Holding Women Back: Michigan's Jane Could Have Been Astronaut

From guest columnist Diane Petryk:

Holding Women Back: Michigan's

Jane Could Have Been Astronaut

August 20, 2024

Watching the Democratic convention last night brought back many memories. The bloody Chicago convention of 1968 attended by MSU's State News editors, among them. The Vietnam War was being protested outside. I joined the State News in the Summer of 1968, my first term at MSU. There was a student chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, but my State News colleagues quickly told me females were not allowed to join, even journalism majors.

Fall term began on September 16, 1968. I was home for the weekend on Friday the 27^th. My mother and I were watching TV. We were a Star Trek family from day one, and this was the second show of the third season. In the pilot episode in 1965, Gene Roddenberry had written in a female “Number One,” or first officer. But in audience testing, people would write: “Who does she think she is?” So Majel Barett, the actress who played Number One, had to change her black hair to blonde and become Nurse Chapel. There were to be no females in authority – yet. By 1968, my brother, a big sci fi fan, was in the army on Okinawa, and not even VHS

existed then. I promised to send him all the Star Trek plots. I had my Norelco cassette recorder on. As “The Enterprise Incident” began we were paying close attention. Kirk and Spock were to get aboard a Romulan ship and steal their cloaking device. They got caught. They are brought into the Romulan Commander's office. The commander's swivel chair is facing the wall, not the door. You first see just the back of a head. Nothing is spoken. Then the commander swivels the chair to face the captives. Her captives.

My mother and I were are electrified. The Romulan Commander was a woman!

It might be hard for a younger person to believe the intensity of our surprise and excitement. But in 1968, women's roles on television were always the helpmate, never the boss. We could only see what that looked like if they were aliens.

This was Rod Serling's leap of genius. When he was writing serious dramas for CBS, exploring topics like the Holocaust or lynching, network executives called a halt. They didn't want to show the dark side of human nature. So Rod Serling invented Twilight Zone, where he could handle bad stuff as long as he had aliens doing it. Many could see that the aliens were just stand ins for us. So Joanne Linville, thank-you. We saw what a female boss in space would look like thanks to your portrayal of the Romulan Commander.

It would be another 27 years before Star Trek iteration Voyager would give us Captain Kathryn Janeway. Ok, Captain Rachel Garrett in Yesterday's Enterprise, a 1990 time travel episode, got us a foot in the door.

I don't know when the first women were allowed in Sigma Delta Chi, but it happened at Michigan State. My first Sigma Delta Chi membership card is dated 1970. That was about the time Gloria Steinem spoke on campus. The Sixties were tumultuous, but, overall, a time of optimism. Progress was being made on all fronts. I didn't get to go to the Chicago convention in 1968, but in 1969 I was part of the State News staff at the March on Washington in November.

Michigan's Jane Briggs Hart saw no reason why she should not be in the astronaut program. Jane was the wife of Michigan's beloved Senator Phil Hart, but more importantly she was the daughter of Walter Briggs, who owned the Detroit Tigers. She could afford to do anything she wanted. She took flying lessons without her father even knowing about it. She was a champion equestrian. She was a sailor. She became the first female helicopter pilot in Michigan. Phil Hart would later quip that it was easy to vote your conscience when you wife's an heiress. He became known as the most honorable man in the senate and they named the senate office building after him. Jane and her fellow female pilots became the Mercury 13 – women who passed all the same physical and psychological tests given the Mercury 7 males. But when they took their petition to become astronauts to Lyndon Johnson in 1962 he shut them down. And astronaut hero John Glenn rejected them as outside the proper way our society is organized.

I spoke to astronaut Eugene Cernan while we were waiting for the first shuttle landing in Florida. He was the last man to walk on the moon and I asked him why they did not take women to the moon. “None were qualified,” he said. Infuriating answer, because women scored above men in most tests, but technically correct because of the requirement for jet plane piloting experience. Women were shut out of any opportunity for that because, at the time, the only place to get it was in the military and that was closed to women. But in all other respects some of the women had more hours of flying and test piloting that some of the men. Besides, being smaller they took up less space and oxygen. Jane Hart and her friend Jerri Cobb and probably many of the other women would have made great astronauts. At 73, Jane crewed a sailboat crossing the Atlantic. She was also a founder of the National Organization of Women and a mother of eight.

When the Mercury 13 were denied, it would be another 21 years before Sally Ride would become the first American female to be launched into space. It is not recorded whether John Glenn thought that proper.

Victoria Woodhull ran for president in 1872, but was under age 35, so the honor of first female candidate for president is Shirley Chisholm's. But Woodhull made her mark. She demanded, 152 years ago, the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or governmental interference. “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform,” she often said.

The Supreme Court of these United States is trying to prove that wrong. Two things I do not understand. Why there isn't non-stop picketing of the Supreme Court over the presidential immunity ruling and why woman of reproductive age and the people who love them are not leaving red states in droves. Indeed, the rising tide of Christian Nationalism is trying to hold back the rising tide of reform.

Last night Hillary Clinton said “Change is afoot.” Change is always afoot. But the direction of change is now the issue.

Author Diane Petryk can be reached at bloomplanet@gmail.com.

Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com or call or text me at 517-730-2638. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.

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