Born: 21 October 1921, United States
Died: 5 June 2015
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Jane Briggs
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
The Mercury 13 were a group of astronauts who were never given a chance to go into space. In the early days of the U.S. space program, women were excluded from consideration because of the requirement that astronauts had to have been fighter pilots in the military—although many women served as pilots during World War II, they were not allowed to fill the role of fighter pilot, nor were non-Caucasian men. A privately funded group wanted to prove that women were just as capable as men, and so the group, dubbed the Mercury 13 in a pointed reference to NASA’s Mercury 7 astronauts, underwent all the same tests the men had. They not only passed, but several of the women outperformed the men on various tests. The oldest of the Mercury 13 was 41-year-old Jane Briggs Hart.
Born in 1921, Hart was a political wife, mother of eight, and equal rights campaigner who had never stopped flying, becoming the first licensed female helicopter pilot in Michigan. In her youth, she’d been an award-winning horseback rider and competitive sailor. During World War II, she drove trucks for the Red Cross Motor Corps before earning her pilot’s license. After her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1958, she would fly to D.C. to see him, commenting she did this at least once a week to do his grocery shopping. She was politically active in her own right, becoming vice chair of the Oakland County Democrats in 1950, serving as a founding member of the National Organization for Women and board member for the League of Women Voters, as well as a lifetime member of the NAACP. As one newspaper declared, “Mrs. Philip A. Hart doesn’t care beans about being a senator’s wife.”
Also in the ‘50s, Hart served as an officer in the Civil Air Patrol and documented the accomplishments of other women pilots, so her participation in the Mercury 13 project was right up her alley. Apart from the tests and the debatable need for fighter pilot experience, it was theorized that women’s smaller size made them better suited to a role where space was extremely limited and every gram mattered—in fact, the Mercury 7 requirements included that the men must be no taller than five feet, eleven inches.
Having proven their point, the program received government funding approval for additional training—only to have it rescinded at the end of 1961 before the women had even arrived. Hart and her fellow Mercury 13 member Jerrie Cobb testified before a U.S. House of Representatives special committee on the matter. “It is inconceivable to me that the world of outer space should be restricted to men only, like some sort of stag club,” Hart told the committee. “I submit, Mr. Chairman, that a woman in space today is no more preposterous than a woman in a field hospital 100 years ago … I wonder if anyone has ever reflected on the great waste of talent resulting from the belated recognition of women’s ability to heal.”
Although their words fell on deaf ears, she continued to advocate for women in space well into the 1960s. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, while the U.S. wouldn’t send a woman up for another two decades, when Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983.