Rise of the Rocket Girls (Holt)

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Rise of the Rocket Girls...then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the individual women and their stories which comprise Rise of the Rocket Girls. Whose story did you find most interesting, whose path perhaps more difficult than others'? In what way do their stories shed light on the greater cultural changes taking place then...and now?

2. Talk about the obstacles in the paths of these women...and the unfairness they overcame to gain acceptance to (or in) the rarefied atmosphere of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

3. Most everyone who reads and/or reviews this book has been surprised by the important role women played in the rocket program. Why have their contributions taken so long to be widely recognized?

4. Holt offers the story of Barbara Canright calculating and graphing the course of a satellite. "Behind her she could sense Richard Feynman...her every move was being carefully watched." In the very next paragraph, Holt adds a detail about Barbara's boyfriend who had kissed her before she left home. Today that domestic scene might not seem such a strange juxtaposition, but in that era there was a fair amount of ambivalence and confusion about women who performed typically male jobs and yet had—gasp!—families or male partners.

What other juxtapositions did you notice in Holt's account of these women doing traditional male jobs...yet exhibiting traditionally "female behavior" or falling prey to demeaning male attitudes? To what extent, if any, do those kinds of juxtapositions exist today?

5. What was the irony of JPL finally promoting the original "human computers" to the title of engineers? Why did it end up contracting rather than expanding opportunities for women at the lab?

6. All the calculations done by the "human computers" were done working with pencils, graph paper, and notebooks—and it could take a day to calculate a single rocket's trajectory. What was the attitude at JPL toward the first IBM 704 when it arrived in the late 1950s? What eventually spurred the use of computers in rocket science?

7. Talk about the close-knit group the women formed for themselves, which included those working in both technical and non-technical jobs. What kind of support did they offer one another no matter what their professional status? 

8. Holt notes at the end of the book that there are more women working at JPL now than at any other NASA center. Consider doing some research into the numbers of women in math and science and whether or not they reflect women's positions in the wider society.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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