Women in Science - Katherine Goble Johnson

I've just been to see Hidden Figures, the film about Katherine Goble, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who all did outstanding work for NASA in the early days of space exploration.
Katherine Goble was the "computer" who calculated the trajectories of rockets. She worked on the early missions of Alan Shepherd and John Glenn, and on the Apollo 11 mission, right up to space shuttle flights in the 1980s. She's still alive at the age of 98, and has said of the film Hidden Figures: "It was well-done. The three leading ladies did an excellent job portraying us."
Along the way, she was one of the first African-Americans to attend graduate school at West Virginia University, and the first African-American woman to do so. The film points out the many difficulties of living in a segregated society - it wasn't easy for any of them, and they had to be extraordinarily determined to do what they wanted to do.
She had three daughters, Constance, Joylette and Katherine, and after her first husband died of a brain tumour, she married James Johnson - and they've been together ever since. They still live in Hampton, Virginia, near the NASA Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory where she did her work.
On May 5, 2016, a new 40,000-square-foot building was named Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility and formally dedicated at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Katherine Johnson was there as guest of honour. It was the 55th anniversary of Alan Shepherd's flight, for which she had provided crucial calculations.

And here she is recieving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama:

Maureen O'Hara

I just heard that Maureen O'Hara has died, at the age of 95.
Here she is in one of my favourite pirate films, The Black Swan, with Tyrone Power.

Walks Far Woman

A lot of ink has been spilt over Johnny Depp's portrayal of Tonto in the Lone Ranger recently. For what it's worth, my take on it is that he's playing a man with a dead bird on his head, and the last man who was able to carry that off with a straight face was Valentine Dyall as the Black Guardian in Doctor Who. Also, of course, Johnny Depp is white, for all his protestations of Native American ancestry - and there are lots of roles for white guys and not so many for Native American actors. I remember Jay Silverheels - and at least he was a Mohawk Indian (I always liked him better than the Lone Ranger. I've always had a soft spot for sidekicks).
In all this debate, though, I haven't seen a single mention of a movie I remember seeing on TV a few years ago. Starring Raquel Welch, of all people, it was called The Legend of Walks Far Woman. Here, too, you had a white woman playing a Native American - but I was quite impressed with the story. While looting the bodies of US Cavalrymen after a battle, Walks Far Woman finds a small pouch full of pieces of paper. The other women can't see any use for it, but she keeps it - and the movie audience can see at once that it is a wallet stuffed with dollar bills.
Later, she wants to buy land, since her people are being kicked off the land that was theirs. The white man who is helping her tells her that she could buy land if she called herself Walks Far Jones or something - claiming white blood - but full blooded Indians are not allowed to buy land. She refuses to lie about her identity, and fails to buy any land. To bring us full circle, at the end of the film she is seen as an old woman on a reservation, watching the Lone Ranger on the TV.
I remember being impressed. Before I watched this film, I had no idea that Raquel Welch could act - I knew of her only from that picture of her posing in a fur bikini in One Million Years BC.
I think it's a film that deserves to be better known - maybe it's time for a remake with a Native American actress in the lead role.

The Gentle Sex

Reading the Captain Marvel story, with the group of girl pilots from the Second World War, set something tickling at the back of my mind.

During the Second World War, Leslie Howard (best known for his roles as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, among others) made several films for propaganda purposes. One of these - in fact, the last film he ever made, before his death in a plane crash in 1943 - was The Gentle Sex, which was a look at the contributions women were making to the war effort. And it was a lot more than pouring tea in the NAAFI.
The film follows seven women of different backgrounds who meet at an Auxiliary Territorial Training camp. Leslie Howard provides the narration.

The scene from the film that I remember most vividly is where the women drive a convoy of trucks through the night to get them to where they need to be on time, while the men waiting for the trucks joke that they must have stopped to put their make up on.

Perhaps the most famous member of the ATS was Princess Elizabeth, now the Queen, who learned how to repair car engines, among other things. The ATS also manned searchlights (a very hazardous job, as the German planes would shoot down the searchlight beam to put out the lights). There's a famous picture of St Paul's Cathedral with searchlights in the "V for Victory" position behind it - I used to know the daughter of one of the women who was there, that night. Members of the ATS were also radar operators and manned anti-aircraft guns, as well as being telephonists and other support jobs.