Heather Alexander - VIP: Dr. Mae Jemison: Brave Rocketeer

To all kids who dream of the stars and beyond

Mae Jemison held her breath as the lunar module touched the surface of the moon. She stared at the grainy image on her familys television. Her brown eyes grew wide watching American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step out. They would be the first humans to walk on the moon.

Wow! The moon! cried twelve-year-old Mae.

It was July 21, 1969. Along with hundreds of millions of people all over the world, Mae was witnessing the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Shed been waiting for this special day for a long time.

Mae had been obsessed with the space program since she was six years old. She knew a lot about space, the stars, and how rockets flew. She knew when each mission would take place and what it was supposed to accomplish. Shed read books that gave step-by-step details of how a human would go to the moon.

What if I were way up there? she wondered.

Mae closed her eyes and imagined herself floating through space. She wore an astronaut suit. She walked on the moon. She made important scientific discoveries.

When she opened her eyes, she saw photos flash onto the television screen of the American astronauts whod gone to space and ones who were training to go. She stared at their faces. They looked nothing like her.

They were all men.

They were all white.

Where are the women? wondered Mae. Where are the people of color?

What will the aliens think? she asked her family. Will they think that Earth is just made up of white men?

Her parents explained it was the way things were. The way things had always been.

Mae thought it was stupid that only white men got to go into space. A huge solar system filled with stars, planets, and who knew what else waited out there. She wanted so badly to explore it. Why did she have to be left out?

The moon is only the first step, Mae thought. When I grow up, people will fly to space as easily as they fly across the country in airplanes.

Somehow.

Someday.

Mae planned to fly to the stars, too.

Mae Carol Jemison was born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama. The nurses at the hospital gathered around her. What an incredibly happy baby! they all cried. Little Mae was full of energy.

Mae was the third child of Dorothy and Charlie Jemison. She had an older brother, Ricky, and an older sister, Ada Sue. Her father was a roofer and a carpenter, and her mother would later become an elementary school teacher.

Both her parents had spent their whole lives in Alabama, but they decided to leave when Mae was three years old. Maes mother had dropped out of college to care for her sick parents. Back then in Alabama, most Black women could only find work cleaning the houses of white people. Dorothy Jemison knew she was meant to do much more. So Maes family moved to Chicago, Illinois.

In Chicago, Maes mom graduated from college and became a teacher. She even went on to get her masters degree. Dorothy taught her children that with hard work they could achieve anything.

10 Things Women Couldnt Do in the 1960s and 1970s

When Mae was growing up, women in America didnt have a lot of the legal rights or opportunities they have today. Many didnt have jobs or only worked in careers that were thought to be suited to womennurse, teacher, sales clerk, or secretary. They were often treated as second-class citizens compared with men. In the 1960s and 1970s, women started to protest this unequal treatment. They marched and wrote articles championing womens rights. Laws and society began to change.

Did you know that when Mae was a girl, women couldnt...

1. Get a credit card: A bank could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman, and if she was married, her husbands signature was needed. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 made it illegal to refuse a credit card to a woman based on her gender.
2. Serve on a jury: Although every states law was different (Utah allowed women to sit on a jury in 1879), most states wouldnt let women on a jury. Women were thought to be needed in the home. They were said to be too delicate to hear about gory crimes and too sympathetic to make objective decisions. In 1973, women were finally allowed to be jurors in all fifty states.
3. Attend some Ivy League universities: Yale and Princeton didnt accept female students until 1969. Columbia didnt until 1983.
4. Attend a military academy: The United States Military Academy at West Point first admitted women cadets in 1976.
5. Serve in combat: Women were not allowed on the front lines for ground combat until 2015.
6. Practice law: In the 1960s, 90 percent of all law firms refused to hire a woman lawyer.
7. Keep their jobs while pregnant: Until 1978, women could be fired from their jobs for being pregnant.
8. Earn equal money as men: In 1963, women earned only fifty-nine cents for every dollar a man earned. (In 2018, women earned approximately eighty cents for every dollar a man earned. African American and Latina women earned less.)
9. Run the Boston Marathon: Women were not officially allowed to race until 1972.
10. Become a NASA astronaut: Women were not accepted into the training program until 1978.

Mae started kindergarten at her neighborhood school on the South Side of Chicago. She was a bright, curious child who could already read and count. One day the teacher asked the class, What do you want to be when you grow up?

Maes little hand shot into the air. But the teacher called on the other five- and six-year-olds first. Police officer, teacher, mother, they replied one after the other. Finally the teacher came to Mae.

I want to be a scientist, Mae declared.