Katharine Wright

Sister of the Wright brothers

Katharine Wright Haskell (August 19, 1874 – March 3, 1929) was the younger sister of aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright.She worked closely with her brothers, managing their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, when they were away; acting as their right-hand woman and general factotum in Europe; assisting with their voluminous correspondence and business affairs; and providing a sounding board for their far-ranging ideas.

She pursued a professional career as a high school teacher in Dayton, at a time when few middle-class American women worked outside the home, and went on to become an international celebrity in her own right.

A significant figure in the early-twentieth-century women’s movement, she worked actively on behalf of woman suffrage in Ohio and served as the third female trustee of Oberlin College.