Blazing a Path for Your Daughters

CAN'T FIND OUR PICTURES SO: TITUSVILLE, FL - JULY 07: THIS IS ABOUT WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE  (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

When we were first married (1983) and living on Florida's Space Coast towards the end of the cold war, a co-worker gave me tickets to Sally Ride's first launch into space.  While "close" is a laughable term in regards to a shuttle launch, we were closer than other uninvolved civilians usually get.  In the very wee hours we got up and drove, in our non-air-conditioned car to a swamp with a friend and sat in this swamp for hours and hours.  The launch pad and the Vehicle Assembly building were visible from the swamp (complete with "DANGER! Alligators and Snakes" signs.  Mosquitos were abundant.

As a young women who grew up in the sixties and seventies of the last century Sally Ride's achievement was hugely important.  Nobody could say to any other young woman that they couln't be something or do something because they were a woman.  Astrnaut training was regarded as an enormous test physically, emotionally and intellectually.  A woman did it, therefore a woman could do just about anything.  Dr. Ride wasn't alone in making this happen; women, and men, both had to either push, fight, or stand aside to allow her to enter the space program. 

Some of you reading may have daughters.  Because Sally Ride took that flight, because others made it so that path was open to her, your daughters will have opportunities we did not have. It's as simple, and as important, as that. It just is.

So with Dr. Ride's passing, we have lost a pioneer who blazed more than a path through the sky. She blazed a path and removed obstacles from the futures of women everywhere who could now say, yes I can become a ______.

I can't recall if it was Dr. Ride or another woman who said that the true measure would come when  we don't see "first" before a label, just "astronaut," just "pilot."

Just REMEMBER.

[Sally Ride] America's first woman astronaut communitcates with ground controllers from the flight deck during the six day mission of the Challenger. (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)