Review: Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly

[Russ Allbery]

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly

Publisher: William Morrow
Copyright: 2016
ISBN:      0-06-236361-1
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     272

I appreciate the film industry occasionally finding good books that I
should read.

As I suspect most people now know from the publicity of the movie,
Hidden Figures is the story of the black women mathematicians who
performed the calculations that put a man on the Moon. Or at least
that's the hook, and the conclusion of the story in a way. But the meat
of the story, at least for me, was earlier: the black women who formed
the mathematical backbone of NACA, the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, and specifically the NACA facility at Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Virginia. NACA eventually transformed into NASA and
took on a new mission of space exploration, but that comes relatively
late in this story.

The story opens in 1943 when Melvin Butler, the personnel officer at
the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, had a problem: he needed
more support staff for NACA's mission to improve US airplane
technology. Specifically, he needed mathematicians and computers (at
the time, computer was a job title for a person who performed
mathematical computations; practical electronic computers were still
far in the future). An initially-controversial female computing pool,
started at Langley in 1935, had proven incredibly successful, but
mathematically-trained white women were in scarce supply. Butler
therefore, with support and cover from A. Philip Randolph's successful
push for Roosevelt to open war jobs to black candidates, made the
decision to start recruiting black women.

Shetterly makes clear how complex and fraught this was. Langley was
located in Virginia, a segregated southern state, and while the NAACP
had already started opening cracks in the walls of segregation, Brown
v. Board of Education was more than ten years into the future. The
white female computers were already logistically separated, since no
woman could supervise a man. The black women would need to be
segregated further, and Butler's recruitment efforts were kept fairly
quiet. But wartime necessity opened a lot of doors. And so, West
Computing (distinct from the white women in East Computing) was formed,
named after its location in Langley's underdeveloped West Area.

Hidden Figures starts with Dorothy Vaughan, the woman who will
eventually become the head of West Computing, and later follows threads
of connection from her to Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and others
who started in West Computing. It also, effectively and memorably,
starts by setting the scene through both biographical details of the
women's lives and authorial descriptions of the complex tapestry of
black colleges and social relationships they came from.

For me, writing this as a white man in 2018 who grew up on the west
coast and visited even the modern US South a mere handful of times,
it's very hard to get an emotional or visceral sense of what
segregation was like, beneath the bones of historical fact. Hidden
Figures does the best job of that of any book I have ever read.
Shetterly is blunt and unflinching in her descriptions, but also
borrows from her biographical subjects a sense of practical
determination and persistence that avoids drowning the story in the
injustice of US racial politics. Segregation was an obstacle and a
constraint these women navigated around, persisted against, suffered
through, and occasionally undermined, but it wasn't the point. The
point was the work they were doing: the NACA work to develop and then
fine-tune military aircraft technology, the post-war work of supersonic
research, and finally the space program. Segregation, racism, and
sexism was pervasive, but at the same time they were just injustices
that got in the way of what their true life's work. That core of
determined joy in the work is what makes this book sing, and outlines a
path towards hope.

That this is Shetterly's first book is extremely impressive. She has a
confident grasp of her material, full control over a complicated
interweaving of timelines and biographies of multiple women, and an
ability to describe both cultural institutions and engineering work in
a way that holds a reader's attention and interest. This is tricky
material for a book because, while these women's lives are dramatic,
it's a drama of careful work, slow progress, persistence, and
carefully-chosen defiance. (I will always remember the story of Miriam
Mann taking the "COLORED COMPUTERS" sign off the lunch table each day
and making it disappear into her purse, until whoever was responsible
for placing it finally gave up and stopped.) The dramatic beats don't
follow a normal plot structure. But Shetterly handles this
magnificently for most of the book, keeping the pacing fast enough to
remain engrossing but slow enough to communicate the underlying reality
and sense of place.

The one mild criticism I have of the book is that once it enters the
NASA era and the challenge of the space program, I thought Shetterly
started forcing her dramatic beats just a touch. I think she was trying
to build to a climactic payoff and emphasizing the inherent drama of
the Moon landing to do so, but it felt in a few places like she was
trying too hard and not letting the story carry itself. This was at the
same time as a huge transition from performing calculations themselves
to learning to program computers, and I would have loved for Shetterly
to dwell a bit more on that, but she rarely got into the details of the
day-to-day work. That quibble aside, though, the story is compelling
and fascinating to the very end.

Shetterly also pulls off a very advanced technique that I would not
recommend other writers try: the whole story is told using the language
of the time. Black people are Negros, women are girls, and the very
language of the book rolls back decades of social progress. This was
done carefully and exceptionally well, and for me it did a lot to
communicate the visceral feel of the time (and to drive home just how
much society has changed in at least the level of condescension and
contempt that can be openly stated). I was surprised at how much the
pervasive use of "girls" made my skin crawl, and how clearly and
succinctly it communicated the struggle of the computers to be taken
seriously as mathematicians and engineers.

I have not watched the movie version of Hidden Figures and probably
won't, although I hear it's very good. But for others like me who
prefer words over images, I can confirm that the book is excellent.
It's not just a valuable history at the cross-section of aviation,
computing, racial politics, and gender politics. It's also an
illuminating and compelling case study on the effects of institutional
racism and sexism, on how black women maneuvered through those
restrictions, and on the persistence, determination, and patience
required for social change.

Recommended. This is a piece of American history that you don't want to
miss.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-11-19

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>