53 pages • 1 hour read
Hidden Figures: Young Readers Edition
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Themes
Perseverance in the Face of Adversity
As Black women in the days of segregation, all the key figures in the biography faced obstacles in their professional, personal, and social lives. They overcame these challenges by believing in a better future and continuing to work hard no matter what. Their story hence conveys to young readers that they can overcome difficulties through perseverance.
Before they began working at NACA, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden overcame adversity to pursue an education and become teachers, considered a “very good black [job]” (24). As Black women, this was the best career they could hope for at the time. However, Shetterly writes that “teaching offered status [but] didn’t pay well” (20). Dorothy had to work in underfunded schools that closed halfway through the year and later looked for more work to supplement her teaching job. Getting a job at NACA was a big improvement for the Black computers, but it didn’t mean that their challenges stopped. The women had to continue to fight against discrimination and keep working hard to “prove themselves equal to or better than the white mathematicians” (46). However, they never gave up. Katherine, for example, was “persistent” and finally allowed into the Space Task Group’s editorial meetings. These anecdotes highlight tangible results of perseverance.
Shetterly also conveys the importance of perseverance through the historical subtext of World War II, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights Movement. She explains how these were big challenges for the whole country, and everyone had to work together to overcome them. Sending a human into space, for example, had never been done before; people weren’t even sure it was possible. It required many failed tests and many hours of work that led nowhere. The engineers had to believe that their goal was attainable, even when it seemed impossible.
The biography suggests that the perseverance of oppressed people has a positive impact on these wider contexts. Women like Dorothy, Katherine, Mary, and Christine had spent their whole lives believing in themselves and doing things that others told them were impossible. Dorothy “refused to feel any self-doubt” on her first day working in the Langley Laboratory (29). Katherine believed that “[y]ou had to expect progress to be made” (197), and Mary lived her life as “a long process of raising one’s expectations” (79). Shetterly compares the women’s journey to the Langley Laboratory to Neil Armstrong’s journey to the Moon. The presence of Black women working as mathematicians in a government agency is something that many people thought was impossible, just like a person walking on the Moon. And just like the Moon landing, it took the women many years of hard work and dedication in the face of adversity to make their dream a reality.
Race, Gender, and Professional Opportunities
In Hidden Figures, Shetterly explores how men and women have different professional opportunities. She also examines the different professional opportunities for Black people and white people. However, Black women like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden face intersecting discrimination and limited professional opportunities because of their race and gender.
At the Langley Laboratory, all women struggled to receive equal opportunities. Shetterly writes that “men were engineers and women were computers. Men did the analytical thinking and women did the calculations. Men gave the orders and women took the notes” (142). This establishes a binary of active men and passive women in the workplace. Any advancement that a woman experienced was because a man noticed her. Female employees had to give a man “a compelling reason” to see her as “a peer,” or she “might get stuck doing repetitive, humdrum work” (143), no matter how smart she was. Women were paid less than men, and certain job titles or important meetings were off-limits to women as “a matter of practice” (142). Shetterly hence chronicles major barriers to professional opportunities for women.
Meanwhile, there were also very few Black men working at Langley. Shetterly tells the story of Thomas Byrdsong, an African American engineer, and the racism he experienced at work, including having an experiment sabotaged by a white mechanic. Shetterly notes that “black men at Langley were more likely to have trouble over racial issues than black women” (120). However, the men still worked as engineers or scientists, while Black and white women were usually barred from these positions. The text hence suggests that these Black men experienced more discrimination because they were in more influential positions and perceived as a target or a threat.
The Black women working at Langley were unique. They were “not exactly excluded but not quite included, either” (42). They might not have experienced outright sabotage, like Byrdsong, but they had to use segregated bathrooms and sit in the section for “Colored Computers” at the back of the cafeteria. They also struggled with opportunities for advancement and overcoming men’s low expectations the same way that white women did. By showing the different experiences of white women, Black women, and Black men at NASA, Shetterly portrays the complicated relationship between identity and opportunity. She explores how people can be discriminated against for multiple aspects of their identity, which can exclude them from opportunities enjoyed by others who share aspects of their identity. However, Shetterly argues that discrimination based on race and gender is bad for everyone because these factors don’t determine intelligence. The biography conveys that discrimination sometimes means that the smartest people are excluded from certain jobs, and the whole of society is held back.
Fighting Discrimination Through Community Support
Throughout Hidden Figures, Shetterly shows how people succeed through the support of their communities. All of the woman featured in the text fought discrimination and overcame other obstacles through support from their families and the larger community. In turn, they are serious about giving back to their community and supporting the next generation of African Americans.
As young children, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden grew up in tight-knit African American communities. They all had adults in their lives who recognized their potential and supported them. Dorothy’s stepmother taught her to read before she started school, Katherine’s professor created special math classes to challenge her and encourage her to attend graduate school, and Christine’s parents sent her to a private girls’ school. The women maintained strong family bonds as they grew up and invested in their community, joining sororities in college and volunteering to support the community in other ways. It’s significant that all the women became teachers, a profession that they enjoyed because it allowed them to support young Black people. By portraying this interconnected social landscape, Shetterly suggests that contributions to a community, both big and small, can have a vast impact.
At NASA, the Black computers fought against discrimination by building their own “sisterhood.” They made sure that no one made a mistake on her work, arrived late, or looked “sloppy.” Shetterly writes that the women “knew they stood for something bigger than themselves as individuals” (46). The human computers were proving that Black women were just as smart and capable as anyone else, and they constantly looked out for one another because they knew that any mistake would reflect poorly on the whole African American community. Furthermore, they knew that their success was also the success of everyone who had helped them along the way. The women working at NASA saw their success not only on their own terms but in terms of collective advancement. They were glad for their own opportunity but knew that it meant their own children would have even better chances. They worked hard to support the next generation of Black girls, women like Christine Darden, “who would rely on the pioneers like Katherine and Dorothy and Mary for inspiration and guidance” (189). The biography hence resists exceptionalism to convey that all African Americans are capable and make contributions to society, not just a minority of individuals.
To further support the importance of community, Shetterly shows how racial discrimination makes the United States weaker. The country could not celebrate values of freedom and democracy if it continued to treat Black people unfairly. Segregation created “inefficient” systems by dividing resources and creating schools that “shortchanged both black and white students” when there could have been one better school for everyone (118). Through these examples, Shetterly suggests that societies are stronger when they put aside their differences and support each other.
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