Hidden Figures: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Dorothy’s husband Howard Vaughan continues to work at the Greenbrier Hotel alongside Joshua Coleman, Katherine’s father. Dorothy and Howard have two more children, but the children move with Dorothy to Newport News. Dorothy returns to work because the family counts on her income at Langley.

The other West Computing area women become surrogate aunts and uncles to Dorothy Vaughan’s children. They organize picnics and retreats along the river. This freeform socializing (different from the church outings and planned home visits that characterized most black communities in the South) helps bring them closer together.

Dorothy worries that she might be fired after the war ends. Luckily, it turns out that she won’t have to leave. The country turns out to be on the edge of a defense industry boom that will keep her employed for decades. Local military installations grow. The defense industry tightens its grip on the economy of southeastern Virginia. Virginia becomes a warfare state, the embodiment of what Cold War president Dwight D. Eisenhower will call “the military-industrial complex.”

Dorothy has been at Langley for three years by this point. Her work is flawless and she consistently earns “excellents” on employee evaluations. In 1946, she is made a permanent Civil Service employee. All of the West Area computers have done their best to hold onto their seats. Now they have to learn how to advance in a world of white men.

But this is difficult. Veteran scientists welcome male researchers into their folds, but women have to work much harder to get ahead. The most impressive computers are invited to work permanently with certain research teams, while other women specializing in certain fields have the luck to watch those fields grow, and to grow with them. One example of this is the research team trying to solve the problem of faster-than-sound flight. The women working on that high-profile project are able to become junior engineers, simply because it’s a growing field in need of people.

From 1941-1945, Doris Cohen, a mathematician who began work at the lab in the late 1930s publishes nine reports documenting research in high-speed aeronautical research. She is for many years the NACA’s only female author. Publishing a research report under one’s own name is the first step to becoming an engineer. For a woman, having the opportunity to do so is unusual.

Head Computer Virginia Tucker continues to relentlessly recruit women to work in the lab. However, as the war effort ends, the women who work under her are drawn into engineering pools and away from East Computing. As they leave for permanent assignments, no one is hired to replace them. Tucker eventually leaves, moving to the West Coast to join a different engineering company in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, it becomes harder for West Area Computers to migrate out of their computing pool. When three black women manage to join Cascade Aerodynamics, a group that studies rotating bodies, it causes a scandal. Some conservatives see the race mixing as a terrible thing. However, because the women are so good at their jobs, those who are against them soon quiet. Dorothy Hoover, a black computer with a master’s degree in mathematics, is the first black computer to get the opportunity to become an engineer, accepting an offer from R.T. Jones to work directly for him.

Margerey Hannah takes an offer to work as an engineer with the Full-Scale Research Division. Soon she publishes a paper under her own name with her boss about sound waves. Blanche Sponsler tries to follow in her footsteps, but eventually becomes mentally ill. One day, she covers the blackboard in one of the West Computing offices with “meaningless words and symbols” and begins speaking unintelligibly. After that she is transferred to a sanatorium and a hospital. Dorothy is appointed to take her place as the acting head of West Computing.

Some white computers break into management ranks through persistence, though generally they only become supervisors in other divisions with many female employees. For most black women, Dorothy Vaughan’s position as West Area supervisor is the highest they can expect to go. She eventually becomes full head of the unit in 1951.