Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot Shetterly Lee

in her life—Dr. Claytor and Dr. Davis—would ever have asked her to deny love or sacrifice a family for the promise of a career.

      In the four years since leaving graduate school, Katherine had not once regretted her decision to exchange the high-profile academic opportunity for domestic life. Most days she felt like the luckiest person in the world, in love with her husband and blessed with three daughters she adored. In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for. In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor. But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.