In 1973, four years after Neil Armstrong’s space boot hit moon dust in the most celebrated step ever taken by a man, a Nasa report observed that: “There have been three females sent into space by Nasa. Two are Arabella and Anita – both spiders. The other is Miss Baker – a monkey.” The report’s co-author Ruth Bates Harris, who the space agency had originally hired to run its equal opportunities office, was described as a “disruptive force” and fired a month later.
The prospect of women in space was hardly outlandish. Ten years earlier, 26-year-old Soviet parachutist Valentina Tereshkova had orbited Earth 48 times – a feat not greeted with delight by US officials, who swapped rumours (which Tereshkova denied) that she had suffered “some kind of emotional breakdown” during the flight. At Nasa itself, Jerrie Cobb had already passed the same gruelling physical and psychological tests the agency set for its all-male Mercury crews by 1960. (This milestone achievement was marked by the headline: “No 1 Space Gal Seems a Little Astronaughty”.) In 1962, Cobb appeared before a House subcommittee to argue for women’s place in the US astronaut cadre. Her evidence was promptly dismissed by the Mercury hero John Glenn, who remarked flatly: “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
