Was Jerrie Cobb’s “First Female Astronaut” Good Girl Image an Act?

This is part of my Virtual Book Tour in support of Fighting for Space. For more information, see the bottom of this article. I’ll be discussing Jerrie and Jack and Mary in a livestream on my YouTube channel Thursday, April 9, at 1:30pm PST.

If the name Jerrie Cobb is familiar, it’s likely because you’ve heard of the so-called Mercury 13. It’s a story that surfaces with some regularity every few years, and it’s always the same: Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to take the astronaut medical tests, leads a group of thirteen intrepid women on a campaign to right gender imbalances in spaceflight. They have the right stuff to fly in space in the 1960s, but NASA keeps them grounded. It’s sexism, plain and simple. Jerrie Cobb is the hero, and the villain, aside from the patriarchy, is famed aviatrix Jackie Cochran.

Jerrie Cobb with a model Mercury spacecraft. NASA.

My new book, Fighting for Space, tells the real story of Jerrie Cobb and Jackie Cochran, one in which Jackie plays the central role, and both women take turns being the villain. One aspect that I didn’t get into in the book, beyond a brief mention in the author’s note, is Jerrie’s affair with a married man, something to which she never publicly admitted.

When Jerrie Cobb made headlines in her quest to become the first woman in space in the early 1960s, she was the embodiment of the…