Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly
Speaker 1: Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about dishwashers
Speaker 1: this week. That's the thing I am very grateful for. Same.
Speaker 1: There are a few a few things I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about, but especially that article we mentioned from where
Speaker 1: they got Josephine's name completely wrong and listed her as
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Cochrane. I don't know if that name rings a
Speaker 1: bell to any of our listeners or to you, but
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Cochrane was one of the aliases that Nellie bly
Speaker 1: used funny. It just struck me as very funny that
Speaker 1: this um, this article very repeatedly called called Lissa with
Speaker 1: cochran um. It also when I say it got stuff wrong,
Speaker 1: I mean it got stuff real wrong. And it almost
Speaker 1: made me go didn't know, I bloy like have someone
Speaker 1: confused her with Josephine Cochran and she gave a completely
Speaker 1: fake interview. Because there's so much cockamam me stuff that
Speaker 1: gets added to the story, including that she was working
Speaker 1: on elevators at that point. She never, to the best
Speaker 1: of my knowledge or research, ever worked in the elevator industry. Um,
Speaker 1: so I really was like, was this a dupe? Did
Speaker 1: somebody mess with this poor reporter for not being thorough
Speaker 1: enough to fact check who they were talking to and
Speaker 1: they just gave them a bunch of fake information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so strange to me. When I was in college,
Speaker 1: I was interviewed by a reporter from the campus newspaper
Speaker 1: about stuff that was coming up for a club that
Speaker 1: I was a co president of, and they recorded the interview.
Speaker 1: I don't know what happened between that and writing the article,
Speaker 1: but it was riddled with error. Uh. They were big errors,
Speaker 1: and they were errors that made us look bad and
Speaker 1: then made the newspaper look bad. And I still am like,
Speaker 1: how how it was as much of a mess as
Speaker 1: this article. It's so weird to me, right, I I mean,
Speaker 1: we have talked many times about how there was a
Speaker 1: little more I shouldn't even say a little more, there
Speaker 1: was a lot more commonplace flourish and bias in the press. Um.
Speaker 1: That was just kind of like they could, you know,
Speaker 1: fill out a story by adding things like you know
Speaker 1: that I think this defendant isn't cute, so they must
Speaker 1: be guilty. Like, but this was just so weird, just
Speaker 1: completely made up of whole cloth. Oh, she's busy at
Speaker 1: work on an elevator. What that she had moved to
Speaker 1: New York? She not. It was just the weirdest assortment
Speaker 1: of strange, strange things. That is very odd. But boy,
Speaker 1: that's one of the great things I love about looking
Speaker 1: at old newspapers. You find things and you're like, wait,
Speaker 1: what And at first I thought, you know, because you'll
Speaker 1: have that happen if you're doing like a search through
Speaker 1: old newspapers and your search terms will pick up something
Speaker 1: that looks like it should be exactly what your subject is.
Speaker 1: But when you actually open it and look at it,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, no, no no, no, no, this is a
Speaker 1: case of just a duplicate name or something. Nope, it was.
Speaker 1: The first part is all about how she invented the dishwasher,
Speaker 1: and then it goes into this wild cockamam storys so weird.
Speaker 1: It was super weird. We mentioned only briefly because it
Speaker 1: only ever comes up briefly in anything I have read
Speaker 1: about her. The fact that Josephine Cochrane's husband was an
Speaker 1: anti Lincoln Democrat um and was very politically active, and
Speaker 1: I don't know if It's one of those things of
Speaker 1: once he had passed, which was before she rose to prominence.
Speaker 1: She wasn't really involved in any of that anymore, or
Speaker 1: if people who wrote about her later, recognizing the importance
Speaker 1: of Abraham Lincoln, downplayed any involvement she had in in
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party at the time. I don't know, there's
Speaker 1: like nothing, it's it's an empty void of information. Um.
Speaker 1: So I know it's a mystery for me. It was
Speaker 1: one of those things that made me like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like set up like a mere cat and
Speaker 1: go I should investigate this, and I there wasn't much
Speaker 1: to fun. Yeah, so I don't I don't know. I
Speaker 1: will tell you this, that last thing we read about
Speaker 1: Whirlpool donating a dishwasher just gave me a chuckle. And also,
Speaker 1: I will note that the the historic marker that was
Speaker 1: placed in the nineties also mentions Kitchen Aid dishwashers by
Speaker 1: brand and has the its A Aid logo on it.
