Lots more woman Cosmonauts in the 1960s

I have heard it said that a senior person in the Soviet Space Programme favoured women, maybe for weight reasons.

As far as I can see Valentina Terschover (spellling not checked) was a token gesture.

How would the World have reacted if there were a lot of women put up there by the USSR.

Would it have speeded or retarded American women in society generally
 
Tereshkova's flight was done purely for propaganda reasons, apparently Korolev wasn't keen on what he saw as a stunt and in any case favoured a different candidate. However Krushchev favoured Tereshkova because she came from a poor background, her performance on the flight was pretty poor, at one point she drifted off to sleep causing ground control to think she was dead! Korolev's wife said years later in a BBC documentary that he had been so disgusted with Tereshkova that he told her "Space is no place for broads!" :D

Even if her flight had been more of a success I doubt there would have been many more female cosmonauts and astronauts in the 1960's. The Moon race meant that missions involved many complex tasks including rendesvouz and docking, the only people who had the skills necessary for such flights were military pilots and there simply weren't any women fighter pilots at that time. The women who were subsequently selected for the space programmes in the 1970's were scientists, it's only in the last 20 years as women have been allowed to become front line fighter pilots that women have commanded Shuttle missions, AFAIK there has never been a woman in command of a Russian space mission, am I right?
 
There were at least several other women trained as cosmonauts. Tereshkova got the nod for political reasons similar to Yuri Gagarin--like him, she came from distinctly humble, peasant/proletarian origins, and was thus deemed the best choice politically. Unfortunately, unlike her male counterpart who was an experienced airman, she had had relatively little experience flying. Other female cosmonaut candidates (kosmonauta?) had had a lot more flight time, but the reason they were able to was that their class origins were not so iconically proletarian--being daughters of relatively well-off Russians, they were better positioned to get the test pilot gigs and so forth--and that class "taint" put them out of the running for first Soviet woman in space. But Tereshkova had a hard time handling zero gravity and the misfortunes of "Chaika" ("Seagull," her mission call sign) put further women in space far down the priority queue and under the circumstances, political and budgetary, they never got around to it until a later generation when the Americans were finally going to send up a woman of our own; a female cosmonaut was hastily added to a Soyuz mission to pre-empt Sally Ride for the title of second woman in space.

So, either Tereshkova having more flight experience and better luck in adapting to zero-g, or her being scrubbed from the first mission and one of the other kosmonauta being chosen and performing better, might have left the door open for yet more and the normalizing of something like gender equity in the Soviet program.

(Sort of. Decades later in the Salyut and early Mir missions, male cosmonauts would still present arriving women with the traditional Russian gifts to welcome a woman to a house--an apron and a broom!:rolleyes: The infamous "second shift" for women lived on In Space...)

As for what this would have done for the American program--well, it was a lot more odd for the Russians to omit women from their space program than for Americans, since the Soviets were supposed to be progressive Communists whereas Americans were supposed to be more conservative. But actually there were arguments--largely ignored--for American women in space from before the Mercury program launched anyone. How this would have played out in the 1960s, and in the Women's Lib era of the early '70s, is the stuff of actual timelines of course!
 
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