The Dishwashing Myth We Keep Telling About Women in Science
There's a story that pops up just about every time Agnes Pockels gets mentioned: that she stumbled onto her most important discoveries by watching soap film on water while doing the dishes. It's a tidy origin tale — domestic drudgery interrupted by a flash of genius — and it bears a suspicious resemblance to the apple-bonking legend we love about Isaac Newton.
But historians who have looked closely at Pockels's life say the dishwashing story is probably wrong, and that its persistence reveals something troubling about how we talk about women in science.
The Historians' Verdict
Don Opitz, a historian of science at DePaul University who has traced Pockels's life through primary sources, notes that her family employed domestic help — standard for their social class. More fundamentally, he argues, the dishwashing myth flattens the actual intellectual work Pockels was doing years before any sink observations. There's all of these tropes and stereotypes about gender roles that make it easy to collapse women's contributions to the sciences as something that's domestic.
Brigitte Van Tiggelen, a historian at the Science History Institute who specializes in women in science, goes further. She's not just skeptical of the story's accuracy — she's troubled by what it implies when we repeat it.
I've never heard anyone suspect that either Lord Rayleigh or, later, Irving Langmuir got the idea to work on surface films on water because they were doing the dishes. So this is a very gendered stereotype.
But Van Tiggelen's critique cuts deeper than the stereotype of the distracted housewife. She sees the dishwashing narrative as part of a larger, more insidious message: that the best female scientists are the ones who can seamlessly blend domestic life with research, who don't need institutions or recognition because their feminine intuition flows naturally from the household.
What it delivers as a message is that, well, girls and ladies, you can do both. You can be interested and fully invested in households and produce science. I think this is very damaging.
Agnes Pockels: The Real Story
Agnes Pockels was born in 1862 in Venice, then part of the Austrian Empire. Her family relocated to Braunschweig when her father fell ill with malaria. At the time, German universities didn't admit women, so Pockels attended a Municipal High School for Girls, where the curriculum focused on languages, music, literature, and what were considered suitable accomplishments for a future wife and household manager.
But Pockels kept studying on her own, using her younger brother Fritz's physics textbooks after he enrolled at the University of Göttingen.
Here's where the usual narrative gets it backward. Scholars have often framed Fritz as the sibling who guided Agnes's scientific development — after all, he had university access and she didn't. But Pockels was the older sibling, and historians like Van Tiggelen suspect the influence may have run the other direction.
Agnes is the oldest, and he's two or three years younger. That's a difference when you grow up as siblings, especially in the teenage years. Which means that probably, more probably than not, Agnes had an influence on her brother, maybe even in the choice of a career in science.
Building a Scientific Instrument
By nineteen, Pockels was designing her own experiments. She built a sophisticated instrument — the Pockels trough — using an old pharmacist's balance and everyday materials. The device let her measure surface tension by pulling a button-disk across water and calculating the force required. It was meticulous work that demanded rigorous controls.
When she noticed impurities in her equipment affecting results, she wrote to Lord Rayleigh, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, documenting the contamination and its impact on replicability.
Rayleigh recognized what Pockels had accomplished. He forwarded her letter to Nature in 1891, making her one of the first women published in that journal. Two years later, the University of Göttingen invited her to use its laboratory.
She declined.
The Choice to Stay Independent
Modern readers often interpret this as a tragic moment — a woman forced from her ambitions by restrictive gender norms. But the reality was more complicated. Pockels's parents were chronically ill, and as the only daughter at home, she felt a duty to care for them.
She had an alternative model in her own family: an aunt who achieved renown as a painter, living independently in Paris and Berlin as a single woman. That example gave Pockels a sense of self and self-determination within all the constraints of that space and time.
She was invited in a laboratory that she didn't own, that she didn't govern. She would have been asked to work in a certain way, at a certain pace, on a certain topic, maybe. And she would have lost the freedom of inquiry.
In her own home, with her own makeshift equipment, Pockels could set her own agenda. She spent a decade refining her instrument, adjusting parameters, pursuing questions that interested her without answering to an institution's priorities.
That autonomy was not trivial. University laboratories are not always the pinnacle of scientific research. A laboratory is created inside an institution. It has its own goals, its own setup. Who's the boss? Who says this is interesting or this is not? Van Tiggelen points out that history is full of discoveries dismissed as artifacts by lab bosses who didn't find them fashionable — discoveries that turned out to be groundbreaking.
Lord Rayleigh himself exemplifies the point. A professor at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, he chose to retire early to his estate, where he continued experiments in converted stable lofts. That humble way of doing research was very familiar to him and something that he valued. When he described Pockels to Nature's editor as a German lady working with homely appliances, he meant it as respect — an acknowledgment of kinship with an amateur scientist doing original work outside institutional walls.
A Legacy Beyond Institutions
Pockels published fourteen papers over her lifetime. Her concept of the Pockels Point — the minimum area a single molecule can occupy in monomolecular films — remains foundational in surface science.
The instrument she invented became the basis for the Langmuir-Blodgett trough, which Irving Langmuir used to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 and which underpins technologies from catalytic converters to computer chips to medical implants.
Pockels herself received the Laura R. Leonard Prize from the Colloid Society in 1931. She never held a university position. She died in 1935, having worked almost entirely from her home.
The question is whether that biography makes her a tragic figure or something more interesting.
Asking the Right Questions
Van Tiggelen thinks we've been asking the wrong questions. When we look back to scientists of the past, we look at them through what we know about science and how it works nowadays. We want clean narratives — rebels who smashed barriers or victims who had their work stolen. But Pockels was neither.
I don't think she was a rebel. But she still followed her own path. She forged her own connections. And she was not afraid to act for herself.
Opitz frames it similarly: Pockels was intelligent, and she had the capacity, the flexibility, and the resources to do what she loved to do, which was original research in chemistry and physics.
Maybe the real lesson of Pockels's life isn't that the system failed her, or that she transcended the system. Maybe it's that we should expand what we consider a scientific career to begin with. Is success only a tenured professorship? A Nobel Prize? Or can it also mean inventing a tool that others use to make Nobel-worthy discoveries, publishing rigorous work, asking questions that outlast your own lifetime?
The Myth We Keep Telling
The dishwashing story won't die because it does so much narrative work for us. It lets us feel good about women in science by suggesting genius can emerge anywhere, even in the kitchen. But it also quietly insists that women's contributions will always be adjacent to domestic life — charming, perhaps, but not quite legitimate.
It's a story about a woman who had it all, except the recognition she deserved. And by telling it, we get to feel like we're celebrating her while reinforcing exactly the assumptions that diminished her.
What Pockels actually achieved — building a foundational instrument, advancing a field, corresponding with Nobel laureates as an intellectual equal — gets obscured by the myth. She wasn't a lady who stumbled into science while folding laundry. She was a scientist, on her own terms.
That story is harder to tell, and more important to try.
Based on: The Dishwashing Myth We Keep Telling About Women in Science; Sarah L. Sussmann; NOVA (PBS), 2024.