There are more than 120 Canadian women who worked on the design, manufacturing, testing, launch and operation of the Alouette I satellite, launched into space during the Cold War era’s race to space. And yet, these women are positioned outside of space business and labour histories. The author aims to influence and dismantle this hegemonic positioning and celebrate one of these women’s histories in the present and future by asking and providing a plausible answer to How do you build and share histories of a hidden, invisible or forgotten science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-professional woman?
The author embraces a poststructural intersectional feminist lens within the postmodern histories approach coupled with the gendered antenarratives theoretical framework to dismantle these knowledge hierarchies. Based on primary source interviews, archival documents and photographs from 1950 to 1979, the author weaves these collected data with the Canadian space industrial historical context, carefully choosing who is placed at the center of this study, while also considering how she obtained, shared, and meaningfully engaged with historical discontinuous bodies of discourses (re)created into a Canadian Alouette woman’s spiral of storying.
The reader is invited to jump into the spiral of storying at the dawn of the Canadian capitalist space industry. This spiral is presented via writing differently and speculative fiction, offering a dialogical web that moves beyond the structural boundaries created by previous Alouette I grand narratives. By using this storying approach, the author contributes to women’s and gender historians’ efforts to celebrate and engage with more diverse histories and to disrupt the hegemonic positioning of women outside the boundaries of space business and labour histories.
This research stands apart from other space histories as the author aims to distance her (re)production of gendered living stories from the practice of grand narratives. Furthermore, this study, framed within the poststructural intersectional feminist lens, is a deliberate act to deviate from the liberal feminist lens that permeates the treatment of women in business and labour historical studies. She also refocuses our attention on a Canadian woman’s space contributions that were hidden in archival boxes. Arguing that we must continue to obtain, share and meaningfully engage with STEM professional women’s experiences in the space industry, this manuscript inspires girls and young women in the present and future to continue to reach for the stars.