Speaker 1: So some of this is definitely like a corporate quaint
Speaker 1: branding thing. Although it is interesting and I am glad
Speaker 1: that someone bought her home that wants to restore it.
Speaker 1: I think that's a cool project. Um, just in general.
Speaker 1: There are many things on historical markers that are not correct.
Speaker 1: They're like anytime I'm researching something and there's information that
Speaker 1: I find from a historical mark, especially if the marker
Speaker 1: is the only place that it says that I'm always likes.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's like a very romanticized or kind of like,
Speaker 1: uh like more of the local lore version than what
Speaker 1: can actually be substantiated. Yeah, Yeah, I also wish we
Speaker 1: need more about George Butter's Yeah, not a lot written
Speaker 1: about him, but clearly very important to the entire thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: seems to have known what he was doing and to
Speaker 1: have been a good dude. It's not a weasel, especially
Speaker 1: since she does call out other men she had to
Speaker 1: deal with. Yet she kept him, you know, right by
Speaker 1: her side throughout all of their their work together, so
Speaker 1: he clearly was was great to work with for her.
Speaker 1: She never said anything negative about him that I could find.
Speaker 1: There is, as I said, debate about how many dishes
Speaker 1: she actually ever washed. Some things will say she never
Speaker 1: washed dishes, and others will say, like, no, she probably
Speaker 1: actually was doing dishes at home for a long time
Speaker 1: before she decided on this, And there doesn't seem to be.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like people document when they do
Speaker 1: household chores normally, so there's not really any definitive evidence
Speaker 1: one way or the other. The headline of socialite didn't
Speaker 1: want to do dishes is very popular, but frankly, no
Speaker 1: one wants to do dishes. I think there are some
Speaker 1: folks who get satisfaction over the but like for a
Speaker 1: lot of us, as a chore and a not particularly
Speaker 1: pleasant Sure. We recently had an issue in our household
Speaker 1: where the dishwasher wasn't working correctly, and when the tech
Speaker 1: came to look at the dishwasher discovered a plumbing problem
Speaker 1: in the kitchen sink that prevented work on the dishwasher problem.
Speaker 1: We had to get the plumbing thing fixed first, and
Speaker 1: so in addition to the dishwasher being broken, the kitchen
Speaker 1: sink was also a problem. And I was like, my
Speaker 1: life is too many, too many things to be happening
Speaker 1: wrong in the kitchen right now. Yes, yes, when your
Speaker 1: kitchen is messed up, it is so disruptive to a
Speaker 1: point that for me anyway, and I imagine for a
Speaker 1: lot of people it is mentally an emotionally taxing Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I just want to fry an egg and clean
Speaker 1: up after it. That's all I want. Some years ago,
Speaker 1: before we were married, before I had even moved to Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: pat ricks landlord decided not to renew his lease, and
Speaker 1: so he had like a couple of months to find
Speaker 1: a new place to live, which in the Boston metro
Speaker 1: area is often challenging, and he had signed the lease
Speaker 1: on the new place that he found, and afterwards was like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I didn't see a dishwasher in the kitchen,
Speaker 1: and he hated washing dishes so much that like then
Speaker 1: this whole period of angst and difficulty of needing to
Speaker 1: unexpectedly move with that without a ton of notice, And
Speaker 1: I used some credit card reward points to buy a
Speaker 1: little model that went on the countertop that hooked to
Speaker 1: the faucet with I remember you telling me about that, uh,
Speaker 1: And it was great. I mean it could only handle
Speaker 1: like four plates, four bowls, four glasses, and some silverwared
Speaker 1: time that was like its max capacity. Um, But that
Speaker 1: thing I saw him through the whole time living in
Speaker 1: that apartment, and then us moving in together in apartment
Speaker 1: that also had new dishwasher, and then I can't remember
Speaker 1: if we donated or gave it away when we moved
Speaker 1: into the house that had a dishwasher that works most
Speaker 1: of the time. I feel like if I had one
Speaker 1: that was that little, it would be running constantly because
Speaker 1: I make a shocking amount of dirty dishes for one
Speaker 1: person personally, because I like to cook an experiment and
Speaker 1: I'll be like, I know, for dinner, I'm gonna saute
Speaker 1: twelve different things and they each need to be on
Speaker 1: separate plates before I recombine them into BA I will say,
Speaker 1: in those instances, I usually do try to hand wash
Speaker 1: as I go. It doesn't always work, and their often
Speaker 1: ends up like a pile in the sink. It's just
Speaker 1: a fact of life, dirty dishes. So thank you, Josephine
