Into the Cosmos Read online

  Soviet Union progress is inconceivable without the participation of the

  women.”41

  For children experiencing the Tereshkova moment, there was little

  cause to doubt that Soviet girls would have an opportunity to follow the

  first female cosmonaut into space. Pionerskaia pravda’s June 25, 1963, issue greeted the young eyes and imaginations of its readers with two pho-

  tographs of Tereshkova. Stretching across the top of page one was an im-

  age of the six cosmonauts and Khrushchev on the Kremlin wall—hands

  linked and upraised in a triumphal gesture. The second photo showed

  206  Roshanna P. Sylvester

  Khrushchev folding Tereshkova into a fatherly embrace. “We celebrated

  this time like never before,” began the accompanying story, which de-

  scribed the Red Square festivities and parading motorcade. “Here she is,

  our Valia, the first woman to have visited the stars!” “She is so beautiful,

  so simple [ prostaia]! And her smile is bright and dear, and her voice clear, tender, and familiar [ rodnoi].”42

  A particularly vivid anecdote included in the piece captured the hopes

  and enthusiasm of the children who saw Tereshkova in her moment of

  glory. The reporter described seeing four children “clambering up to the

  roof of a newspaper kiosk. One of them was a slip of a girl [ devonchka].

  In her hands was a small basket. At the moment when the ceremonial

  motorcade drove past, the girl threw into the sky white-winged pigeons

  and cried with all her might: Long live the cosmonauts!” Tereshkova no-

  ticed the girl and waved. “Who knows, maybe this slip of a girl with the

  ardent face and short hair cut will someday fly to space,” the columnist

  concluded.43

  An Earthly Flower in the Garden of Cosmonauts

  Despite the rhetoric of inclusion and unabashed trumpeting of fe-

  male possibility that flooded the Tereshkova moment, the question of

  whether girls and women should actually be encouraged to aspire to lead-

  ership in the predominantly male preserve of science and technology re-

  mained unresolved at best in the upper echelons of party and state power.

  Soviet girls’ ambitions to follow their hero into the cosmos thus stood in

  marked contrast to the notably ambivalent attitudes expressed in private

  by some of the USSR’s most important political leaders and top scientists

  toward female participation in the space program. On the one hand, there

  were certain highly placed hopes that the Soviet Union would outpace the

  Americans when it came to building colonies in space, an endeavor that

  if successful would necessarily involve couples and families living beyond

  Earth. Indeed, the desire to accumulate data about the effects of space

  travel on the “female organism” was part of what motivated Soviet deci-

  sion makers to send a woman to space in the first place.44 But with Nikita

  Sergeevich Khrushchev at the helm of the Communist Party in the early

  1960s, there was on the other hand a concerted effort to recast the young

  Soviet woman as not only hardworking and politically reliable but also as

  She Orbits over the Sex Barrier  207

  chic and feminine. In popular representations drab was out while Dior

  was definitely in.45

  The project of redefining Soviet womanhood in a space age Cold War

  fell in part to those writing in the Soviet press about Tereshkova. The

  biographical profile that ran in the popular illustrated weekly magazine

  Ogonek in the immediate aftermath of her flight sought to integrate the young cosmonaut’s unfeminine love of technology with emerging motifs of Soviet femininity. The result was a revised portrait of the ideal

  new Soviet woman that emphasized “our Valia’s” softer side while still

  celebrating her tenacity, strong will, intellect, and scientific aptitude.

  The two-page spread titled “I Am the Seagull” (a reference to the cosmo-

  naut’s radio call sign “chaika”) ran below a large soft-focus photograph of

  a beautiful, white-clad Tereshkova in a flower garden. The caption read:

  “Earthly flowers in ‘the garden of cosmonauts.’” In striking contrast to

  that image, the essay’s author, Aleksei Golikov, chose to open the piece

  with a dramatic description of Tereshkova boldly facing her first para-

  chute jump in May 1959. Up until that time, Tereshkova’s friends, fam-

  ily members, and coworkers thought of Valentina as an “artistic, fragile

  looking girl [ devushka] [who] played volleyball, sometimes engaged in

  light athletics, but most of all loved music and to stroll around town,”

