National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

newyorker:

…she was a heroine, especially to many girls. She openly acknowledged that the women’s movement had made her trip to space possible—that it didn’t just happen. She told reporters at the time of her flight, “It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.” Again, that was her work; she had a sense of what it meant to be a role model, to be Sally Ride. Perhaps she thought that parents would not buy the children’s science books that she co-wrote with O’Shaughnessy, who helped run Sally Ride Science and was described on its Web site as her “friend,” if they thought the authors were lesbians. The more troubling question there is not for Ride but for the rest of us: If that was her fear, was she right? Have we, as a nation, not been ready to let a lesbian inspire our daughters to fly, if they want to, to the moon, and back?

Amy Davidson on The Astronaut Bride: Sally Ride and her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy http://nyr.kr/NJtbAW

(Image courtesy of NASA)

On July 23, 2012, astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to enter space, lost her battle with pancreatic cancer. Ride won the NCAA’s Theodore Roosevelt Award, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and was twice awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal. Ride was also the first person in space to have a posthumously acknowledged same sex relationship.

About Ride, President Obama said, “Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model. She inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars.”