SONIA ZHURAVLYOVA
ASCHOOL PROJECT when Amy Shira Teitel was seven changed her life. She chose to do a science project about the planet Venus. “Venus was such an interesting thing. It’s on fire — literally! And you can see it in the sky without binoculars — and I just thought it was the coolest thing in the world. The variety of stuff in our solar system was mind-boggling to a seven-yearold,” she tells me. The project started her obsession with space and aviation, which led to several degrees and her current career as a space historian and popular science writer.
Her latest book focuses on the fight to get women into outer space. The first American woman to go to outer space didn’t blast off until June 1983 — and getting there had certainly been a bumpy ride. In her fascinating and thoroughly researched book, Fighting For Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle For Female Spaceflight, Teitel recounts the hoops that women had to jump through not only to set foot in a space rocket, but to be allowed to fly full stop — and draws lessons from it for all women.
She tells the stories of two midcentury American heroines of the skies — Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb. It took time, money and gumption for both women to turn their fortunes around and to be taken seriously as pilots. Although Jackie Cochran’s name might not be familiar to most, her determination to master the skies meant that she held more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history. In 1953, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. But she was not just a pilot — she also ran a successful cosmetics business and was married to one of the wealthiest men in the country, which opened doors in business and political circles.
Like Cochran, the younger Jerrie Cobb came from humble beginnings and caught the flying
Amy Shira Teitel bug early. All she wanted was to be a professional pilot. But things had taken a conservative bent in post-war America and ex-army pilots were a dime a dozen so no one wanted to hire her, despite all the right qualifications and thousands of flying hours.
“For both of them flying represented an extreme freedom,” says Teitel, who scoured letters, archives and autobiographies to deftly interweave the history of flight with personal stories and anecdotes. “Both of them describe the sensation of flying for the first time as feeling at home all of a sudden, as being in tune with the plane. The ability to fly opened up a larger freedom to explore something that was pretty cut off for women. For both of them it was a leap into a new realm.”
Cobb eventually became famous for being the first woman to go through the same rigorous medical tests as aspiring male astronauts but her petitions to be the first woman in space ultimately failed.
Teitel began by wanting to situate Cobb’s story in its historical context but she soon realised that Cochran was arguably the more intriguing of the two. Cochran lobbied for female pilots to be taken seriously, especially during the Second World War. Why, then, does Teitel think that she has been all but forgotten, while her friend and contemporary — the aviatrix Amelia Earhart — became so famous?
“She was very well known when she was alive but she died in 1980 with no children and there was no foundation to keep her name alive,” says Teitel. “I wanted to bring her back to people’s consciousness — she was a very remarkable, but very flawed, character.”
Being a female pilot, even as talented and determined as Cochran and Cobb, was clearly hard work. Their struggles to establish themselves and be accepted on merit alone in a male-dominated industry will doubtlessly resonate with many readers today.
“[The backlash they faced is] so reminiscent of women in maledominant fields that still have to find their own safe space. Jerrie knew she was qualified but came up against male pilots and didn’t want to be just the token woman. And that’s still so relevant,” says Teitel.
Toronto-born Teitel, 35, now lives in California. She grew up with a Jewish father, a doctor, and a mother who’s an artist. It was important to them that she knew about her roots — she went to Jewish summer camp and on a Birthright trip to Israel.
Her family home remains strongly Jewish and tradition still plays a part in her life: “I love the high holidays because my family is a lot of fun. We did a virtual seder for Passover this year,” she says.
She wasn’t great at maths — to the extent that she wasn’t allowed to take physics in high school, but ended up doing an undergraduate degree in the history of science.
“That was where I learnt that you can do history that’s made of science without having to do the equations,” she explains. “Science storytelling is actually a really important thing because it brings the stuff to the people who want to know about it but don’t want to read all the scientific papers.”
She didn’t want to stay in academia so started a blog, The Vintage Space. “It quickly began to gain interest in the space circles and I managed to parlay that into writing for a few websites and that culminated in my first book in 2015,” she says.
She soon added a YouTube channel in which she expounds on subjects ranging from Soviet cosmonauts lost in space to space law. A bad experience as a talking head on a TV show that made her wear a wig and a frumpy suit made her even more determined to pursue her own interests on her own terms.
“I like having this visibility for women in science and I like to have a platform where no one controls what I wear or what I look like.
“I’m a woman who does detailed scientific research and still wears make-up and dresses. I want young girls to know that they can like both fashion and science — for some reason these two things are not supposed to exist together.”
Despite her enduring love for space and aviation, she’s not had the chance to take up flying lessons herself but this is firmly on the to-do list. She’d be following in the flightpath of her two pioneering protagonists, as well as all the women who came after to make a space for themselves up in the skies.
Fighting For Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle For Female Spaceflight, Grand Central Publishing, is out now