China girl, pt. 5: American amnesia - how we mobilized women in defense to win wars on land, race to the moon, and find the worst people on Earth but then forgot it while China didn't

Or when winning in America required everyone, we used everyone, and Agnes Meyer Driscoll, Katherine Johnson, and 10,000 female codebreakers proved what works

When Mao declared “women hold up half the sky” in 1968, his own mother, born in 1867, had bound feet, meaning she was literally immobilized by tradition. Less than a century separates the birth of Mao’s mother, a woman whose feet were broken to limit her movement, from the birth of Zhu Xuejun in 1962, dubbed China’s ‘Missile Goddess’, whose hypersonic missiles travel at roughly ten times the speed of sound, faster than anything America can currently intercept.

Xuejun’s feet were not bound and neither were her capabilities, as China learned to unbind both women and their potential to serve the country’s defense needs. Meanwhile, America, lagging severely behind its adversaries in the defense industry, has a superpower we refuse to use desperate innovation. When we absolutely must win, whether World War II, the Space Race, or finding bin Laden, we suddenly remember that talent comes in all packages. Then the crisis passes and we forget. Our distinctly American amnesia indicates we know h…