It’s no accident that Purdue University became the “Cradle of Astronauts” and that those incubated included my astronaut sister Janice Voss. Purdue had a lineage of leading and promoting education for the underrepresented starting in its roots as a land-grant college. Crisscrossing lines of good effort over time form a matrix of support—like the womb nurtures a baby or public education supports every citizen to function in our increasingly complex technological society—that give life to the creative new in ways that can be fostered but not always predicted.
Entering Purdue in the fall of 1972, Janice had benefited from Purdue’s efforts to recruit women engineers. When she returned from a semester in the cooperative education (coop) program working for NASA, she was part of the recruiting team. Her advisor Donna Frohreich tapped her to help host a luncheon for incoming female engineering students during the summer semester in 1973 as part of Purdue’s Women in Engineering Program (WIEP). Frohreich had advised Janice during pre-registration. As the founding director of WIEP, Frohreich had been working since 1968 to overcome obstacles for women in engineering, including providing a map of restrooms available to women in the engineering buildings. In a memo to the faculty and the two student hostesses that included Janice, Frohreich wrote, “The purpose of the luncheon is to make these new students feel welcome at the university and to indicate to their parents that we feel that engineering is a very appropriate, acceptable career for women!” she wrote. “Many parents seem to disapprove of their daughters studying engineering – too ‘unfeminine.’”[1]
Frohreich was working on raising the number of women engineering majors from 40 in 1967, to 46 in 1968, 53 in 1969, and 70 in 1970. Reflecting these efforts, by the time Janice graduated in December 1975, Purdue had the largest female enrollment of any American engineering school.
That Purdue should have taken on this mission aligned with the values of Indiana’s first land-grant university. When the Morrill Act of 1862 opened the door to the use of public funds for a more practical higher education, throwing the door open to everyday Americans, Purdue took on the ethic of opening education to those who had been excluded. The land-grant colleges transformed engineering education in America. Within 50 years, the U.S. surpassed Germany as the international leader in technical education. That vision encompassed some luminary women. In 1935, Purdue President Edward Eliot recruited world-famous pilot Amelia Earhart as a career counselor for women and advisor in aeronautics and Lillian Gilbreth as the nation’s first female engineering professor. Eliot was impressed by Earhart’s spirit of adventure and advocacy for women’s rights and aviation. Earhart promoted women learning to live in the world on their own terms by pursuing education, supporting themselves, and planning their own adventures.[2] Purdue named a residence hall after Earhart and dedicated a larger than life statue of her in 2009.
Lillian Gilbreth, “the first lady of engineering,” helped shape the discipline of industrial engineering, applying psychology to the movement of humans and machines to streamline work processes. Gilbreth went on to advise six presidents from Hoover to Johnson, helping harness women’s groups influence for the war effort during the second world war. Earhart and Gilbreth roomed together in a Purdue dorm. Earhart later said rooming with Gilbreth was the “most rewarding” of her time at the university. (Gilbreth was teaching in three departments, including home economics, in 1948 when my mother majored in Home Economics at Purdue. Mom probably entered Purdue around 1947.)
Gilbreth was a founding member of another women’s engineering group that Janice actively participated in. The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) was established in 1950 to foster connection, fellowship, and scholarship and provide support and community to female engineers. Janice had been introduced to SWE in high school during a summer program sponsored by the National Science Foundation for advanced engineering students. Purdue’s student chapter of SWE, chartered in 1954, was the nation’s oldest continuously chartered student section. In April 1975, the year Janice went to their national convention as a student representative, Purdue’s student chapter was named best student section in the country based on increased membership and activities. She highlighted on her program the name of a woman professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Sheila Widnall, winning the SWE award for national achievement.
