A Giant Step for Womankind - 26 May 2000

Sitting around on Wednesday afternoon, dawdling, waiting for the result of the vote in the House of Representatives on the China Trade Bill - a "yes" vote that President Clinton said he hoped he'd be remembered by when most of his administration's good works had been forgotten - I thought of the not-too-familiar story of Josephine Cochrane, a beneficiary to all womankind.

I was surprised to find, in the course of my dawdling, that she was not even mentioned in my four main encyclopaedias, historical timetables, chronologies and one or two other fountains of information that are there on my shelves waiting to be tapped.

Well it is a true tale and it has a moral for us, this week certainly.

Josephine Cochrane. It's in the 1880s when we first meet her and she's the widow of a prominent Midwestern politician, in her mid 40s, living in a capacious house, what in Shelbyville, Illinois - indeed in practically any American suburb to this day - would be called a mansion.

On a hot summer evening she gave a dinner party and when it was all over and the guests had gone she apparently went into the kitchen and looked over the piles of dishes that were about to be washed. She'd heard a succession of little cracklings and tinklings toward the end of the party and had her suspicions, and she was right.

She'd long been a collector of fine china and to her anger and disgust she saw that several treasures had been chipped or broken. She astounded the servants by telling them to go to bed - she, for once, would wash the dishes, something she'd rarely, if ever done, in her life.

Her anger lasted long enough for her to go on doing the dishes for several days when she not only found it to be a tedious occupation but alarmingly rough on the hands.

When she'd cooled off and the servants resumed their kitchen duties, a little more nervously than before, Mrs Cochrane meditated on the chore and the bore of dishwashing.

It was a moment in history. It was a giant step for womankind.

"Why doesn't somebody," she moaned to herself, "wash dishes with a machine?"

It might have ended there had it not been that, if there is such a thing in a family as an inventive gene, Josephine Cochrane had it.

Her grandfather took out a patent on his steamboat so long ago as the late 18th Century. Her father invented a hydraulic pump for marshes.

So the widow Cochrane sat and thought and sketched out in her mind the stages in the process of getting dishes rinsed and washed and dried.

She had a machine clearly in mind, called in a man friend who was an engineer, and in a woodshed made the first working model of a mechanical dishwasher.

And the remarkable thing about it is that in one leap of the imagination Josephine Cochrane had devised the succession of motions, the processes that are the basis of the dishwasher today.

She measured her china, made up wire brackets to hold the separate shaped articles, the whole cage was lowered by a lever into a tub, then a tub load of soapy water was hand pumped over the dishes, the cage was raised, boiling water poured on the dishes from a kettle. They dried out in the air.

Pretty simple, pretty crude but she was the first to know it and to improve it.

She at once applied and got a patent from the United States Patent Office.

She got a local firm to make the machine and it's an astonishing object to see today - a big iron network of levers and pulleys, all the innards on display.

In fact I think if it was built on an enormous scale atop an auditorium I think, today, it would, in Europe anyway, win a prize as a masterpiece of modern/post modern plumbing architecture.

So she advertised it - a frieze of glorious prose surrounding the iron wonder.

And she demanded, in capital letters, the attention of hotel men, stewards, restaurants, boarding house keepers, hospitals.

She sold two machines to the biggest hotel in Chicago and one to the next biggest.

It cost, by the way, a hundred years ago, $150 which today would be about $4,500 - not the sort of money even wealthy husbands would spend on a domestic gadget.

As one Chicago businessman remarked, speaking, I'm sure, for mankind: "Why should I pay a fortune for something my wife is perfectly capable of doing with her own hands?"

Well in 1893 Chicago held its still-famous World's Fair. Over stiff male opposition but with the help of nearly 200 women sponsors, she had her machine exhibited.

Against both domestic and European competition it received the first prize for "the best mechanical construction for durability and adaptation to a particular line of work".

She sold nine machines to the fair concessionaires and one of them sent her the glowing tribute: "On Illinois Day your machine washed without delay soiled dishes left by eight relays of a thousand soldiers each, completing each lot within 30 minutes."

