Between Kitchen & Space: The Gravity Of Expectation Weighing Women Down

In the corner of a modest kitchen, stainless steel spoons gleam in a holder, jars of lentils and spices stand in quiet discipline, and the faint whistle of a pressure cooker hums in the background. Amid this orchestration of domestic rhythm, a laptop glows. On its screen, the headline reads: “100 Women in Space: A Legacy of Trailblazers, Scientists, and Dreamers.”

The juxtaposition is startling. A hand, adorned with bangles, stirs a pot; the other world, pixel-lit on the screen, recounts stories of women who navigated rockets, satellites, and galaxies. The scene is at once intimate and infinite—a reminder that the trajectory from the kitchen to the cosmos is not a leap across realms, but a continuum of resilience, curiosity, and imagination.

This image of everyday labour against the backdrop of cosmic aspiration invites us to rethink women’s place not only in households but also in humanity’s grand narrative of exploration. It whispers a truth that history has often silenced: that the women who sustain life on Earth are also the ones who dare to reimagine life beyond it.

The Symbolism of Space and Kitchen

For centuries, the kitchen has been framed as a woman’s universe, a place where she is bound by repetition and expectation. “A woman’s place is in the home,” patriarchal societies have insisted, turning the stove into a cage and the spice jar into a symbol of confinement. The cosmos, by contrast, has represented the opposite: an expanse without boundaries, a metaphor for freedom, imagination, and the future.

Yet, what if these two worlds are not opposites?

What if the kitchen is not merely a site of limitation but also a launchpad of resilience? The act of cooking, after all, is an alchemy of elements—fire, air, water, earth—transforming raw material into sustenance. It is not unlike the alchemy of rocket science, where fuel and fire, physics and patience, transform metal into flight.

The woman who stirs lentils embodies the same principles as the woman who stirs the controls of a spacecraft: precision, patience, and care. The kitchen, far from being a contradiction to the cosmos, may be its mirror.

Historical Roots: Women and the Sky

Long before rockets pierced the heavens, women were looking up. In Vedic India, Gargi Vachaknavi stood in King Janaka’s court and questioned the nature of reality itself, asking sage Yajnavalkya: “On what, pray, is the world woven back and forth?” Her inquiry was not domestic but cosmic. Similarly, Maitreyi, another philosopher of the Upanishadic period, explored immortality and the infinite with boldness that defied her time.

Across cultures, women were linked to the sky. Nut, the Egyptian goddess, arched her body across the heavens, swallowing the sun each night and birthing it each morning. Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon, symbolised both wild independence and cosmic rhythm. In many Indigenous traditions, women were astronomers who aligned planting seasons with the movement of stars.

Later history offers Hypatia of Alexandria (4th century CE), a mathematician and astronomer who taught the motions of celestial bodies in a world hostile to female intellect. In the 18th century, Caroline Herschel became the first woman to discover a comet. Each of these women looked beyond their immediate sphere, daring to map the heavens while societies sought to keep them earthbound.

Women Astronauts: From Earth to the Stars

When Valentina Tereshkova ascended into orbit in 1963, she carried more than just Soviet ambition—she carried the weight of centuries of women excluded from the stars. A textile worker before becoming a cosmonaut, Tereshkova symbolised the collapse of boundaries between factory floor and outer space. Her words remain a reminder of cosmic humility: “Once you’ve been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is.”

Two decades later, in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She was a physicist who later devoted her life to inspiring young women in STEM. Asked about being the first, she responded with understated brilliance: “It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

For India, the dream of space bore the name of Kalpana Chawla, who in 1997 became the first Indian-born woman in space. Her life was tragically cut short in the Columbia disaster of 2003, yet her words continue to inspire: “The path from dreams to success does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it.”

Sunita Williams extended this legacy, holding records for spacewalking hours by a woman. She often narrated her experiences in ways that connected the extraordinary to the ordinary—cooking tortillas in space, exercising on treadmills, even watching Earth rise as one might watch the sun through a kitchen window.