The quintessential 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” model of the stay-at-home mom and working father who might spend his entire career loyal to one company was still prevalent in the 1960s, but was undergoing major changes. I remember my Dad telling me he would preferentially hire a male over a female engineer because a woman would quit to go have a baby. In the 50s, it was acceptable for women to work in the nursing or teaching professions. But once they married, they were expected to drop out of the workforce to raise the family. In our home, like many others, Mom was the one handling all our logistics on the home front. Dad disappeared each morning and returned from the mysterious world of work each night. Two of my aunts were teachers, and Mom went back to school when Vicky and Janice went off to college. She got her masters and started teaching home economics to help pay the bills. In the 1970s, before the convulsions in the world of work that culminated in the remote work revolution after the pandemic of 2020, the realm of work belonged predominantly to men. We had no connection to or experience with that world.
I remember being daunted by the apparent chasm between my life as a student and becoming a professional when I graduated from college.
But the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s was breaking the mold on that 50s model. Women advocated for greater roles in society outside the traditional roles in the family. Lillian Gilbreth was one of the pioneers who showed it was possible to raise a family of twelve children, run a company, and make significant professional contributions. (Her story was told by one of her children and inaccurately portrayed in the movie from the book, Cheaper by the Dozen.)
The late 1960s and 1970s saw some watershed moments for women’s rights. In 1972, the year Janice entered college, Ms. Magazine launched, with the inaugural issue advocating for the legalization of abortion. Enacted in 1972, Title IX prohibited sex-based discrimination in any education program receiving federal funds. The movie The Graduate laid out the dark side of the traditional model from the perspective of youth. The turbulence of the Vietnam War protests, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the protests and advances in civil rights and women’s rights all wrapped up into a turbulent decade. Much of the idealism of the 1960s went sour, but the changes continued. Abortion was legalized in 1973.
The change in roles for women who intended to work outside the home was still fairly uncharted territory. Janice had questions about what the work environment would be like for women in a career field completely dominated by men. She was still barred from even competing in her goal of becoming an astronaut. She wondered, “Am I going to have to struggle a lot here? Are there things I should be working on, skills I'm going to need because of that environment that I don't yet appreciate?” Would she find limitations put on her as a woman and could she overcome them? As a highly competent engineer, who held a profound belief that ability and hard work should be rewarded, Janice focused on her opportunities in a sea of paradoxes and disjuncts between possibilities, realities, and aspirations. She was training in making her own opportunities.
She determined to find out her unknown unknowns, and one of the ways she did that was forging connections with other professional women who had “been there” and knew what it took. Attending SWE’s national conventions gave Janice the opportunity to talk with “an enormous number of professional women who were very successful and had started their young years in the 60s when it was really hard.” They shared their struggles and how they dealt with them. They shared decisions they had made about family and career changes and college majors. Janice got a sense of what skills were needed to cope with the environment. She also got their perspective on how things had changed and how much better the environment was now. “That was enormously helpful and satisfying to me.”[3]
Janice considered her experience with SWE another important element in supporting her confidence that she was on the right track. She found a lot of support, which went both ways, as she spent a lot of time throughout her career inspiring people, young women in particular, to pursue math and science educations and work hard to realize their dreams.
[1] Memo from Donna Frohreich in August 1973 in the Purdue archives.
[2] https://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2009b/091019CordovaEarhart.html?_ga=2.96351519.2078292139.1701800542-1922877193.1701800542
[3] Oral interview, Nov. 9-10, 2000, on campus for Indiana Space Grant Consortium and “Meet an Astronaut” program.
Thanks, Gary. That's neat that you have a family connection to Purdue, too! One of my sisters' classmates was the first to hire a woman engineer in his division of Honeywell. He felt comfortable doing that because of his experience with Janice, and she proved her worth.
Nice to learn about Purdue leveling the playing field for engineering women! I've worked with several female engineers over the years and never had any problems with them. "Equal pay for equal work," I always say!
Also, my father-in-law was a Boilermaker from the class of 1950(?), I think. After graduation, he had a successful 40-year technical career with Boeing. So I know from personal family experience that the engineering school turns out competent graduates!