How Sally Ride Changed My Life

I am a child of the 80s. In January 1980, I was finishing up one of my favorite grades in all of my years in school-2nd grade. I graduated from high school in May 1990 and started college later that year. I am a member of generation X, the often maligned generation. Reagan and Bush were presidents for most of my childhood, especially the parts I remember. We were the first generation to own personal computers en masse. We played with other toys that used basic electronics. We lived through the oil boom of the early 80s and the bust in the later 80s. We learned about AIDS in school, and lost one of own, Ryan White, to the disease in 1990. Just like other generations, we lived through our share of crises. The day Reagan was shot was sort of like our generation's Kennedy assassignation. And there was a lot of corruption and greed, which lead to the 1987 Black Monday bust in the stock market.

What is rarely mentioned is that we were the first generation to see the changes in our culture that started back in the 60s. Desegregation of schools was largely finished. More girls played at least one sport, partially a result of Title IX and the recognition that it was just as safe for girls to play sports as boys and the girls wouldn't be any less "ladylike" if they played. Girls still had Barbie dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, but we also had our small collection of Star Wars figurines and Matchbox cars. In my class, we still had some "homemaker" moms, but most of our moms worked when we were at school, and a few of my classmates were "latch key kids", those that were unlucky enough to go home after school to an empty house. But our mothers were raised to believe they could become teachers, nurses, or secretaries, and while many had rebelled, many women were still in careers that were considered "traditional" for women. 


For many girls, it was television opened our eyes and widened our world to all of the other possible careers we could have when we grew up. On television dramas, women would often be powerful (yet ruthless) business owners. Think Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) in Dynasty- women could make it to the top of the business word but they had to be b**ches to do it. Or gorgeous. You could be a detective, but you had to look like Heather Locklear or Farah Fawcett.


But women in the news were different. Slowly women were beginning to be leaders in business and government.  Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the U.K., and we saw her in meetings head-to-head with the leaders of other nations. Sandra Day O'Connor sat proudly with her peer Supreme Court judges, all old white men. 


And then there was Sally Ride. The space shuttle program was still relatively new, the shiny white gliders with black undersides reminded me of a great whale. Every space shuttle launch was covered on television, and the astronauts were proudly paraded around to talk about the importance of the space shuttle. My generation was too young to remember any of the moon launches, so our knowledge about space exploration was limited to encyclopedias (the hardbound kind that I swear weighed more than me!) and stories from our family about watching the first moon landing on television. In the first few launches of the space shuttle, the astronauts and command center for the shuttle looked like a picture out of NASA's moon program days: a command center full of white men helping the white male astronauts during the shuttle's flight. Until Sally Ride. 

A young, attractive woman with dark brown hair, but not so pretty that you might think she got the job because of her looks. She looked like someone who could be the mother of one of my friends. (In fact, she was born the same year as my parents.) Sally Ride was going to space on a space shuttle mission! She may not have been the first woman in space, but she was the first woman from the United States to go and that was all that mattered during the Cold War. In interviews before her first shuttle launch, I remember her being quite shy, almost embarrassed by all of the attention she was getting. But in 1983, when she walked tall and proudly on the bridge to board the Space Shuttle, girls like me all across America realized they too could become astronauts or at least be a scientist because Sally was going to space! After returning from her first mission, the words "Sally Ride" quickly became synonymous with "women in science". She was one of the most visible female science since Marie Curie. Whenever a story or book was written about scientists, Sally Ride's picture always appeared. She was featured in many of those thin biography children's books written about famous people. Certainly women before her had made important contributions in science, but their stories were usually told as a footnote to the work of a male scientist--basically describing the woman as a helper or lab assistant to the brilliant male scientist. But Sally wasn't a lab assistant. She was a physicist and an astronaut!

I entered my first science fair project one year after Sally's first space shuttle mission. Never once while I was working on the project or being questioned by the male judges. (I didn't have any female judges the first year.) did I ever feel like I didn't belong because I was a girl. And when I won a second place ribbon for my project, I knew there would always be a place for me. In science. As a female.

I continued to follow Sally Ride's career after her work with NASA. The Sally Ride Science program and its resources to encourage girls to pursue science careers will be her legacy to young women and the work I hope she was most proud of.


Today, after learning of her death, I wondered how many other women were impacted by her like me. In college, about half of my classmates in my science classes were females. I can't help but think that Sally Ride played a part in getting many girls to pursue scientific careers. She will forever be known as a woman in science who broke the glass ceiling for future generations of female scientists. Thank you, Sally, for helping me realize that I too could one day be a scientist. 

NSTA :: News Story