Citation for Margot Lee Shetterley

Margot Lee Shetterley. You are an author, chronicler, and stereotype-shatterer.

Ask many literary historians, and they’ll tell you that they chose their subject because they wanted to share the excitement of a newly discovered story with the world. Or because they wanted to put a new spin on a story that had been told many times before.

You, on the other hand, wrote a story that was neither a discovery to you nor an oft-told tale self-advantageously respun. Instead, it was a story right there out in the open — so much a part of the world you knew that you were shocked to discover that no one had bothered to tell it before, or that it needed to be told at all.

But did it ever. Your book Hidden Figures is, as its subtitle so wonderfully puts it, “the story of the African American women who helped win the space race” — a history obscured that you successfully, unapologetically, and beautifully made common knowledge.  

“It’s a science story,” you’ve said, “told from the perspective of Black women, who in our popular perception are probably the least likely to be identified as scientists.” 

And it’s about how the world can be transformed by, in your words, “women sitting in rooms doing math.”

Perhaps you were the perfect person to tell the story because you were immune from a very young age to the voices in society that said that women and math, or Black women and science, didn’t go together. Your father was a research scientist who made sure you took, and aced, all the advanced science classes — and so it wasn’t until years later that you realized that some of his colleagues at NASA you heard about growing up were making history in more ways than one. As I said before, these extraordinary women were not news to you.

But of course, their particular stories, the path they took together to reach their accomplishments, and the details of the discrimination, doubt, and more that they confronted and overcame on that path, had yet to be spoken of, largely because few had bothered to ask.

You asked, interviewing these women and giving a wide public voice for the first time to some of the most influential mathematicians and aerospace engineers of the 20th century. Among them was Katherine Johnson, recipient of a Barnard Medal of Distinction in 2018.

And you told their stories with such style, brilliance, and narrative flair that the book not only became an instant classic, but also a movie that starred Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, and Octavia Spencer and that earned three Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

You didn’t rest on your accolades. After all, there were many more stories to tell. In 2013, you founded the Human Computer Project, created to discover even more of the hundreds of women who worked in NASA’s aeronautical and space laboratories and to share and preserve even more of their stories for posterity.

And in 2018 you published a children’s book version of Hidden Figures — so that Black girls everywhere would learn the story of the human computers who made history, and who happened to look a bit like them.

Margot Lee Shetterley — for sharing with the world your multiple, cross-disciplinary gifts as a writer of science, history, and biography; for ensuring the preservation of stories of groundbreaking women formerly kept in the dark; and for helping to smash stereotypes and open up opportunities for women, and for Black women especially — it is my honor to present you with a 2022 Barnard Medal of Distinction. We could not imagine a more inspiring person to help us close out the Barnard Year of Science