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The Astronaut Wives Club

The Astronaut Wives Club is an excellent companion to Hidden Figures (nonfiction). While Hidden Figures discusses women who had an active role in NASA’s daily operations, The Astronaut Wives Club tells of the women behind the scenes. The wives of the astronauts formed a tight-knit group that supported each other through photoshoots, their husbands’ absences, terrifying space missions, and deaths.

NASA’s first group of astronauts, The Mercury Seven, was announced in 1959. They were selected in an intensely competitive process and, once selected, had to compete with each other for space flights. NASA believed that having a healthy marriage would contribute to an astronaut’s mental stability and success in space. Their wives were not only under pressure to keep their families functioning while the astronauts were in training, but to keep functioning in a picture-perfect way – always positive, always enthusiastically supportive of their husbands, and always “All American.” Any domestic discord had to be hidden from NASA as well as the press, who were eager to present the wives to the world. No matter how they really felt about missions, the wives always said that they were “Proud, happy, and thrilled,” which became something of an in-joke (and which appears in Apollo 13):

The Astronaut Wives Club does a wonderful job of showing how deliberately the wives grouped around each other to provide and receive support. It also does a great job of showing the personalities and coping skills of the Mercury Seven wives. However, once the focus shifts from The Mercury Seven to subsequent groups, the books gets more scattered (hence the A-). It helps that the front pages include a list of the wives in groups. (“The Original Seven,” “The New Nine,” etc.). The book followed the women from the Mercury Program through the Apollo Missions.

It’s fascinating to see how the women worked together, as well as how the astronaut culture changed between 1959 and 1972, when the Apollo Program ended. Most of the marriages did not survive – there was too much separation, too much infidelity on the part of the astronauts, and too much personal and cultural change for the marriages to last. The epilogue covers a Wives’ Reunion in 1991 at which the women speak openly about stressors they never could have discussed in the past. As Marge Slayton said of the Club, “We were a lifetime membership.”

– Carrie S

As America’s Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons.
Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK’s favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other’s children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon.
As their celebrity rose-and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives-they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history.