Speaker 1: for making my life easier. You talked about Viola Desmonds
Speaker 1: after many, many, many listener requests for an episode. UM,
Speaker 1: A couple of things we didn't mention. There were very
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of things that got like put
Speaker 1: into the outline and cut out that were more related
Speaker 1: to her family than related specifically to her. But that
Speaker 1: currency that she was featured on the ten dollar ten
Speaker 1: dollar bill. It's a beautifully designed bill that one awards
Speaker 1: for its design. UM it's also the first vertically oriented
Speaker 1: Canadian bank note, which as somebody who lives in the
Speaker 1: United States, which nonsensically makes all of our bills look
Speaker 1: exactly the same except for like tiny differences. They're all
Speaker 1: the same color, they're all the same size. Having one
Speaker 1: vertically oriented is like a little mind blowing. Sometimes she
Speaker 1: is described as the first woman on Canadian currency. There
Speaker 1: was one earlier woman, uh shown with a group. Um,
Speaker 1: she's the first, I think, the first woman on a
Speaker 1: bill by herself, not as part of a group picture,
Speaker 1: so that is just some Canadian currency detail. I uh
Speaker 1: really enjoyed reading her sister, Landa. Robson's book called Sister
Speaker 1: to Courage. I read both of those books, actually, Sister
Speaker 1: Courage and the one that she co wrote with her professor.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't initially found Sister to Courage, so it
Speaker 1: was something that I got to pretty late in the
Speaker 1: in the process. I had thought that it was just
Speaker 1: a book specifically about her sister, but it's more broadly
Speaker 1: like about their family and how they grew up in
Speaker 1: their parents. Um. And originally I had all these uh
Speaker 1: like little bits of stories about her parents and her
Speaker 1: family life and all I was like, this is not
Speaker 1: actually related to Viola Desmond, um, and I need to
Speaker 1: cut it out to make more room for things that
Speaker 1: are about Viola Desmond. It's interesting to me. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I kept thinking about in this episode
Speaker 1: is the trickiness of figuring out what the right course
Speaker 1: of action is on big issues. Right, because the black
Speaker 1: community was split in Nova Scotia over how she should
Speaker 1: have handled this. Yeah, Um, that's so difficult and put
Speaker 1: someone in such an awkward and hard position because you know,
Speaker 1: they probably all intellectually agreed on what would have been
Speaker 1: the right thing and what would have been fair and
Speaker 1: equal and just. But then it's more complex than that
Speaker 1: because we're all hiddens well, and the Nova Scotia Association
Speaker 1: for the Advancement of Colored People as a group at
Speaker 1: first was also divided about what to do. Like eventually
Speaker 1: they unanimously supported the decision to go to court, but
Speaker 1: like at first, there was a lot of discussion about
Speaker 1: what the right move here. Should we push back, should
Speaker 1: we not push back? So like across the board, that
Speaker 1: was just something that involved a lot of discussion, and
Speaker 1: then people had varying opinions about Um and a lot
Speaker 1: of fear that if people did push back, that it
Speaker 1: was just kind of cause problems. And I mean that's
Speaker 1: come up with other episodes before that. This was an
Speaker 1: interesting thing to research. Being from the United States, where
Speaker 1: we have talked a lot about racism and a lot
Speaker 1: about segregation. I read a lot a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that was written in Canada by Canadians that made comparisons
Speaker 1: to the United States. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: struck me was that, uh, they tended to describe the
Speaker 1: system of Jim Crows segregation in the United States as
Speaker 1: how it worked in the United States and the situation
Speaker 1: in Nova Scotia and can Nada was different because this
Speaker 1: was not something that was legally required and it could
Speaker 1: really vary from place to place, And it could vary
Speaker 1: from place to place in the United States too, especially
Speaker 1: outside of the South, right, a lot of places in
Speaker 1: the North did not have specific laws requiring segregation. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, like restaurants in New York City
Speaker 1: would only hire black waiters for a period to like
Speaker 1: try to maintain the appearance of slavery, to like appease
Speaker 1: Southern slaveholders who were visit visitors to New York, Like
Speaker 1: it was a there's a lot more uh, a lot
Speaker 1: more nuanced within the United States. Um that some of
Speaker 1: the things that I wrote were like a little sort
Speaker 1: of imagined the situation in Canada to be different from
Speaker 1: the situation of the United States, when really it was
Speaker 1: very similar to the situation in some parts of the
Speaker 1: United States. I'm reminded de remember when we did our
