Let's celebrate the spacewoman's story

HOW gripped the world was 40 years ago by the live transmission of the first moon landing. Especially where I was, in central Africa, where television had arrived a mere 10 years or so before, we saw and heard history being made.

We heard a man say "This is one small step for [a] man and one giant step for Mankind."

We did not see a woman stepping onto the surface of the moon and speaking for all Humankind. But why not?

Yes, women could be astronauts. The Russians selected a woman who had been a textile worker, Valentina Tereshkova, and made her our first spacewoman in June 1963. But in the US at that time there were 13 women, qualified and experienced pilots, in a training programme parallel to the men's.

A training programme where they performed equally well, and better in some tests than men who were eventually chosen for space missions. Their story is wonderfully told in the book by David J Shayler and Ian Moule, called Women in Space: Following Valentina.

That the first person on the moon was not a woman, and that despite subsequent moon landings no woman has yet stood on the moon, is because of the implacable barriers that institutional sexism put in their way, all logged and annotated by Shayler and Moule. Barriers at every level, all the way up to President Johnson.

The second wave of feminism started in the 1960s, too late to make an impact, and it was 20 years after Valentina before another woman got the chance to go into space.

I would recommend that every secondary school library should have a copy of the Shayler and Moule book. It would be so unthinkable today for President Obama to similarly approve women's inequality that we are likely to forget what a struggle it was before Eileen Collins could become the first female commander of a space shuttle flight.

Let's celebrate the first man to stand on the moon, but let's celebrate also the feminists who ensured that women such as Britain's Helen Sharman would be seen as acceptable astronauts.

Moira Macdonald

Lower Hill Barton Road

Exeter

(by email)