'Hidden Figures': The story of the women who helped put a man in space

In 'Hidden Figures', a new film about three woman Nasa mathematicians, the achievements of the main characters are all the more incredible given the limitations of the era in which they lived and worked.

Sexism was rampant in '60s America, and society prevented most women from reaching their potential. For African-American women the obstacles were even more daunting.

It was a time when a woman could go to university but was then expected to forgo a career in order to marry, bear children and commit to a life of homemaking — which averaged 55 hours a week of childcare and housework.

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Advertising billboards that belittled and objectified women appear laughable today, but then they accurately reflected women's "inferior" status, which was enshrined in '60s law. Women couldn't open a bank account unless their husband co-signed for them, and "Head and Master" laws meant they had no legal right to share in their husband's earnings or property.    

Meanwhile, husbands could control their wife's property or earnings, and the only way a woman could leave a bad marriage was to prove in court that her husband was at fault.

For the few women who did go out to work, opportunities were limited to that of teacher, nurse or secretary. Women such as Katherine Johnson were generally unwelcome in the professional world — women represented just 6% of doctors, 3% of lawyers and less than 1% of engineers in the US.

Should a woman with a job want children, her working life was likely over; pregnancy was a fireable offence.

The frustration faced by this generation of talented, educated women, who had excelled at college only to find there was no way for them to advance, was summarised by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, a book that helped spur the second wave of feminism that swept the US as the decade progressed: "A woman today has been made to feel freakish and alone and guilty if, simply, she wants to be more than her husband's wife."

What we now perceive as sexism was everywhere — from Hugh Hefner's TV show Playboy Penthouse to the Billboard Hot 100. Male singers sang about staring at women on the street (I'm A Girl Watcher by The O'Kaysions) and how women should behave to hang on to their men (Jack Jones's Wives and Lovers).

Meanwhile, male music moguls put sexist messages into the mouths of women in songs like Dusty Springfield's Wishin and Hopin', in which she advises women who want to land a man to "wear their hair just for him" and "do the things he likes to do"; Leslie Gore's That's the Way Boys Are, which excuses all kinds of unpleasant male behaviour; or The Crystals' shocking domestic violence apologia, He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).

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Even though the contraceptive pill was approved for birth control in 1960, some states still banned it, and unmarried women were often refused a prescription. Juries were another area where a woman's judgment was not trusted; they were considered too sympathetic and fragile to remain objective about those accused of an offence. It wasn't until 1973 that women could serve as jurors in all 50 US states.

Across all aspects of life, society indicated that women needed to be dominated and were incapable of succeeding in the ways men could.

So when the Space Race began and Nasa, desperate for helpers, opened its doors to mathematicians regardless of sex or race, it was a ground-breaking moment. Finally, women like Johnson were allowed to put their talents to work and prove that all humans have equal potential.

Sadly, the advances of women behind the scenes of the Space Race failed to be reflected. When researchers proposed that women, being smaller and lighter, might be better suited to travel on the cramped spacecrafts, a privately funded programme was set up in the early '60s in order to test the theory.

Even though 13 women passed the same physical examinations for astronaut selection, the study was controversially shut down. The first woman astronaut didn't enter space until 1983.

• 'Hidden Figures' opens on February 24.