Speaker 1: episode on the Great Store Derby and the one black
Speaker 1: family that was involved, and the father saying he kind
Speaker 1: of made the opposite point of like, well, at least
Speaker 1: if I were in the United States, this would all
Speaker 1: be overt and acknowledged, whereas here everyone wants to act
Speaker 1: like this is not a thing and it is. The
Speaker 1: Other thing to remember is that there can be laws
Speaker 1: and people don't follow them, Yeah, exactly, which is a
Speaker 1: problem where I think sometimes we get the reductive teaching
Speaker 1: of like history as it relates to racism and slavery,
Speaker 1: where it's like and then there was reconstruction. It's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, I remember, I feel like I was at
Speaker 1: I was at history camp Boston. I was I was
Speaker 1: at a history event of some sort, watching people give
Speaker 1: their their papers and presentations, and there was a presentation
Speaker 1: specifically about after the Civil War, newly freed people trying
Speaker 1: to track down their family members, and then they're descendants
Speaker 1: trying to go back and reconstruct their family trees. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that people were having to just
Speaker 1: remind themselves of was that people were not necessarily following
Speaker 1: the law. Um, and you when you were trying to
Speaker 1: trace through the family tree, you couldn't just assume that
Speaker 1: a slaveholder had quote freed everybody at the same time
Speaker 1: the way they were supposed to. Like, you couldn't assume
Speaker 1: anything about that whole process just because something had been
Speaker 1: made the law. All of this stuff folds folds in together. Um.
Speaker 1: I like how she read something about Madam C. J.
Speaker 1: Walker and was like, I want to do that in
Speaker 1: Nova Scotia, Like I want to start my own business.
Speaker 1: I want to start schools for people. I want to
Speaker 1: train people, And she just did it. Yes, I had
Speaker 1: a slight chuckle, which I hope no one thought was
Speaker 1: disrespectful or reductive when we were talking about her mom
Speaker 1: sewing money into her bra because she was afraid for
Speaker 1: her safety. There was probably a much higher likelihood of
Speaker 1: a nonsafe situation than what I would have experienced. But
Speaker 1: It just reminded me of my own mother, who was
Speaker 1: always very anxious and fretful about everything and everywhere I
Speaker 1: wanted to go. Of course, as you know, I am
Speaker 1: something of a free spirit who does not take well
Speaker 1: to being told what to do. So I envisioned myself
Speaker 1: having a mother doing a similar thing and being like,
Speaker 1: you've got to get over this. Yeah, I'm gonna need
Speaker 1: to actually use the money. It cannot be sewn into
Speaker 1: my bra One of the stories about her parents that
Speaker 1: I put in the outline and then wound up taking
Speaker 1: out because um, it was not actually about her, and
Speaker 1: it was like the the episode was just becoming bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger, and I was like, there's other
Speaker 1: stuff I need to focus on here. Um. Viola desmonds
Speaker 1: uh maternal grandfather had moved to Connecticut, her mother had
Speaker 1: eventually gone to a finishing school in Boston, and she
Speaker 1: had met her father like on a summer break in Halifax,
Speaker 1: married him without telling her father, went back home as
Speaker 1: planned because she was afraid to tell her dad about
Speaker 1: this whole having gotten married without talking to him about it,
Speaker 1: realized that she was pregnant, was trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how am I how am I going to tell my
Speaker 1: dad all this that like, not only did I get
Speaker 1: married without telling him while I was on a break,
Speaker 1: but also I am like, I'm now expecting my first child.
Speaker 1: And somebody sent him a clipping of the wedding section
Speaker 1: of the church bulletin. That was how he found out.
Speaker 1: And he was like, shouldn't you could just shouldn't go
Speaker 1: back home to your husband. Now She's like, yes, in fact,
Speaker 1: I should. Wanda Robson described her grandfather as annoyed by
Speaker 1: this whole situation. Um, so anyway, oh my gracious, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad I finally got to the Viola Desmond episode.
Speaker 1: I think some of the times that we have gotten
Speaker 1: requests for her have been times like when she was
Speaker 1: first appearing on the Currency and that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and there's just a lot of stuff out there about her,
Speaker 1: and uh, it just took me a while. So Happy Friday, everybody.
Speaker 1: I hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plates.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with a Saturday Classic, uh tomorrow, and
Speaker 1: then we will be back Monday. Was something new? Stuff
Speaker 1: you Missed in History Class is a production of I
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