Today, NASA has pledged that the first woman will set foot on the moon by 2030. History, once sealed off to women, is slowly being rewritten in the stars.

The Double Gravity: Social and Scientific

For women in space, the challenge has always been twofold: escaping Earth’s gravity and escaping society’s. It is not merely physics but patriarchy that has weighed them down. For centuries, women were barred from universities, excluded from scientific academies, and denied credit for discoveries. Even in the 20th century, women at NASA were often confined to computational roles, known as “human computers,” their brilliance hidden behind men’s missions.

Virginia Woolf, writing in A Room of One’s Own (1929), lamented the constraints placed on women’s intellect: “Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” That freedom, however, needed more than imagination—it needed institutional support, access to education, and the courage to step beyond prescribed roles.

Women astronauts, therefore, carry a “double gravity.” To soar, they must defy both the pull of Earth and the weight of tradition. Their journeys are not just scientific achievements but social revolutions.

The Everyday as Training Ground

In this light, the kitchen becomes more than a symbol of limitation. It is also a site of training—discipline, endurance, and balance. Astronauts spend years learning to multitask in confined spaces, to maintain patience under pressure, to transform scarce resources into survival. Do these not echo the skills women perfect daily in households across the world?

Consider the humour and humanity of Sunita Williams, preparing tortillas aboard the International Space Station—a gesture both ordinary and extraordinary. Food, the essence of the kitchen, travels with humanity even into the cosmos. 

Indian Context: From Hearth to Horizon

In India, the symbolism is particularly poignant. For centuries, women were the custodians of the household flame, the keepers of kitchens where stories and sustenance alike were prepared. Yet in recent decades, Indian women have stood at the forefront of cosmic exploration.

The Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) of 2014, which astonished the world with its cost-effectiveness and success, was engineered by teams of women scientists at ISRO. Images of these women in sarees, with bindis on their foreheads, celebrating the mission’s success, became iconic. They embodied a narrative that disrupted stereotypes: a woman could be both traditional and trailblazing, domestic and cosmic.

Kalpana Chawla remains India’s most luminous symbol of this duality. Born in Karnal, a small town in Haryana, she reached the cosmos through sheer persistence. Her words resonate with Indian daughters who grow up amid conflicting expectations: “May you have the vision to find the path.”

Generations in Dialogue

The bangled wrist in the kitchen photograph evokes mothers and grandmothers who spent lifetimes sustaining families within limited horizons. Their dreams, often deferred, became the foundation upon which future generations could stand taller.

The laptop screen, glowing with the stories of women astronauts, belongs to another generation—one that inherits resilience but channels it into ambition. Between the spoon in hand and the rocket on screen lies a dialogue across time: what one generation endures, another transforms.

Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” In today’s context, that becoming extends further: one is not born merely to cook, but also to code, to calculate trajectories, to command spacecraft. The kitchen is not erased—it is redefined, no longer the boundary but the beginning.

Ultimately, this photograph is not only about women. It is about the human condition. Each of us lives in kitchens—spaces of repetition, survival, and grounding. And each of us yearns for the cosmos—mystery, transcendence, and expansion.

The greatness of humanity lies not in choosing one over the other but in holding both. To cook a meal is to honour survival; to dream of space is to honour imagination. The woman in the kitchen reading about women in space embodies this duality. She reminds us that no dream is too vast, no space too ordinary, for the universe to begin.

The Sky Within Reach

As I return to the photograph, I see no opposition between the spoon and the spaceship, between the spice jar and the satellite. I see a dialogue. The woman stirring her pot while reading about women in space is not divided between two worlds; she is weaving them together.

Her kitchen is a cosmos. Her cosmos is a kitchen.

And somewhere between cumin seeds and constellations, women remind us: the kitchen is not the limit. The sky is not the limit either.

Between the fragrance of dal and the silence of galaxies, the universe is already in her hands.

Authored by Himani Usha Tripathi | Views expressed by the author are their own.