Like Julie and Jannell, I like browsing in my local book shop, but I also rely on the Boston Public Library to keep my book budget within reason. A recent trip to my local branch yielded a great find: Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt. Because I had recently read Ada Twist, Scientist and Women in Science, this seemed like the perfect follow up.

Rise of the Rocket Girls starts off with a literal bang as a group of young men trying to produce rocket propellant in a lab at Cal Tech create an accidental explosion. In scenes reminiscent of Real Genius (or perhaps The Big Bang Theory), the men—aptly nicknamed The Suicide Squad—are experimenting at the boundaries of sense and science in a quest to get airplanes moving more quickly and from shorter runways. These men were the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which contributed to the development of missiles for the US Department of Defense and later to the design of satellites and rockets for the US space program. But we already know a lot about the men who propelled the US forward in the space race from sources like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. Instead, Rocket Girls focuses on the untold story of the women who worked at JPL as "human computers."

Holt uses a combination of archival material and interviews to write a comprehensive history of the computing department, which was tasked with determining things like the amount of fuel required for a missile launch or the trajectory of a rocket. In the beginning, these complex calculations were done in a purely analog world, using slide rulers, graphing paper, mechanical pencils, and a set of books called the Mathematical Tables Project series (an amazingly ambitious project funded by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.) When electronic computers became available, the women in the computing department were among the first computer programmers.

The dominance of women as human computers started simply enough. The founders of JPL were friends with Barby Canwright, who had a degree in mathematics and was not interested in the limited choice of jobs for women in midcentury America (schoolteacher, nurse, or secretary). Luckily for JPL, there was a strong pool of women just like Canwright, who were available for lower salaries than their male counterparts. (Unfortunately, this is still true today; a post from The Female Scientist shows us that the gender pay gap in computing is 87%.) JPL was unique among engineering groups; even in the early days, they had a large enough population of women to hold a yearly beauty pageant called Miss Guided Missile and later, the Queen of Outer Space, reflecting the changed focus at the lab.

In a bold move, JPL promoted Macie Roberts, one of the first computers to join the company, as manager of the department. Roberts made the decision to hire only women; her rationale was to decrease the distraction that occurred in a co-ed working environment. This resulted in a unique space where "in between calculating trajectories, [the women] chatted about lace trim" for wedding dresses. Roberts was also able to retain her employees even after they got married or became pregnant. This was a noteworthy choice considering that maternity leave simply didn't exist and only about 25% of women with kids under the age of 18 worked outside of the home. Thus, JPL was at the leading edge of science and technology as well as women's rights.

As the 1960s came to a close, the computers at JPL watched the moon landing with great expectations of the changes to come. Soon enough, the computers were renamed engineers. Part of this shift may have been necessitated by the advent of electronic computers, but the title change was also due to the improved perception of the work and contribution of the women, who were no longer just doing math on paper, but were the first people learning how to code the newest computers.

In Rocket Girls, Holt writes a compelling history of women in the work force, as well as the space program and computing. I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of the mission control room during launches, when tensions and stakes were high and when the human computers would manually, and with surprising calm, calculate where the satellite or rocket would end up.

I recommend reading Rocket Girls for an inspiring look at women pushing boundaries and expectations.