FLYING THROUGH A GLASS CEILING
Two pioneering women of different generations crashed Aviation’s boys club & kept on going higher and higher
Wherever they were, they kept their eyes on the horizon.
Jackie Cochran was working in a Georgia cotton mill by age 10. Jerrie Cobb sweated after-school jobs in Oklahoma, picking berries and scavenging old auto parts. Both always knew they were going places. Their story is told in Amy Shira Teitel’s “Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight.” And it’s a bittersweet fable of perseverance.
It begins with Cochran, born Bessie Pittman in 1906. By 11, she was working in a beauty parlor for room and board and $1.50 a week. By 14, she was pregnant by an older man, Robert Cochran, and headed to the altar.
The marriage frayed, then ended. Their only child died in a fire. Bessie, just 19, buried her boy and caught a train. By the time she got off in New York, she was calling herself Jackie and claiming to be an orphan.
The past was gone. All she had was the future.
It soon looked bright. Cochran talked herself into a job at Saks Fifth Avenue’s beauty salon. She built a roster of devoted and generous clients. She wintered in Florida. It was a good life.
“Jackie, a lover of parties, went out to lavish supper clubs three or four nights a week, where she could dine and drink cocktails with friends,” writes Teitel. “More often than not, the nights would end in a casino.”
That was how she met Floyd Odlum in 1932. He was still married, but interested in her, and very rich. She told him she dreamed of flying the country, selling her own line of cosmetics. He told her it would be easier if she could fly herself.
It was a casual observation, but Cochran took it seriously. Odlum took her seriously, too. Soon, they were dating, and he was meeting with divorce lawyers. He made Cochran a bet — if she could finish flight school in three weeks, he’d pick up the $495 cost.
When she enrolled, the instructor told her the course would take two or three months — “if you’re lucky.” She earned her license in 17 days.
But winning the bet wasn’t enough. Cochran’s real dreams were in the clouds now.
“She wanted to fly across oceans and whole continents, staying aloft for hours at a time before landing amid tens if not hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators at the finish line,” Teitel writes. “These were the races that created stars, so these were the races she needed to fly.”
In 1934, she was one of only three women to fly in the MacRobertson International Air Race. Three years later, after working with her friend Amelia Earhart to let women compete against men in the Bendix race, she flew in that, too. And in 1938, she entered the Bendix again and won.
Cochran wouldn’t leave the cockpit, even when victorious until she fixed her hair and makeup.
By the end of the decade, Cochran was the world’s best pilot, period, with a fistful of records. She also thought America’s female aviators were going to waste.
Anyone could see the war was coming. If the government refused to put women into combat, why not let them handle transport, freeing up male pilots for other jobs? She lobbied officials, and on Nov. 15, 1942, Cochran’s Women’s Flying Training
Detachment went to work. After the war, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
By the ’50s, Cochran was chasing a new record: The fastest woman on Earth. It was an ambitious goal, but not out of reach, particularly with a rich husband. He hired pal Chuck Yeager to coach Cochran. Yeager had already broken the sound barrier. She succeeded one week after her 47th birthday.
But there were other barriers to break and other women trying to break them.
Although she was 25 years younger, Jerrie Cobb was a lot like Jackie Cochran. A military brat who loved softball and horses, she was fascinated by flying planes as a kid.
She set plenty of her own records — like piloting a prop plane over 1,500 miles, from Guatemala to Oklahoma City.
Cobb kept the photographers waiting, though, while she got out of her drab flight suit and changed into a dress and high heels. Jackie Cochran would have approved.
The two would soon come into conflict, though.
Dr. Randy Lovelace ran the tests that had helped choose America’s first astronauts, the Mercury 7. He was eager to see how women would fare. After a chance meeting at an aeronautical conference, Cobb volunteered and, on Feb. 14, 1960, showed up to be poked and prodded.
The doctors measured her lung power and heart rate. They put ice water in her ears to induce vertigo. They sat her on a stationary bicycle and monitored her vitals. She came through with flying colors.
“A Woman Passes Tests Given to 7 Astronauts,” The Associated Press reported.
But the same test results didn’t bring the same respect. At a followup press conference, one reporter asked Cobb if she could cook. Another demanded to know why she wanted to beat a man into space.
“I don’t want to beat a man into space,” she answered levelly. “I want to go into space for the same reasons men want to.”
Afterward, newspapers printed her measurements.
Soon, other women were taking Lovelace’s tests, hoping to become astronauts. But NASA required candidates have military experience as jet test pilots — experience women weren’t allowed to gain.
“Although NASA says they have nothing against women, it just so happens that the requirements are such that no woman can meet them,” Cobb complained.
Cobb kept pushing, even appearing at a 1962 congressional hearing to make her case. Arguing against her? Jackie Cochran.
Cochran was already a Lovelace supporter, advising him and helping pay for his research. But she bristled at the press Cobb was attracting. And she worried people were rushing things and distracting America from NASA’s ultimate mission.
“I think there is no doubt that women can go into space and be as successful as men, but I say I don’t want to see it done in a haphazard manner,” Cochran stated. “It is nice to be first, but it is also nice to be sure.” The hearings adjourned early.
The subject, Congress decided, was closed.
The following year, on June 16, 1963, the Soviet Union put the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, into space. Yet even then, NASA officials dragged their feet. It would be another 20 years before they would finally catch up and put Sally Ride on the space shuttle.
Cochran, who died in 1980, didn’t live to see it. But Cobb did, and it only reignited her dreams of outer space. In 1998, when she was 67, she even lobbied NASA again. If a 77-year-old John Glenn could ride the shuttle, why couldn’t she?
They turned her down.
Cobb was left on Earth, still staring off at the horizon. At least before she died in 2019 she knew other women had made that voyage she dreamed of.
She never made it off the launching pad, but she and Cochran had sent a new generation of women into the skies.