Rene Carpenter, the wife of Mercury 7 astronaut Scott Carpenter during the Space Age, died Friday (obit: Washington Post). (She was born in Iowa, hence the very tenuous hook for this blog post.) I say “during the Space Age” because, despite or because of the massive spotlight put on the astronauts and their families in the 1960s, there were many divorces in the group. With Carpenter’s death, that group is gone.
Being an astronaut’s wife required keeping up appearances, maybe even painfully so, to match the expectations of the era. To illustrate somewhat, here is a paragraph from a wire service feature on “Mrs. Scott Carpenter” (as both the headline and first paragraph addressed her) published in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on May 5, 1968:
Rene Carpenter just turned 40, wears a size 6, weighs 110 pounds, stands 5 foot 3 and is totally averse to wearing something just because it’s ‘in.’ Her skirts go from mid-thigh to three inches above the knee and she gets a sick look whenever anyone mentions midis. “I will never, never lengthen my skirts,” she said.
“Kooky dresser campaigns for RFK”, the subhead said, and much more attention was paid to the first half of that than the latter. But then, it was running in the Gazette’s women’s section, above ads for Younkers and Newport’s Greenhouse.
The astronaut corps has included women for decades, including two born in Iowa who have since retired. One can only imagine how an article written in the same vein today would treat their spouses.