In 1943 there was a push to hire qualified black women because the demand could not be satisfied with white employees only. These women essentially did the work of mathematicians but were labelled as subprofessionals in order to be paid less. NASA, originally known as NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) began hiring women during WWII as female computers. Hidden Figures tells the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who blazed the trail for others to follow in the fields of mathematics and engineering at NASA. Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of humankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.īook Review: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African American women.

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.īefore Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Genre: True Accounts, Society & Culture, 20th century American historyīook Summary: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly