finding the “topside crew” extremely irritating.
During the experiment, Sylvia was struck by the fragility of the marine life she observed, including the impact of pollution on coral reefs. Afterward, she made it her life’s mission to sound the alarm and help everyone else understand the urgency of preserving and protecting the ocean. Over the years, her fellow scientists would often refer to Sylvia as “Her Deepness” or “The Sturgeon General.”
In 1990, Sylvia became the first woman to serve as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in 1998 was named by Time magazine as its first hero for the planet. She was also a National Geographic explorer in residence—which has to be one of the best job titles ever. I met her at the National Ocean Conference in 1998 and was impressed by her passion for sharing what she had seen with the rest of the world. To this day, she remains dedicated to making the case for mapping and exploring the oceans before they are damaged further, and she has committed her prodigious skills and talents toward that end.
When I think about Sylvia’s work, I am reminded how important it is for all of us to pause and consider what we want to leave to the generations who come after us—how we’ll honor the past, imagine the future, and give gifts to those who will live out their lives long after we’re gone. That’s exactly what Sylvia’s life as a scientist, an e
ngineer, a teacher, and an explorer should inspire all of us to do: we must preserve our oceans for the future.
Sally Ride
Hillary and Chelsea
Hillary
I was in sixth grade when, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. I had watched the “space race” unfold as a little girl, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing to be the first to send a satellite into space. After the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, it set off a flurry of activity in our own country and inspired new investments in science, technology, and research. When NASA announced a little less than a year later that they were exploring the possibility of sending human beings into space, I was fascinated. In eighth grade, I wrote them a letter saying that I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and asking what I had to do to prepare. Someone wrote back thanking me for my interest but explaining that they weren’t taking girls into the program.
Of course, had my gender not stopped me from becoming an astronaut, my nearsightedness probably would have, but still I was outraged. It was one of the first times I can remember being told I couldn’t do something, not because of my personal inadequacies or any lack of skill but simply because I was a girl. I was upset on behalf of girls everywhere.
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, a little girl named Sally Ride in Encino, California, was also intrigued by space travel. “At the time I grew up, the space program was on the front page of the newspaper almost every day,” she recalled. “It was the coolest thing around. I idolized the astronauts, but I never thought really seriously about becoming one.” She was an excellent student with a passion for science, and a star tennis player. After high school, she enrolled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania but couldn’t help but wonder whether she might have been missing out on the chance to have a successful career in tennis. After a year at Swarthmore, Sally dropped out to pursue the sport, then eventually decided to return to college. (According to her New York Times obituary: “Years later, when a child asked her what made her decide to be a scientist instead of a tennis player, she laughed and said, ‘A bad forehand.’ ”)
Chelsea
She then went to Stanford, where she studied English and physics. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever heard of Stanford was because of Sally Ride.
She stayed to earn a master’s and a PhD in physics. One day, she read an advertisement in the Stanford University newspaper: NASA was recruiting scientists—men and women—for the space shuttle program. “The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said later. She was one of more than eight thousand applicants for thirty-five positions in the first class of astronauts open to women, and to men of color. Sally was one of six women accepted; Guion “Guy” Bluford was one of three black men accepted.
Her astronaut class of 1978 was referred to as the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” or “TFNG.” Each of the six women who had been accepted had met rigid standards and were adamant that the bar for them be as high as it was for their male classmates. She and her fellow would-be astronauts practiced jumping out of planes with parachutes and surviving in open water. They underwent gravity and weightlessness training and learned how to fly a jet plane.
Meanwhile, the development of NASA’s first space shuttle was changing the landscape for future generations of women astronauts. It was bigger than a “capsule” and could fit a larger crew, opening opportunities for more people to join a mission in different roles. Six years earlier, NASA had begun to design spacesuits, seats, and crew equipment for a larger range of sizes, as well as modifying waste management systems for women.
After five years of training, Sally was selected as a mission specialist for a flight. She was chosen in part for her reputation as being unflappable and her experience with helping to build a robotic arm for the shuttle. Along with four crewmates, she launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-7. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space. (Almost twenty years earlier to the day, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had become the first woman in space. Between Valentina and Sally, there was only one other woman, cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya. So, while it took NASA two decades after the first woman in orbit, there certainly wasn’t a rush anywhere in the world to support women pursuing celestial aspirations.)
