Hidden Figures is about the African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s Aeronautical and Space research programs, from NACA (created in 1915) to NASA (replacing the former in 1958).
Margot L. Shetterly starts - in a Prologue (page 6) with personal memories, a visit to her family, conversations and activities, and the early stages of researching for this book. Her father had joined Langley Research Center in 1964, and this is the main set for the rest of the books' 23 chapters, centering mostly on Dorothy Vaughan's life, her careers - first as a math teacher and then her subsequent, longest career starting in1943 when she joined NACA's Langley Research Center as well.
Apart for her, stories about Miriam Mann, Katherine Goble, Doris Cohen, Dorothy Hoover, Mary Winston Jackson and sometimes other women appear, mostly in chapters 6 onward, and intertwined with social, cultural and political backdrop aspects that were often hindrances the these women's very lives and livelihoods : Jim Crow law, segregation, racism, sexism, and during the important periods of the 1930's through late 1960's - passing through the Great Depression, WW2 and the Cold War.
These stories are mingled with those of NACA, NASA and also the civil rights and women's rights movements, peppered both by scientific findings and personal acts of courage and defiance that some of these women undertook to counter their segregated conditions - such as Mann's taking off the sign to the toilets in her work place - West Area Computing, the area first created for the African-American female mathematicians who worked as human computers, complying both with Jim Crow segregation and with the need of Human Resources during WW2, as men had gone to the front.
These women's mathematical formulas and research paved the way, from improved and safer airplanes in the 1940's and 50's, into the Space Age, including John Glenn's orbiting the Earth, as well as The Apollo missions.
Hidden Figures may be, in Shetterly's words, a misnomer, but is still an apt and clever one : after all, history books, even those pertaining to astronomy, most often talked and detailed the lives, work and accomplishments of white men, preferring to forget, omit or hide those of women, of minorities - and in this context, of African American Women. The fact that figures is also also a term in mathematics and that these women's paths includes math at the core only adds to the aptness of the title.
Thus, we learn of these women's work, research and often self sacrifice in a patriotic sense, for scientific achievements and technological innovations they helped promote, from inception to reality - and which were often taken as reached by the men they worked for and with.
We learn of the racism, sexism and their various sociopolitical offspring which clearly slowed USA's Space Race against the Soviet Union/Russia's initial accomplishments, almost as a side effect of learning about everything that these women had to go through, just to get their participation recognized and to change their name from 'computer' to 'mathematician' and for some, to 'Engineer', a title given at first only to an elite of white men.
Hidden Figures is very informative and Shetterley gives her thanks to the many people involved in helping her research for this book in the Acknowledgements section (p. 273-278) after having expanded the story with some 1970's to modern day (2010's) news about the women's post-Space age lives in the Epilogue (p. 254-271).
There's an important Author's note (p. 272) about using potentially discordant terms throughout the book, an extensive Bibliography (p. 273-286), Notes (287-329), Index (330-365), Reading Group Guide (368), About the Author (369), Bookperk singup link (370), Copyright (371), About the publisher (373).
I highly recommend this super informative book and invite you to share about it, and further help lifting the veil that history covered over the important contributions of these women, and thus giving better visibility and a fuller image of these Hidden Figures. Its style is fluid, sometimes almost in prose, never dull, and very few technical words are ever used ; it aims mostly the layperson who doesn't necessarily know about the science behind some of advancements recounted.
In 2016 a Young Reader's Edition was released for readers ages 8–12. Its ebook version is 134 pages long, and I know this because I had read about 27 pages before realizing that I was reading it and not the fuller version, which I then reserved on the e-library.
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