Hidden Figures: Young Readers Edition

“But few of the women were granted the title 'mathematician,’ which would have put them on equal footing with some male employees. Instead, they were classified as ‘subprofessionals,’ a title that meant they could be paid less.”

Here, Shetterly outlines some of the difficulties that all women faced working in the Langley Laboratory. Women were considered inferior to men. They were paid less and considered less important. She hence introduces the theme of Race, Gender, and Professional Opportunities.

“Some women with Dorothy’s education might have seen taking the laundry job as an unthinkable choice. Wasn’t the purpose of a college degree to get away from dirty and difficult work? In addition, the camp was far enough away from Farmville that Dorothy would have to live in employee housing during the week and only go home on weekends. But Dorothy didn’t care. She would do whatever was necessary to save enough money so that her four children might be able to get the best education possible.”

This passage illustrates Dorothy’s perseverance. She was willing to do anything to support her family, even work that other educated women might consider beneath them. It also shows the limited opportunities for Black women. Shetterly uses a rhetorical question to prompt reader engagement with the limitations placed on educated Black women.

“In Dorothy Vaughan’s world, there were black jobs, and there were good black jobs. Sorting laundry, making beds in white people’s houses, working in tobacco plants—those were black jobs. 

Owning a barbershop or a small business, working in the post office or on the railroad—those were good black jobs. 

Being a teacher or a preacher, a doctor or a lawyer—those were very good black jobs. 

But the job at the aeronautical laboratory was something entirely new, something so unusual it hadn’t been dreamed of yet.”

In this passage, Shetterly distills “black jobs” into three categories to clarify the narrow parameters of Black life during this period, clearly conveying the results of racism to young readers. She ends by establishing the connection between Dorothy’s career aspirations and the aims of the aeronautical laboratory: Both Dorothy and the laboratory were aiming for something that “hadn’t been dreamed of yet.”

“The sight of women wearing coveralls and working at filling stations, a job that used to be just for men, no longer turned heads. Women now did all kinds of jobs—shined shoes, worked in the shipyard, and staffed offices. With men off to fight on the front lines, womanpower picked up the slack.”

Shetterly uses colloquial language, “womanpower picked up the slack,” to communicate this historical change in a pithy way. She also alters the conventional term of “manpower” to resist the way patriarchal values emerge in quotidian language.

“How could black Americans learn about the way the Jews were treated without comparing some of these experiences to some of their own struggles against slavery, unfair treatment, and violence at home?”

Shetterly again employs a rhetorical question to prompt the reader to engage with her arguments: that while the United States was fighting for the freedom of oppressed people in other parts of the world, many of those same struggles were happening to the country’s own Black citizens.

“From this divide, between feeling black and feeling American, came the idea of the double victory.”

Shetterly critiques “American” values throughout the text, and here emphasizes the challenges of walking the line between patriotism and critique for African Americans.

“This kind of racial insult was all too common. It was the kind of subtle jab that African Americans had learned to tolerate, if not accept, in order to function in their daily lives. The women probably expected it, but in the environment of the laboratory, a place that had chosen them for their intellectual talents, the sign seemed particularly offensive.”

This passage describes the women’s reaction to the sign designating where the “colored computers” had to sit in the cafeteria. Even though the Black employees had jobs that required education and intelligence, white employees still discriminated against the Black women at Langley. This passage epitomizes the way Shetterly uses setting in the novel to emphasize Perseverance in the Face of Adversity; this “environment” presents another place that the biography’s key figures struggle to navigate and must move through warily.

“The West Computers rejected all notions of being inferior because they were black or female, and they banded together like sisters to help each other at work. They double-checked one another’s work and policed each other to prevent tardiness, sloppy appearance, or the perception of bad behavior. They fought against negative stereotypes. They knew they stood for something bigger than themselves as individuals.”

Here, Shetterly describes how the Black computers engaged in Fighting Discrimination Through Community Support. The description of how they “banded together like sisters” adapts the masculine, militaristic language of a “band of brothers” to suggest that these women are similarly creating a community to win a war, both at home and abroad.

