Hidden Figures

               Hidden Figures is a film about three African American women that worked at NASA and their involvement in the space program.  As it was the 1960’s the sexism and racism these women, Kathrine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, had to deal with is in no way surprising with the women’s liberation movement was just starting in the 1960’s.  These women may have been frustrated with the way things worked and were submissive in it to a point, but they still were able to change things ever so slightly but over time were able to cause massive change.  As Dorothy says in the movie when Mary and Kathrine get promotions and she is upset she didn’t get the supervisor job she applied for “Now don’t get me wrong, any upward movement is movement for us all.”.  this shows that they move as a whole but still hurts when you’re the one left behind. 

               The movie also depicts the gracefulness that these women fight for their roles at NASA with. You have Mary Jackson who at first seems like the firecracker among the three but turns to be the most calm of sorts outside of how she gets mad that she can’t apply for the engineering job that is available because she doesn’t meet the knew requirements. She blows up on the white woman because she feels that they keep making it harder since the only schools that teach the newly required courses are in white only schools because Virginia is still segregated despite the ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.  Mary does find the strength to get a court date and fight for her ability to go to one these schools to get her education to become an engineer at NASA.  Dorothy despite feeling left behind by her friends because she didn’t get a promotion, she finds a new niche in NASA once she finds out about the IBM computer that will replace the “computers” she works with.  She quietly learns everything she can about this new machine and teaches her fellow black “computers” how to use the machine. Eventually leading her to be the supervisor of the women running this computer.  Also, the fact that women were thought of so little in NASA that they were referred to as “computers” only is kind of shocking for a 21^st century audience but also they were treated and expected to act like machined just replaced when “broken”.  Kathrine probably has the biggest arc in the movie as she seems top be the quiet one but ends up being the most aggressive of the three to move up and gain favor in NASA.  She explodes finally when she is being questioned on her work ethic and she spills that she has to run a half mile to use the bathroom and she has to use a separate coffee maker and make her own coffee because they don’t want to share with a person of color.  She also is constantly fighting her next in command Paul Stafford who is a bit of a racist to say the least.  She usually wins by getting Al Harrison to agree with her. 

               The fight these women had to go through to become some of the most important and smartest people to ever work at NASA is unbelievable.  These are still some of the fights that women of all races are going through in the workplace even today.  Women are still fighting for equal pay for equal work and to have protections for pregnancies and sexual harassment.  It is hard to believe these fights are still happening in 2020 but all we can do is support women and make sure that if you have a chance to help you help because in the immortal words of Letterkenny “When a Friend asks for help, you help them”.