Women’s achievements and contributions have been routinely neglected, overlooked or misattributed. In my new book, I tell the story of 1,000 of these extraordinary characters missing from history. Here are just a few
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For this month’s Kickass Women in History we turn to the nerdy end of the spectrum with Josephine Cochrane (sometimes spelled ‘Cochran’). She was the inventor of the modern dishwasher.
Born 1839, Josephine Garis came from a nerdy family of engineers and inventors. In 1858 she married a wealthy man, William Cochran, who had earned a ridiculous amount of money as a dry goods merchant. When they married, Cochrane took her husband’s last name as was the custom, but she added an ‘e’ to the end of it.
After the marriage, Cochrane had two children (one of whom died at the age of two) and became a full-time socialite. The family lived in Shelbyville, Illinois. Cochrane liked to entertain with her special china and she hated it when the dishes were chipped, which she blamed on poor handling by the servants. She started washing her own dishes, and to her extreme annoyance she chipped some herself. Eventually, according to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, she declared: “If nobo