  Golikov informed his readers. But Valia had her own ideas about whom

  she was and what she would become, challenging herself to be daring,

  to overcome her fears, and to strive for perfection. Thanks to her strong

  character, the profile continued, Tereshkova became a Communist Party

  member, an excellent parachutist, and finally a cosmonaut. Yet even as

  she declared herself “ready for a spaceflight,” Golikov summoned up for

  his readers an image of Tereshkova “in a cozy, girlish room” in Star City,

  sitting at a desk that held “a vase with a lilac branch [and] a pile of ab-

  stracts on air navigation, astronomy, medicine, higher mathematics, and

  astrophysics.” Tereshkova passed her exams and kept up with her physi-

  cal training, Golikov continued. “And so came the day when for the first

  time in the history of the planet a radio communication emerged from

  space in a female voice: “I am Chaika. I see the horizon. It is Earth! It is

  so beautiful!”46

  The attempt to harmonize Tereshkova’s femininity with her scientif-

  ic and technical prowess became an essential component of official nar-

  ratives of her accomplishments, part and parcel of the Cold War iteration

  208  Roshanna P. Sylvester

  of the new Soviet woman. But not all writers shared Golikov’s felicity of

  expression, especially those who penned the texts of the spate of official

  speeches and proclamations that filled Soviet newspapers and airwaves

  during and immediately following the flight of “the seagull.” Predictably,

  some chose to plot a safe course by placing Tereshkova firmly into the

  well-established line of inspirational female role models so well known

  to girls in the early 1960s.47 It came as no surprise, then, that in their

  carefully scripted triumphal speeches in Red Square on June 22, 1963,

  both Tereshkova and Khrushchev referenced the martyred partisan Zoya

  Kosmodemyanskaya, the storied tractor driver Pasha Angelina, the hero

  textile workers Valentina Gaganova and Dusia Vinogradova, and other

  famous Soviet heroines of the World War II and Stalin eras.48

  Other speakers and writers, including those who addressed children,

  chose to emphasize a different set of antecedents, inscribing Tereshkova

  into a line of female accomplishment explicitly connected with science

  and technology.49 For instance, a July 1963 issue of Znanie-Sila, a popular science magazine aimed at young people, included an article titled “Her

  Predecessors” that joined a drawing of Tereshkova in her space helmet

  with a profile of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian female

  aviation pioneers.50 Likewi
se, Pravda special correspondent Nikolai Denisov reported in an Ogonek column “from a journalist’s diary” about a

  press conference with the Soviet cosmonaut corps attended by “academ-

  ics, leading Soviet scholars, specialists in various branches of learning

  . . . and, of course, we journalists.” One of the highlights of the event

  was an address given by “a venerable scholar” who after congratulating

  Bykovskii and Tereshkova spoke “with enormous feeling about the great

  role of women in Soviet society, recalling too the work of the famous

  Russian mathematician Sofiia Kovalevskaia, who in the years of tsarism

  was forced to leave her mother country in order to continue her scientific

  studies.”51

  For his part, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev seemed particularly

  ambivalent about the extent to which Tereshkova should be cast as a mas-

  ter of science and technology. “I am very happy and as proud as a father

  that one of our girls [ devushki], a girl from the Soviet Union, is the first, the first in the world, to travel in space, to be in command of the most

  highly perfected machinery,” Khrushchev enthused in a widely publi-

  cized in-flight telephone conversation with his newest space star on June

  16.52 At first glance the statement suggests that the Communist Party

  She Orbits over the Sex Barrier  209

  leader was happy to publicly acknowledge and celebrate female aptitude

  in the realm of science and technology. And yet Khrushchev’s use of the

  term devushka bears scrutiny. Literally translated, the word means “an

  unmarried girl.” But in common usage, devushka is highly flexible, with tone and context making all the difference in whether it is understood

  as a straightforward label of age and sex, a term of endearment, or a

  patronizing, even offensive slur. While in this case Khrushchev used de-

  vushka in an explicitly paternal voice, perhaps as a way to express his fondness for Tereshkova, it is worth noting that Nikita Sergeevich also

  regularly referred to her with the familiar diminutive “Valia.” But when

  he addressed the Vostok- 5 cosmonaut Bykovskii, it was with the more formal and respectful first name and patronymic: Valerii Fedorovich.53

