ZEITGEIST 2 FINAL

Friday, April 27, 2018 A LITERARY MAGAZINE p.19
ESSAYS Powerful Women in History
We’re here to shed some light on the forgotten but important women in our history. Here you’ll see
both the wealthy and the poor, the good and the bad, and the ones in matrimony and the unwedded. These women
have left an often doubted, or just completely obliterated, mark on our past. We hope to demonstrate interesting
anecdotes about fascinating women who were left in historical darkness. We believe these stories can be used to
teach people about love, acceptance, passion and lessons regarding our society.
First we’d like to mention three intelligent and exemplary women, who worked at NASA and joined mission
Apollo, which entailed leaving Earth’s orbit to land on the Moon. People talk about the astronauts, who actually
boarded the spacecraft, but we want to talk about the geniuses behind the scenes. One of them was Katherine
Coleman Goble Johnson, an African-American mathematician who contributed greatly to NASA’s first manned
space flight program and provided notable calculations in orbital mechanics. Considered an “actual human
computer”, Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was another African-American mathematician who distinguished herself
by learning and teaching others FORTRAN, the computer programming language of the time. Also joining them
is Mary Winston Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics who became the first black female engineer for NASA. The great contributions these amazing women
achieved, during an era full of great gender and race inequality, should serve to teach young girls that one can
defy any barrier by making the most of one’s intelligence and abilities.