The first woman in space was the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who launched on June 16th, 1963. Her craft, Vostok 6, orbited the planet forty-eight times over three days. Tereshkova’s achievement was one of great pride and propaganda value for the U.S.S.R.—and confusion and consternation for the U.S.A.
For one thing, she didn’t fit American’s Cold War-era stereotypes of Soviet women. One such stereotype, as historian Robert L. Griswold reveals, was the “graceless, shapeless, and sexless” Russian working class woman. Many Americans imagined female Soviets as miserable and shabby, suffering from bad clothes and makeup, thanks to their inferior form of government. According to Griswold, by the late 1950s, the “American conception of Soviet working class femininity became a way to reassert the boundaries of proper womanhood” which, after World War II in the US, no longer had a place for “Rosie the Riveter.”
Then there was the stereotype of the apolitical matron, informed by Nina Khrushcheva, partner of Nikita Khruschev. Practically everybody liked “Mrs. K.” when she toured the U.S. in 1959. Although she was in fact “a revolutionary in her own right,” in the eyes of the American media she “became a kind of world grandmother who focused on her family and had little interest in Kremlin intrigue.” Griswold writes that in this case, conservative Baby Boomers’ maternal ideology was more powerful than anti-Communism.
This all changed when Tereshkova went into space. Suddenly a new stereotype emerged on the American cultural front: Soviet professional women were “female physicians in lab coats, women engineers with their slide rules, even a young cosmonaut in her spaceship.”
The twenty-six year-old Tereshkova had, after all, “travelled further than the entire American male astronaut corps combined.” The American media fixated, unsurprisingly, on her sex appeal. The Chicago Tribune dubbed her the “Russian blonde in space,” even though she wasn’t blonde. She was said to wear a perfume called Red Moscow, and was compared favorably to Ingrid Bergman.