Josephine Cochrane went on to build her own corporation, improved the model and one hundred years ago this month produced one with a motor that oscillated the dish rack back and forth while the water was mechanically pumped. It was effective enough to wash and dry 120 dishes a minute.

I think we should get one, now: The Garis-Cochrane Dishwashing Machine - registered US 1900.

She didn't sit back and rest on the achievement of this marvel. Before she died, of a stroke in 1913, she'd produced a model with a revolving washing system, a centrifugal pump and a hose for draining into a sink.

So from 1913 on there was a dishwasher in every - no not even in every grand hotel. The Victorian prejudice was strong against denying women the devotional labour to which God had called them.

There were clergymen who actually called the dishwasher immoral. Of course it was also decadent. But the highest tide of protest came from servant girls who saw the march of progress robbing them of their jobs.

At the turn of the century about only 3%of American labour was organised and it was in coal and steel. The idea of houseworkers organising was fairly preposterous.

Nevertheless, first in Chicago and then, I believe, in New York servants who did kitchen work met to try and form a union, somehow to protect their, shall we say, handiwork.

It got nowhere but the gesture had been made and the same impulse came to found, successfully, a union in New York of needleworkers when the most successful sewing machine appeared to be taking their jobs away.

Eventually, of course, the needleworkers' union was the union of the sewing machine workers not the protesters.

So the moral, as you must have guessed by now, is the more it changes the more it remains the same.

This is a routine of action and reaction that has been going on since, at the latest, 1811 when a bunch of craftsmen in Nottingham burnt Arkwright's factory and broke into the house of James Hargreaves to smash his Spinning Jenny.

Well in the matter of China becoming a permanent trading partner with the United States, ever since President Clinton decided to present the Bill to the House the trade unions combined and rallied to the cause of opposing and defeating it.

Their stated cause was that to embrace China as a permanent trading partner would reverse a 20-year policy of punishing repressive dictatorships by denying them free trade.

In the past week or two we've heard some burning oratory about China's suppression of all dissent from an opposition which has become a very mixed company - mainly the trade unions but also environmentalists, religious groups, Vietnam veterans.

Mr Clinton has had a tough time responding to these factions if only because when he first elected he was a great advocate of this crusade, of doing no permanent business with a dictatorship until it began to grant its millions some human rights.

Mr Clinton's conversion is easily explained: he feels, as many other sincere civil rights people feel, that 20 years of punishment has not encouraged more freedom, it has made the Chinese dig into their conviction that the United States regards China as the new big enemy and wants to isolate it from the global economy that is now beginning to mushroom.

The more practical motive of the trade unions is not idealism but the fear that hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing will be lost to the Chinese, working for wages that in this country would be starvation pay.

The supporters of the Bill maintain that on the contrary, although many menial American jobs will be lost, many more skilled jobs will be created here, many more Chinese will leave the fields and pitiful stoop labour and do better in factories.

Until Wednesday afternoon we were told that the vote in the House would be too close to call.

In the result, the Bill got a surprising majority of 40 and while it's a triumph for Mr Clinton it is not a party triumph. Two in three Republicans voted for it, two in three of the President's own party - the Democrats - voted against it, especially, it could be seen, congressmen who were coming up for re-election in November and who need the trades union vote.

I think it should be said that neither of the best arguments on either side has been vindicated. The great question is unanswered and may be for years to come.

Will free trade and the enormous impulse for choice that it gives to Chinese workers - and entrepreneurs - will it loosen the totalitarian grip and encourage human freedoms?

Though the Chinese Government has rejoiced in the passage of the Bill there are some members who have misgivings about the main question. They think of Mr Gorbachev in Russia who hoped to "improve the Communist system" by opening up debate and encouraging private business.

What he succeeded in doing was killing Communism by mistake.

Never was a time when an act of Congress appeared so tantalisingly not as the advancement of a known policy but as a hopeful toss of the dice - a journey into the unknown.

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