How Some Girls Saw the Apollo Space Program in 1971
Three of the girls quoted in a 1971 newspaper article about whether they’d like to visit space (Billings Gazette / Newspapers.com)
Twelve men set foot on the moon during the Apollo program between 1969 and 1972, but not a single woman. And while America’s space program has made some strides, there are still plenty of hurdles for women at NASA. The latest problem? NASA doesn’t have enough spacesuits for women. But they’re working on it, as the space agency prepares to put the first woman on the moon with the Artemis program in 2025.
The February 7, 1971 edition of the Billings Gazette in Montana ran an article by reporter Carol Perkins about how kids viewed the Apollo program. And the feedback from girls at the time was particularly disheartening.
“I wouldn’t like to go to the moon. It’s not really a place for girls,” said 7-year-old Joan Anderson, who would be about 58 years old now.
“I think it would be fun to marry an astronaut. He would be rich and famous,” said 5-year-old Gail Standard.
“He’d be gone away a lot, so I would go with him. I’d wear a girl’s astronaut uniform and cook a lot of potatoes,” said 6-year-old Jennifer Dettmann, speaking of her potential astronaut husband.
There are a lot of myths about the Apollo space program. Chief among them is that most Americans fervently supported the space program’s enormous costs. In reality, most Americans of the 1960s thought the Apollo space program wasn’t a good use of taxpayer funds, with many people asking why that money wasn’t being spent to fight homelessness or hunger in the U.S.—the same criticisms you hear today.
In fact, one of the girls quoted in the article, 11-year-old Betsy Longo, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I don’t think they should use so much money to go to the moon,” Longo said. “They should use it to stop cancer and help people here on Earth.”
One 10-year-old, Amy Ponich, was the only girl in the article who seemed receptive to the idea that she could have a role to play in America’s exploration of space, telling the reporter that she wanted to be a scientist to “discover more frontiers.”
“We need to know what the moon is made of and how it related to the Earth,” Ponich said.
But honestly, even I was surprised to see so many young girls of the early 1970s quoted as though they wouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits of space travel. There was media in the 1950s that explicitly encouraged girls to imagine their futures in space, with the book A Trip to Space: For Boys and Girls from 1954 as an example. But it’s hard to think of an example aimed at kids from the late 1960s or early ‘70s with similar representation.
Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, but an American woman wouldn’t get to space until decades later when Sally Ride made that achievement in 1983. And here’s hoping the women who will be chosen to set foot on the moon in 2025 are able to inspire more girls and young women than the early 1970s.
Joan, Gail, Jennifer, Betsy, if you’re still out there, I’d love to hear from you and what you think of the U.S. space program today. As far as I know, none of you are likely going to be astronauts heading to the moon in a couple of years, but even so, I’d be interested in hearing about your lives and what you thought the future would be like.
Love Paleofuture? Subscribe to Paleofuture+ to get exclusive articles, rare videos, and access to a members-only chat.
Paleofuture's members-only area