“Two million American women—black and white alike—received ‘pink slips,’ or notices that they were losing their jobs, even before the war officially ended. Some women looked forward to going home. Others enjoyed their jobs and their paychecks, and they didn’t want to go back to the traditional female roles in the kitchen and nursery.”

Shetterly presents a multifaceted picture of womanhood here to conduct an intersectional feminist critique of the post-war social climate. She discusses “black and white [women] alike,” as well as “women [who] looked forward to going home,” to celebrate a vast array of women as well as the key figures of the biography.

“Men often came to the laboratory as junior engineers and were allowed to design and conduct their own experiments. Researchers took the men under their wings, teaching them the ropes. Women, on the other hand, had to work much harder to overcome other people’s low expectations. A woman who worked in the central computing pool was one step removed from the research, and the engineers’ assignments sometimes lacked the context to give the computer much knowledge about the project.”

Here, Shetterly juxtaposes the experience of male and female employees at Langley to highlight the injustices of workplace discrimination via a description of the computers doing assignments without “context.”

“Maybe Mary couldn’t remove the limits that society put on the girls, but it was her duty to try to make sure the girls didn’t put limits on themselves. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status—none of these were reasons not to live out their dreams. You can do better; we can do better, she told them every day. For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one’s expectations.”

This passage shows how Mary Jackson supported the next generation of African American girls. When leading the girls in her local Girl Scout troop, Mary encourages them to dream big, no matter what society tells them. Shetterly’s emphasis on the key figures’ engagement with children has a metatextual aim: to communicate these same messages to young readers.

“Mary Jackson was angered—no, enraged—to have been confronted with such blatant prejudice in a workplace dedicated to scientific and rational thought, and she considered it absurd to be singled out for something as common and universal as going to the bathroom. In the moment that her white coworkers laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to second-class human being.”

Here, Shetterly communicates Mary’s feelings by detailing her edit from “angered” to “enraged,” suggesting that Mary decides not to curtail her feelings for the sake of charm and politeness. This suggests that honesty is necessary for change, which is reinforced by the stark juxtaposition of “professional mathematician” and “second-class human being.”

“She enjoyed teaching and felt a sense of responsibility to ‘advance the race’ by giving her students the best possible education, even though they attended segregated schools with fewer resources.”

Shetterly uses the refrain of “advance the race” throughout the text. The term “race” refers to Katherine’s Blackness and her desire to fight for civil rights, but it also implicitly recalls the “Space Race.” This refrain hence emphasizes the intertwined relationship between technological and social advancement detailed throughout the biography.

“Outside the Langley campus, the rules were clear. Blacks and whites lived separately, ate separately, studied separately, socialized separately, worshipped separately, and, for the most part, worked separately. At Langley, the boundaries were fuzzy.”

This passage describes the “fuzzy” lines between Black and white people at the Langley Laboratory. This sentiment contrasts with the definiteness of separation described throughout the passage. Shetterly repeats the word “separately” to emphasize the pervasiveness of segregation and make the sentence run on wearily with these multiple clauses to convey the constant challenges of living through segregation.

“Katherine and the other black mathematicians mounted a charm offensive: they made a special effort to always be well-dressed, well-spoken, patriotic, and upright. They were keenly aware that the interactions that individual blacks had with whites could have implications for the entire black community.”

Here, Shetterly describes how the Black employees at Langley interacted with their white coworkers. She again applies militaristic language to feminine circumstances (“charm offensive”) to highlight the relationship between the United States’ foreign affairs and the Civil Rights Movement: the Double V.

“Katherine was now both mother and father, the one who offered love and discipline, the sole breadwinner. Each of them would have to work hard to pull the family through the difficult time.”

This passage describes Katherine’s changing responsibilities after the death of her husband. Just like at work, Katherine has to take on roles that aren’t usually for women: being a “father,” the disciplinarian, and the “breadwinner.” In her personal life, she shows the same kind of resilience and determination that she does at work.