Sally helped deploy and retrieve a satellite, the first time the shuttle was used to return a spacecraft to Earth. They landed six days after launch at Edwards Air Force Base in California. She grinned and told reporters: “I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”
Hillary
I followed the launch from Arkansas with then three-year-old Chelsea by my side, poring over headlines and photos of the crowd of 250,000 at Cape Canaveral, which included people in T-shirts quoting the song “Ride Sally Ride.” I was struck by how much had changed in the two decades since I had written to NASA. Not only were women being accepted into the program, they were being actively recruited and sent into space. For the first time, the sky was quite literally the limit.
But it wasn’t easy. “The only bad moments in our training involved the press,” she later said in an interview with Gloria Steinem. “Whereas NASA appeared to be very enlightened about flying women astronauts, the press didn’t appear to be. The things they were concerned with were not the same things that I was concerned with.… Everybody wanted to know what kind of makeup I was taking up. They didn’t care about how well prepared I was to operate the arm, or deploy communications satellites.” (Even today, it’s hard to think of a woman in the public eye who couldn’t relate.) She endured questions about whether space flight would damage her reproductive organs and how she would go to the bathroom. Johnny Carson cracked that the shuttle flight might be delayed because Ride was looking for a purse to match her shoes.
“I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight, it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can’t be what you can’t see.”
—SALLY RIDE
Chelsea
After the 1986 Challenger tragedy, when the space shuttle broke apart shortly after launch, killing all seven crew members, Sally’s astronaut career came to an end. Though she had been slated to go on the Challenger’s next flight, NASA temporarily suspended the shuttle program. By the time Sally left NASA, she had logged a total of 343 hours in space.
Her work for NASA and to support women in space continued. Sally served on the Challenger accident investigation board and was part of the team that articulated NASA’s long-term spaceflight goals. She devoted her life to closing the distance between Earth and space for everyone. Bonnie Dunbar, a fellow astronaut, described befriending Sally on the Flight Crew Operations coed softball team and remembered conversations about how lucky they had been to have “teachers and parents and other mentors who encouraged us to study math and science in school—the enabling subjects for becoming an astronaut.” Sally championed STEM education for young people from all backgrounds, especially young girls. She founded a company, Sally Ride Science, that provided science curriculums for schools. She started an online project through NASA in which middle school students could both shoot and download images of the Earth from space. Close to my heart as a mom and children’s book author, she also wrote wonderful space books for kids, delving into such topics as how to make a sandwich in space. (Quickly, before it floats away!)
Hillary
In March 2009, when I was secretary of state, I went to Israel and crossed over to the West Bank to Ramallah, to the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. I visited a classroom where Palestinian students were learning English through a U.S.-sponsored program. They were studying women’s history month, and their lesson was about Sally Ride. The students—especially the girls�
�were captivated by her story. When I asked for a single word to describe Sally and her accomplishments, a student responded: “Hopeful.”
Chelsea
Even after her death in 2012, Sally Ride kept breaking barriers. She came out as a lesbian quietly, without fanfare, in an obituary written by Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of twenty-seven years. At various chapters in her life, she worried that being open about who she was would hurt NASA, would hurt her company with corporate sponsors, would hurt her career. They didn’t hide their relationship from family and friends, but, heartbreakingly, they felt they had to wait until after Sally’s death to reveal it publicly. Not long after her death, Tam received a call that surprised her, from Ray Mabus, then secretary of the navy. The navy hoped to honor Sally by naming a research vessel after her. Secretary Mabus was calling to ask whether Tam would be the ship’s sponsor—a role that had, up until that point, been filled by the wife of the man for whom the ship was named. “I think it is fitting that the celebration of Sally’s legacy as a pioneering space explorer and a role model includes an acknowledgment of who she really was and what she cared about,” said Tam. The R/V Sally Ride, commissioned in 2016, is the first navy research ship named for a woman. Her legacy lives on in the scientific curiosity sparked in the girls and boys she continues to inspire, the ship that bears her name, and a spot on the moon named after her by NASA.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 15