For Pride Month, I'll be posting entries on LGBTQ history.
This is the best way for me to start my blog--discussing two of my favorite things: women's history and SPACE. And there's no better woman to kick off my pride month posts than with the American Hero that is Sally Ride (1951-2012).
Almost everyone has heard of Dr. Sally Ride, who became the first American woman in space in 1983. She was also the youngest U.S. astronaut to go to space at age 32. After achieving her PhD in Physics at Stanford, she switched to engineering once she joined NASA and helped design the robotic arm that she would eventually operate in space. Oh, and she learned to fly a jet plane.
As if her two trips to space on the Challenger space shuttle were not enough, Dr. Ride was also a nationally-ranked tennis player and the Number 1 woman's singles player when at Stanford. She even met Billie Jean King, who told her that she should go pro!
Though Ride was preparing for another flight aboard the Challenger, she never returned to space--after the Challenger explosion in 1986, Ride retired, though she was the only person to serve on the investigative committee for both the Challenger and the Columbia disasters. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at UC San Diego, director of the California Space Institute, and led public outreach programs for NASA until her death in 2012.
Ride strove to create more women scientists from her outreach, or at least encourage young girls to become interested in science.
One of Dr. Ride's greatest passions was the Sally Ride Science company, of which she was president, co-founder, and CEO. She also co-authored six scientific children's books. Both the books and Sally Ride Science strove to create science programs and publications to engage and entertain young schoolchildren. Ride in particular strove to create more women scientists from her outreach, or at least encourage young girls to become interested in science.
Dr. Ride's own experiences with sexism probably shaped her agenda in making science more accessible and interesting for girls. She openly acknowledged the women's movement of the 1970s for "paving the way" for her flights to space, but Dr. Ride was still faced with questions about whether she wanted to have children, if space flight would affect her reproductive organs, if she wept when things went wrong on the job, and whether she would wear a bra and makeup in space. One interviewer even asked how she would deal with menstruation in space!! (Honestly, that's an interesting question, but there's a time and place!)
More famously, Diane Sawyer asked Dr. Ride to demonstrate the new "privacy curtain" around the shuttle's toilet, and Johnny Carson joked that Ride would delay the shuttle takeoff because she couldn't find a purse to match her shoes.
At a NASA news conference, Ride addressed the questions and comments, lamenting that "it's too bad this is such a big deal. It's too bad our society isn't further along." (Sally Ride Obituary, New York Times Magazine, 2012).
Sally Ride died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer. An intensely private woman, news of her death shocked the American public. From her obituary came another surprise: Sally Ride was survived by her partner of twenty-seven years: Tam O'Shaughnessy.
Sally Ride and Tam O'Shaughnessy were childhood friends--both were accomplished tennis players. Though Ride married fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1983, they divorced after five years and remained lifelong friends. By the time the divorce was finalized, Ride had entered into a relationship with O'Shaughnessy.
O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State, co-founded Sally Ride Science and co-authored children's science books alongside Ride. Now Chief Executive Officer of Sally Ride Science, she continues Dr. Ride's legacy of scientific outreach for young girls and other children.
When I first learned of Dr. Ride's posthumous outing, I worried that it was done against her will, and she did not want the public to know about her private life. Upon reading a post from journalist Lynn Sherr, a friend of Ride's for over three decades, I discovered that the statement in her obituary was premeditated.
According to Sherr, now author of Ride's biography Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space, the conversation occurred when planning a celebration of Ride's life. Ride and O'Shaughnessy's relationship was so private that even friends like Sherr did not know, and O'Shaughnessy asked her partner how she should be introduced. Ride told her partner "I want you to decided. Whatever you want to say, how much you want to say, is fine with me...Being open about us might be very hard on NASA and the astronaut corps. But I'm OK with that. Whatever you think is right is fine with me."
This quote reveals one of the reasons why Ride was reluctant to go public with her relationship and sexuality. Her partner offers another explanation: "Sally didn't want to be defined by the lesbian/gay label just as she didn't want to be defined by a gender label. We both didn't like categories, didn't want to define ourselves by our sexuality."
Lynn Sherr thinks that perhaps, after years of unwanted attention for being "America's first woman in space," the last thing Ride wanted was more attention. "Being the poster child for gay astronauts," Lynn posits, "might well have robbed her of whatever privacy she had left."
Ride's sister Bear Ride, a lesbian Presbyterian minister, attributes her sister's silence to her"inherent Norwegian reticence" in addition to "the typical tight-lipped scientist thing." She echoed O'Shaughnessy, citing Ride's frustration with dumb reporter questions "you'll see that there was always a major frustration that she didn't comment much on 'how it feels to be the first American woman in space'--she just didn't think that way. She wanted to get the job done. Her personal feelings were just that: personal. Not right or wrong--simply Sally."
"...there was always a major frustration that she didn't comment much on 'how it feels to be the first American woman in space'--she just didn't think that way. She wanted to get the job done. Her personal feelings were just that: personal. Not right or wrong--simply Sally."
In an email shortly after her sister's death, Rev. Bear Ride asserted that "Sally never hid her relationship with Tam...Sally's very close friends, of course, knew of their love for each other. We consider Tam a member of her family."
This next quote made me want to look in to Bear Ride as well, and maybe I will. "I'm a rather out-there advocate for LGBT rights--my partner and I have even been arrested a couple of times in public protest! But that's me, and not Sally."
Reverend Ride said that she hoped the LGBT community were "thrilled" to have a role model like Sally Ride, and that "it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them." I certainly think that's the case.
So here's to Dr. Sally Ride, physicist, athlete, engineer, pilot, astronaut, educator, author, role model and icon for both women and the LGBT community.
