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. Early years Katharine Wright was born in Dayton, Ohio, on August 19, 1874, exactly three years after Orville Wright. She was the youngest of five surviving children of Bishop Milton Wright and Susan Koerner Wright. When her mother died of tuberculosis in 1889, 14-year-old Katharine, as the only female child, was expected to fill her shoes. Throughout her teenage years and early adulthood, she pursued her education and teaching career while managing the home she shared with her father, an itinerant preacher, and older brothers. She was especially close to Wilbur and Orville, providing crucial moral and material support as they worked to solve the problem of powered human flight. (The two oldest Wright brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, left home while she was growing up.) Katharine attended Central High School in Dayton and completed her secondary education at Oberlin Academy in 1893–94. After two years at what was then Oberlin’s preparatory division, she attended Oberlin College, one of the few coeducational institutions in the United States at the time. The only Wright sibling to earn a college degree, she graduated in 1898, just shy of her twenty-fourth birthday. Katharine was exceptionally gifted, intellectually curious, and determined to become financially independent. Upon graduating from Oberlin, she took a position teaching Latin and English at Steele High School in Dayton. Although she found the work rewarding, she complained of earning less than her male colleagues and being assigned less desirable courses to teach. This early experience of gender inequality in the workplace kindled a lifelong commitment to women’s rights and education. To assist with the household chores that she continued to perform on