In terms of the women's movement, there is absolutely no question that it's a critical part of Sally's life. But, surely the fact that the movement was not there, that our society was not further along, is very much part of her story because it certainly affected how she lived her personal life. I am sorry that gay rights, the LGBT movement, was not further along earlier so that she might have benefited from being able to be more open than she ever felt she could be.
Sherr: I don't think you can tell the story of her life without telling those details. Is it possible to tell Ride's story without delving into women's rights, the space race, and gay rights, or is that as much a part of her story as the details of her personal life? She just was the perfect choice as far as I could tell.Ĭ: You write about the social history that changed as part of Sally Ride's life, and that plays a role in telling her story. She was this extraordinary combination of the team tennis player, of the bold adventurous, love-to-fly, love-to-pilot astronaut, and of the scientist who wanted to figure things out. That is the overall piece of her and that is why I think she was exactly the person for the job. I think scientist is what definitely made her tick. This is a woman who liked curling up with a book or research or with a stack of books and figuring out the solution to something. When she left NASA - and I had no premonition of this, she did not pre-warn me or pre-tell me this - my reaction was right, this is a woman who really liked being in the stacks - if you're old enough to remember being in library stacks. This was what she really cared about and that is why she went back to the life she went back to.
I think during the NASA years, she might have said astronaut.īut overall, overarching, it was physicist. Sherr: I think there probably may have been a couple of weeks in her teen years when, if you woke her up in the middle of the night, she might have said tennis player. Do you think that was true throughout the extent of her life? Sherr spoke with about the life and legacy of Sally Ride:Ĭ: The book is titled simply, "Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space," but in the book you mention that if Ride had to put a subtitle to her name – at least at one point in her life – it would have been physicist.
#Sally ride windows#
Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, looks out the forward windows of the space shuttle Challenger in June 1983.
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