For this Text Review, I chose a film called Hidden Figures, about an extraordinary set of women who achieved goals and pursued passions that at the time would have been deemed impossible for women of their race. The film is about 3 black women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who all work at NASA around the same time as the space race was going on where NASA was attempting to send John Glenn into orbit. At the time, the civil rights act was still not enacted, meaning the attitude of most of their colleagues were still very biased against them and they had challenges blocking their goals that today would be seen as violations of human rights.
These are true stories of women who overcame the greatest of obstacles surrounding things that they had no control over, like their race and gender. The best relationship from this course that I can relate to this film is the idea of “power” that was held by all of the white men, and some women, who worked around these women. For instance, the character Katherine Johnson had the job of calculating trajectories for the ship used in sending John Glenn into space, however her job was made so difficult because not only was she not allowed to work in the same space as the other calculists, but something so small as using the bathroom was a challenge as the only “colored” bathroom was located so far away from her workspace that she would have to essentially disappear for 30 minutes or more just to relieve herself, making it look as though she was neglecting her work. She possessed no power to change the challenges that made her job difficult, making it tough to show how devout she was to her work, because she was historically the best mathematician that NASA had on staff at the time. Another character, Mary Jackson, wanted to study to become an aerospace engineer, however, was not allowed to attend college courses to do so solely because of the color of her skin. She had to fight for her right to attend these classes in local courts, essentially fighting for the “power” that any person should inalienably possess.
This film poses questions relating to how we as a society perpetuate injustices that are so obviously unfair based upon the events of the film that actually took place, and how we can use the power we have as individuals to prop up those in society who might not possess as much power as us.
The pictures below show the actresses in the film versus their real life counterparts:
