![]() (Photo by Hopper Stone) Considering the social situation in the United States at the time, how did these women manage to get jobs at NASA?ĭuring the Second World War, the demand for aircraft exploded, while at the same time, a lot of male mathematicians and engineers went off to fight. Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson in Hidden Figures. As professional mathematicians, they could make two or three times more than as teachers. They were generally expected to go into teaching, which was a prestigious job at the time, but it didn't pay very well. ![]() The African-American women working at NASA were largely middle class and educated, so even within the black community these college-educated women were outliers. Most black women at the time were working as domestic servants, or in factories, really scraping just to get onto the first rung of the social ladder. That is how these women experienced segregation in their everyday lives – they may not have been barked down by dogs in the street, but they faced humiliation at every turn. These women were creating calculations to make something happen that had never happened in the history of humanity, and yet they still had to go to the ‘colored bathroom’. Segregation was still in place, and it was very important for me in the book to show the real banality of that, the daily humiliations and slights.
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