VALENTINA TERESHKOVA AND THE FIRST WOMEN IN OUTER SPACE 

Did you know that while the first woman to fly in outer space was Soviet Valentina Tereshkova, aboard the Vostok 6 space capsule on June 16-19, 1963, however, no woman has been to the Moon?

Women have flown and worked in outer space since almost the beginning of human spaceflight. A considerable number of women from a range of countries have worked in space, though overall, women are still significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and by 2020 constitute only 10% of all astronauts who have been to space.

In the competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US) known as the Space Race, both nations chose their first space pilots (known as cosmonauts in the USSR and astronauts in the US) in the late 1950s and early 1960s from the ranks of their military high-speed jet test pilots, who were exclusively men.

In 1959 a group of thirteen female US pilots, dubbed by the American press as the "Mercury 13", wanted the chance to become astronauts and took and passed the health screening tests as the men, supervised by NASA staff. This was funded privately (e.g. by aviation pioneer Jacqueline Cochran) and not by the government; the idea of female astronauts faced a great deal of resistance in the military command and NASA, leaving these women no chance of becoming astronauts. Among the women was Jerrie Cobb who became a consultant to NASA in 1961.

Meanwhile, the USSR's director of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, lobbied for having women as cosmonauts, after being inspired in 1961 by repeated questions from the foreign press about women in space. Subsequently Kamanin crucially gained space program leader Sergey Korolev as a supporter, getting approval six months later for women cosmonauts.

During a visit to the US in 1962 Kamanin got to know Jerrie Cobb of the then rejected "Mercury 13". At one point Kamanin noted in his diary, "We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women." To increase the odds of sending a Soviet woman into space first, the women cosmonauts began their training before the men.

The Soviet government really had no interest in using women as cosmonaut pilots, but Premier Nikita Khrushchev was extremely interested in the propaganda value of proving Soviet superiority over the US in women's equality. 

The first woman to fly in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker who was a staunch Communist Party supporter, the daughter of a collective farm worker who died in the Soviet-Finnish War. She also was an avid amateur parachutist, which gave her an advantage on the Earth landing which was made outside the Vostok capsules. Kamanin framed her as "Gagarin in a skirt". 

Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, completing a 70.8 hour flight making a total of 48 orbits before returning to Earth. Kamanin hoped to fly two other women on the Voskhod 3 and 4 flights, despite the opposition of Yuri Gagarin and the other male cosmonauts. These plans were canceled in 1965, leaving the women with Soviet Air Force officer commissions.

Five months after her flight, Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev on November 3, 1963 at the Moscow Wedding Palace, with Khrushchev presiding at the wedding party together with top government and space program leaders. On 8 June 1964, nearly one year after her space flight, she gave birth to their daughter Elena Andrianovna Nikolaeva-Tereshkova, the first person with a mother and father who had both traveled into space.

The American Apollo program to land a man on the Moon included only male astronauts. Neither the USSR nor US launched another woman into space until women were admitted to the astronaut and cosmonaut corps in the 1980s.

Women were not qualified as space pilots and workers co-equal to their male counterparts until 1982. By October 2021, most of the 70 women who have been to space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station. Other countries (USSR, Canada, Japan, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Italy) have flown one or two women in human spaceflight programs. Additionally, one woman of dual Iranian-US citizenship has participated as a tourist on a US spaceflight.

Women face many of the same physical and psychological difficulties of spaceflight as men. Scientific studies generally show no particular adverse effect from short space missions. It has even been concluded that women might be better suited for longer space missions. Studies have continually indicated that the main obstacle for women to go to space remains gender discrimination.

Source: 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_space