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| Patsy O'Connell Sherman |
"Sometimes you just have to make lemonade out of lemons. After I spilled a chemical cocktail on the assistant's sneaker, we found it
couldn't be removed by anything known to man and the shoe was ruined. That's
when we realized that we failed in what we were attempting to make but had
created something that would protect fabric from spills. And voila! That's the
story of how Scotchguard was invented. So here I was this amazingly brilliant
scientist and yet, when we were testing Scotchguard in the 1950s, I had to stand
outside of the textile mill where the tests were being run due to a rule that
females weren't allowed inside. What a crock of shit. I was perfectly capable
of inventing amazing things yet couldn't go inside a goddam textile mill? If I'd been born
with a penis, I might have ruled the world. Young women today have no fucking idea of
what we went through just because we had ovaries."
Patsy O'Connell
Sherman (1930-2008), American scientist and inventor. Sherman's 1947
high school aptitude test, incidentally, indicated she would be most suited to
the role of a housewife. When she demanded to take the male version of the
test, the results demonstrated her interest in science predicted a career path
in chemistry or dentistry.
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