  Whether intentional or not, this bit of sexism served to emphasize the

  more conventionally feminine aspects of Tereshkova’s persona, perhaps

  moderating to some extent whatever threat she might have posed to the

  masculinized world of science and technology.54

  Ambivalent as they may have been about how girls would fit in to the

  USSR’s Cold War future, Soviet officialdom clearly hoped that Tereshko-

  va’s accomplishments and the associated triumphalism would prove to be

  inspirational to everyone in Soviet society, including its youngest female

  members. In actuality, the decade after Tereshkova’s entry into space ap-

  pears to have been the high watermark for Soviet girls and women in

  terms of female aspiration and accomplishment in science and technol-

  ogy. A long-term study conducted by a team of sociologists in Novosi-

  birsk found in 1963 that both girls and boys desired careers in science

  and technology.55 When asked to rank their preferences, girls’ top choices

  were mathematics, medicine, chemistry, and physics.56

  These positive attitudes were transformed into real career paths as

  young women began to pursue higher degrees and professional employ-

  ment in the sciences. Of all the advanced university degrees awarded to

  women in 1962 through 1964, more than half were in applied sciences

  and more than a quarter in the natural sciences. At the doctoral level,

  although only one in twelve physics and math degrees went to women,

  female chemists constituted 40 percent of recipients in that field.57 These

  numbers were particularly impressive given that in the United States,

  only about 5 percent of PhDs in chemistry and math, and fewer than 3

  percent in physics, went to women.58 By 1970 the census shows that more

  210  Roshanna P. Sylvester

  Soviet women than ever before were engineering-technical workers,

  their numbers more than doubling in ten years from 1.63 million to 3.75

  million. The 1960s had also seen continued increases in the number of

  higher degrees earned by females in science, engineering, and technol-

  ogy fields. From 1971 through 1973 three of every four women awarded

  candidate and doctoral degrees were in the natural and applied sciences.59

  These statistics alone offer compelling evidence about girls’ desire

  and capacity to move ahead in the realms of science and technology. And

  yet ambition in and of itself cannot fully explain girls’ successes. Some-

  thing clearly went right in the Soviet 1960s when it came to enabling girls

  to fulfill their dreams. Although a full investigation of the constellation

  of factors that led to female achievement is beyond the scope of this chap-

  ter, the evidence collected here suggests several preliminary conclusions.

  Before pursuing them, it is helpful to take note of recent research by a

  variety of scholars in the United States and internationally who have been

  studying the question of why females do or do not choose educational and

  career paths in science and technology fields. The factors cited most com-

  monly in that literature are the influence of parents, teachers, and peers

  on occupational choice; the shaping power of stereotypes promulgated at

  home, school, and in the broader sociocultural environment, especially

  through mass culture; the quality of science teaching in schools; the over-

  all image of science and scientists in society; and the presence of positive

  role models who demonstrate that science- and technology-focused ca-

  reers can lead to success and happiness.60

  Bearing this in mind, one can postulate that Soviet girls’ shared quest

  for advancement in the 1960s was aided by the USSR’s standard school

  curriculum, which demanded that both girls and boys from first grade

  on spend more than half their time studying math and science.61 But for

  the Tereshkova generation, other powerful factors were also in play. First,

  girls were immersed in propaganda that told them Soviet women could

  do it all. Second, the Communist system did in fact provide real-life role

  models—most important, Tereshkova—for girls’ emulation. Third, the

  imperatives of the Cold War, with its valorization of science and tech-

  nology, afforded girls a range of opportunities to put their knowledge to

  higher use.

  Unfortunately, this empowering combination of factors was rela-

  tively short-lived. The gains of those years in which girls achieved near

  parity with their male counterparts in the realms of science and technol-

  She Orbits over the Sex Barrier  211

  ogy education simply did not hold up. By 1973—the tenth anniversary of

  Tereshkova’s flight—the Novosibirsk study showed that girls were less

  positive than they had been the decade before toward hard science and

  math occupations. Moreover, by the late 1970s sociological studies found

  that despite the fact that Soviet women tended to be better educated and

  trained than men, when it came to employment prospects in the “think-

  ing profess
ions,” women were increasingly confined to lower- and mid-

  level positions.62 The attitudes of young people in Russia today under-

  score the depth of the loss. A recent study sponsored by the European

  Union found that although both girls and boys in Russia believe that

  science and technology are important for society, few girls (ages fourteen

  through sixteen) want to be scientists. Moreover, the study reveals that

  more than twice as many Russian boys as girls want to work in technol-

  ogy jobs, demonstrating that the gender gap in Russia is the most severe

  of any of the twenty-five countries surveyed.63

  The findings presented in this chapter hint at some of the reasons for

  this dramatic reversal, which cannot in any event be understood in isola-

  tion from the larger dynamics that ultimately led to the collapse of the So-

  viet system. Yet it is clear that part of the explanation lies in the sexism of Soviet political leaders and high-level decision makers among the USSR’s

  scientific and technical intelligentsia. As the historian Sue Bridger has

  reminded us, in the aftermath of Tereshkova’s flight, controversy raged

  in the inner circles of the Soviet space program about the fitness and ca-

  pabilities of female cosmonauts.64 Although none of this was public, no

  one could miss the fact that Tereshkova never returned to space and that

  the four other women who were part of the cosmonaut corps in the early

  1960s were retired without ever getting the chance to follow her. The

  next three female trainees were not recruited until the early 1980s, and it

  wasn’t until 1982 that the extremely well-connected Svetlana Savitskaya

  became the second Soviet woman to make it into orbit. Meanwhile in

  America, the June 1983 flight of thirty-two-year-old Sally Ride, a Stanford

  PhD in physics, reinvigorated interest in NASA and opened up new pos-

  sibilities for girls. “I never even imagined I could be an astronaut,” Ride

  confided in a preflight interview widely quoted in the American press. “I

  guess because I just assumed there would never be a place for women.”65

  But unlike in the Soviet Union, dozens of American female astronauts

  emulated Ride’s accomplishments. By July 1999, when U.S. Air Force

  Lieutenant Eileen Collins first took command of a space shuttle mission,