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Vorschlag B1

Women´s roles

1.
Outline important stages in Katherine Johnson’s life.
(30 BE)
2.
Compare Katherine Johnson’s experiences as a woman to those of Desdemona and Emilia.
(40 BE)
3.
Choose one of the following tasks:
3.1
Taking the example of Katherine Johnson as a starting point, write an article for a magazine aimed at graduates of an American women’s college commenting on the status of women in contemporary American society.
(30 BE)
or
3.2
“We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.” Katherine Johnson, 1980
Katherine Johnson was referring to the struggle to overcome gender discrimination in the 1950s. Referring to material dealt with in class, assess the relevance of the quote today for other groups in the USA and /or the UK who have faced discrimination.
(30 BE)

Katherine Johnson died on February 24th (obituary, 2020)

1
As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, Kathrine
2
Goble (as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer
3
had made an error with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so.
4
It was her first day on this assignment, when she and another girl had been picked out of the
5
computing pool at the Langley aeronautical laboratory, later part of NASA, to help the
6
all-male Flight Research Unit. But there were other, more significant snags than simply
7
being new.
8
Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men.
9
They stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on
10
their Monroe desktop calculators or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as
11
all the rest. Men were the grand designers, the engineers; the women were “computers in
12
skirts”, who were handed a set of equations and exhaustively, diligently checked them.
13
Men were not interested in things as small as that.
14
And, most difficult of all, she was Coloured, and he was White. The lab might be
15
recruiting Black mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called
16
“Coloured Computing” and was segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning,
17
the men next to her had moved away.
18
She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it.
19
Since the café was segregated, she ate at her desk. There was no Coloured restroom, so
20
she used the White one. A few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching
21
job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the state line from West Virginia, all the Blacks had
22
been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until she was asked nicely. But it could be
23
unwise to push a White man too far.
24
Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an
25
aircraft might not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible
26
that he could have made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of
27
a cough drop, he ceded the point.
28
She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the
29
men “forgot” to return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work
30
sharper. It also challenged them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so
31
often out? Because they were maths graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas
32
she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths had led to special classes on analytic geometry
33
in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was she not allowed to get her
34
name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work, filling her data
35
sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got her
36
name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. [...]
37
As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore
38
deeply involved, though still behind the scenes. [...] She ensured that
39
Alan Shepard´s Mercury capsule splashed down where it could be found quickly in 1961,
40
and that John Glenn in 1962 could return safely from his first orbits of the Earth. [...]
41
Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return)
42
and worked on the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with
43
one star observation checked against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the
44
galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a
45
long time she featured nowhere.
46
It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters,
47
cook, sew their clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind
48
how good she was – as good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had
49
graduated from high school at 14 and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew
50
how to teach her. But she typically credited the help of other people, especially her father,
51
[...] who had sold the farm and moved the family so that she and her siblings could all get
52
a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not worked alone. She had
53
been one of around a dozen Black women mathematicians who were equally unknown.
54
But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called
55
“Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doc-
56
torates and – the greatest thrill – a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with
57
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
58
This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own
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reward. She just did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both Black and
60
a woman were shrugged away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be con-
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stantly curious. And learn that it is not dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not
62
least, because it might lead to the small but significant victory of making a self-proclaimed
63
superior realise he can make a mistake.
Source: Katherine Johnson died on February 24th 27. 02. 2020, in: The Economist,
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/02/27/katherine-johnson-died-on-february-24th

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