53 pages • 1 hour read
Margot Lee ShetterlyHidden Figures: Young Readers Edition
Nonfiction | Biography | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Margot Lee Shetterly’s Inspiration and Early Life at NASA
Margot Lee Shetterly is an American nonfiction writer born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1969. As a child, Shetterly’s father worked as a research scientist at NASA, and Shetterly describes herself as “part of the NASA family” (2). Her father worked alongside Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson, and Shetterly knew them when she was a child. It always seemed very normal to Shetterly that African Americans should be scientists and mathematicians, and she took their presence in her life for granted.
Shetterly graduated from the University of Virginia’s Mintier School of Commerce and moved to New York to work in investment banking. Then, she got married and moved to Mexico with her husband. In Mexico, the couple published an English-language magazine for the expat community and worked for the Mexican tourism industry as editorial consultants. One year, home for Christmas, Shetterly’s father told stories about his days at NASA and the women he worked with. Shetterly’s husband wondered why he hadn’t heard the stories, and Shetterly realized that she didn’t know anything about these women. They had made remarkable contributions and even been a part of Shetterly’s life, but she didn’t know anything about them. In 2010, Shetterly began researching the role of the African American women who worked at NASA, and she published the book Hidden Figures six years later, in 2016.
Historical Context: The Mid-20th Century in the United States
Hidden Figures begins in the late 1930s and ends with the Moon landing in 1969. This was a time of immense social and technological change, much of which is reflected in the story of Hidden Figures. People were changing their ideas about what was possible regarding gender, race, and technology.
World War II was the first significant historical event that directly affected the lives of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden. From 1939 to 1945, many men were away fighting in the war, creating more opportunities for women, such as the computer jobs at Langley. With the start of the post-war period in 1949, some women left the workforce, but many women liked their new independence, and views about what jobs a woman could do had changed forever.
After World War II, the Cold War began in 1947 as tensions rose between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Space Race was a significant part of the Cold War, as the two nations competed for technological superiority and raced to become the first to put a human into space. Technology developed very quickly during this time. Just 14 years passed between the first plane to fly faster than the speed of sound in 1947 and the United States’ first manned mission to space in 1961.
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Movement officially began in 1954, when the US Supreme Court made a series of decisions that deemed racial segregation and discrimination unconstitutional. Across the county, marches and protests took place as African American people called for equal rights.
As Black women working in science and technology, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden were uniquely positioned to affect and be affected by these important historical events. They received greater opportunities than other African American women before them, but their work and fight against discrimination also ensured futures for the women coming after them.