“The machines didn’t immediately threaten the mathematicians’ jobs, but Dorothy Vaughan realized that mastering the electronic calculators would be the key to job security. When Langley started giving classes in computer programming after work and on weekends, she signed up. And she encouraged the women in her group to do the same.”

Dorothy knows that she and the other Black computers have to keep working hard if they don’t want to be left behind. Although they have won some battles in the fight for equality, the dawn of electronic computers illustrates just how precarious their jobs still are. Shetterly uses the negative language of “threaten” to emphasize this precarity.

“What a nonsensical thing that black and whites went to different schools! If the city had combined its resources, it could have built one beautiful school for both black and white students. Throughout the South, cities had maintained two separate and inefficient school systems, which shortchanged both black and white students.”

In this passage, Shetterly shows that segregation is bad for everyone. Mary is shocked to discover that the all-white high school is a dingy and rundown place. Shetterly emphasizes her shock with the declarative statement followed by an exclamation point.

“Dorothy had worked hard to support the careers of women like Katherine Goble and Mary Jackson and give West Computing a reputation for doing work that was as good as that of their white colleagues. The end of West Computing was, in many ways, a long-fought-for victory. The standards upheld by the women of West Computing created opportunities for a new generation of women with passion for math and hopes for a career beyond teaching.”

West Computing was the home of the Black computers at Langley. When the division is finally dissolved, it means the end of segregation at the laboratory. All the women who worked in the computing pool have been integrated into other teams, working alongside their white coworkers. Much of this was thanks to Dorothy, who led and encouraged the women of West Computing. Shetterly’s reference to future generations implicitly refers to the reader and emphasizes the significance of Dorothy’s actions to the reader’s context.

“Virginia’s legacy as the birthplace of humanity’s first step into the heavens would have to compete with its embarrassing reputation as the country’s most outspoken opponent to the integration of public schools.”

While African American women were working hard to help put a human on the Moon, the governor of Virginia was doing all he could to keep schools segregated. Shetterly’s use of elevated language, “humanity’s first step into the heavens,” makes the following discussion of the “outspoken opponent” sardonic and suggests the stupidity of ruining such a “reputation.” 

“Some African Americans read the ad, but they frequently disqualified themselves from participating in competitions even without the ‘Whites Only’ sign: there was no rule keeping black boys from entering the race, but it took a lot of courage, and a mind that saw the experience as something open to all boys regardless of their color, for them to give it a try.”

Here, Shetterly talks about Mary Jackson’s son competing in the local soap box derby. She explains how segregation perpetuated itself because African Americans were often too afraid to put themselves into situations with white people. Boys like Mary’s son had to be brave and stand up for themselves, even when they weren’t explicitly excluded. This anecdotal interlude again relates the story of the key figures to young readers by showing them the actions of people their age as well as older role models.

“But with only one operational success under its belt and with six Mercury missions to go, NASA’s road to the moon seemed unimaginably complex. The engineers estimated that the upcoming orbital flight, including the fully manned global tracking network, required a team of eighteen thousand people. It would take many times more than that to complete a lunar landing.”

This description of the “unimaginably complex” journey to the Moon shows how the dream of going to space is similar to the dream of a better future for Black women like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden. The word “unimaginably” reflects Shetterly’s description of “girls in high school [who] were beginning to imagine different possibilities for themselves” (122) [emphasis added]. Like the Moon landing, it seemed impossible for Black women to work as mathematicians at a government agency. Shetterly presents Perseverance in the Face of Adversity as the confluence of the biography’s concerns: race and aeronautical technology.

“Spaceship-flying computers might be the future, but John Glenn didn’t have to trust them. He did trust the human computer, Katherine Johnson. ‘Get the girl to check the numbers,’ Glenn said. If Katherine Johnson said the numbers were good, he was ready to go.”

This is Katherine Johnson’s most famous achievement. Astronaut John Glenn trusted and respected her enough that he specifically requested Katherine to check the calculations for his flight before liftoff. However, the fact that he refers to her as “the girl” suggests the inherent sexism and racism that Katherine continues fighting against.