My upcoming game, code named “null sector”, features women’s issues in a historical context. Time has shown women as a group capable of anything anyone else can do, but the struggle to get there makes great drama.
A recent article on Jezebel shows the kinds of roadblocks women routinely ran into. Things aren’t perfect now, but there’s definitely been progress.
In “history was hella sexist, year 1962,” NASA’s Director of Public Information responded to a woman inquiring about becoming an astronaut that they had “no existing program concerning woman astronauts nor do we contemplate any such plan.” Ouch.
The real kicker here is that just one year later, Russia sent a female Cosmonaut into orbit. America squandered the opportunity to have a very significant first, in an era when the US and USSR were competing for firsts. That we look at documents like this and marvel at how backward its stance is gives one some comfort in the present, and hope for the future.
