Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists

Hidden in Plain Sight: Women of NASA in 1960’s This month, in my feminism alliance club at school, we watched a movie called Hidden Figures. In this movie, three Black women working at NASA in the 1960’s get promoted to a higher-level job. Unfortunately for them, all of their coworkers are white men, who doubt the women and their skills. But even though the men don’t believe in them, they all go on to create great achievements for NASA. This movie is set in the days of segregation and when the US was trying to win the race with the former Soviet Union to get a man to the moon. Because of these women, the US won. This was such an inspiring movie, and I recommend it highly.  This movie taught me many lessons. First, the movie’s whole plot was that we should never judge anyone based on how they look. In fact, these women were being stereotyped by the men around them, even though these women proved many times that they have stronger math skills. This is a really important lesson because, after years of segregation and sexism, people should have looked past superficial appearances to recognize individual talent. This movie proves that exact point: these Black women lead the US to victory. Next, the movie introduces many important facts about history and space. This movie provides interesting facts about training, test runs, debugging, code, and so much more. This really helped me understand more about space, spaceships, and the math that goes into it. In the movie, they have only one chance to get this equation right, or the person in the rocket will die. The math is extremely difficult, narrowed down to the tiniest decimal. Fortunately, NASA finds someone who can do it, who happens to be a Black woman. This proves that women can do anything, and it doesn’t matter what they look like. I recommend this movie to anyone wanting to know more about space, rockets, NASA, or anything related to math. This movie is also based on a true story, NASA themselves confirming the problems with gender and race in their early years as an organization. Their journey was inspiring, and they were so complicated. Watching this movie also opened my eyes to other types of movie genres. I had no idea history and math movies could be so interesting and absorbing. For anyone who likes any of those genres, or just has some free time and might not know what to watch, I highly recommend Hidden Figures.