John Glenn’s fan mail shows many girls dreamed of the stars – but sexism in the early space program thwarted their ambitions

Header image: Glenn, in the NASA mailroom, received letters from fans of all ages. John Glenn Archives, The Ohio State University, CC BY-ND

Roshanna P. Sylvester, University of Colorado Boulder

Pioneering spacefarer John Herschel Glenn Jr. would have turned 100 on July 18, 2021.

When Glenn died in 2016, the famed astronaut was lauded as “the last genuine American hero.” NASA, the U.S. Marine Corps, President Barack Obama and many others posted tributes on social media.

Hundreds of nostalgic fans testified to Glenn’s impact on their own senses of youthful possibility. One woman recalled being a fifth-grader in February 1962, listening to coverage of Glenn’s orbital flight at school on a transistor radio: “This was the definition of the future … I wanted to do hard math with slide rules and learn hard languages and solve mysteries. I wanted to be like John Glenn.”

Glenn’s life and legacy continue to be widely celebrated. Yet recent scholarship on the early Space Age has reawakened questions about the ways gender, race, ethnicity and class shaped the human space flight program in the U.S.

Was America’s first starman really everybody’s hero?

As a historian undertaking a major research project called “A Sky Full of Stars: Girls and Space-Age Cultures in Cold War America and the Soviet Union,” I have analyzed hundreds of fan mail letters written by girls in the U.S. and USSR to the spacefarers Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and Valentina Tereshkova. I set out to discover how young people experienced the early triumphs of human space flight, and how the dramatic events they witnessed influenced their own senses of what they could aspire to and achieve.

My research in the John H. Glenn Archives at The Ohio State University revealed that the