Where no Woman has Gone Before: Femininity, Fashion Photography, and the Race for Space

Abstract

With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Cold War “race for space” officially began, and in the United States discussions arose concerning women’s role in helping meet the increased need for specialists in science and technology, including whether or not they should be trained as astronauts. These debates often revolved around femininity, a construct that at the time was rarely associated with scientific or technological intellect. Cold War anxiety over American femininity also manifested in visual culture. In this article, I focus specifically on fashion layouts from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar featuring photographs by Richard Avedon, William Klein, and Bruce Davidson, arguing that in the early 1960s, space age apparatus and motifs were juxtaposed with ultra-feminine fashion models, which was symptomatic of how the possibility of women’s involvement with space exploration was being channeled into the socially sanctioned realm of feminine consumption.