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Rise Of The Rocket Girls Analysis

Decent Essays

“Calculating trajectories is no simple task,” but to Katherine Johnson and other computers at NASA and JPL, it’s just another everyday job. The film Hidden Figures focuses on African American women who were computers at the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Furthermore, the book Rise of the Rocket Girls is directed towards women who were computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. The connection between these two literary works are similar in terms of the characters but different regarding background. Remarkable similarities between the two stories include personal lives and long-lasting teamwork. The women in Hidden Figures and Rise of the Rocket Girls had to take on multiple roles including …show more content…

At JPL, racial setbacks were less prominent as women of different races and ethnicities cooperated. On the other hand, the Langley Research Center was segregated and the women in the West Area Computing Division were isolated from the rest of the research center. This separation is shown immediately when Katherine Johnson is the first colored women working with the Space Task Group. When Katherine enters the room, she is mistaken for a custodian and handed the trash can. Later, when she pours coffee for herself, all the white people in the department stare at her in disbelief. The following day, she finds a separate kettle for herself labeled “Colored”. In addition, when Mary Jackson is working with the engineers on the space capsule, one of the head engineers asks her if she would like to be an engineer if she was a white man. She responds that she wouldn’t have to wish, she’d already be one. Apart from the racial differences between the two pieces of literature, the struggle for women getting new positions during that time was depicted very differently. In Hidden Figures, both Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson underwent multiple barriers to be able to get their desired position; Dorothy as a supervisor and Mary as an engineer. Dorothy was promoted to supervisor by Ms. Mitchell at the very end and Mary had to go to court to see a judge to be able to

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