Rumors that Valentina Tereshkova's marriage to fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev in November 1963 was just for propaganda purposes have never been proven. They had a daughter, Yelena, who was born the following year, the first child of parents that had both been in space. The couple later divorced.
It's possible that Valentina may have trained for a Voskhod mission that was to include a spacewalk, but the flight never happened, and the female cosmonaut program was disbanded in 1969. It wasn't until 1982 that the next woman flew in space. That was Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, who went into space aboard a Soyuz flight. The US did not send a woman into space until 1983. Sally Ride, an astronaut and physicist flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
Valentina Tereshkova received the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union awards for her historic flight. Later she served as the president of the Soviet Women's Committee and became a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR's national parliament, and the Presidium, a special panel within the Soviet government. In recent years, she has led a quiet life in Moscow.
