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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
6 Min
05/03/2026
Imagine celebrity chefs without their shiny kitchens and them not leaning over the countertops talking about their experiences. Or even coming back home, imagine living without a refrigerator and its racks. A bunch of skilled women were behind the modern kitchen and they ran so modern chefs like Gordon Ramsey and Sanjeev Kapoor could walk. Imagine hand scrubbing every dish to being forced to touch your dustbin lid every single day. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Well, for a long time, that was closer to reality than fiction – and it was women who fixed it.
Underrepresentation can hinder accessibility, and that is what women faced when it came to many areas in life. Patriarchy popularised, ‘women belong in the kitchen’, but forgot to account for the labour and things necessary for women to be comfortable there – technically making for a hostile environment at work. While the gendered lens, when it comes to the kitchen, has been kicked to the curb in many homes, if you look around, certain appliances and gadgets in your home that make life easier were actually the handiwork of women, who knew better. So, this Women’s Day, here’s honouring the women behind some irreplaceable kitchen inventions.
Flashback to 1926, to the first Austrian woman architect, who was the genius behind the modern kitchen. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was designing a kitchen for New Frankfurt, Ernst May's social housing project. The kitchen model was called ‘The Frankfurt Kitchen’ and was designed for efficiency – well-planned storage, racks for drying dishes, kitchen sinks with taps, level counters, and a stovetop that wasn’t a heating source for the entire house.
Schutte-Lihotzky studied how women used kitchens and their movements and came up with this design, and perfected it for modern apartments with little space. A space that designers and architects neglected became something that paved the way for modern kitchens, thanks to Schutte-Lihotzky’s blueprint.
Cross the ocean to 1914, as you celebrate Women's Day, this was when the electric refrigerator was invented by Florence Parpart in America. She was a part of several research projects in the 1900s, one of which was the electric refrigerator. Before this invention, people used to rely on iceboxes that just had ice in it.
She was the one who found out that electricity could be harnessed to effectively preserve food. What she did was make a device that was an attachment that did the heavy work of refrigeration by using electricity to circulate water, so that the refrigerator would stay cold. She sold her patented product at the highest price.
The woman behind this invention was Lilian Gilbreth who also significantly contributed to other kitchen inventions and the bath space. The foot pedal trash bin was one of her creations, that makes sure you avoid touching the trash can lid. She changed can openers to make them more user friendly and also added refrigerator shelves to the modern refrigerator. If these were not enough, she used her PhD to work on studies that applied human psychology towards making homes and workplaces more efficient.
Josephine Cochrane might not have been the inventor of the world’s first dishwasher, but she was behind the world’s first successful hand-powered dishwasher. Aside from being an inventor, she was a socialite which entailed washing numerous dishes which caused her to come up with the idea of a practical dishwasher, in 1887. What makes Cochrane’s dishwasher so efficient is that it uses water pressure to clean dishes instead of scrubbers. It was immensely valued by hotels and restaurants during that time. So, this Women's Day, celebrate the genius of this woman’s innovative brain.
Before every home had a gas or electric range, stoves were slow to get their defining upgrade, until Mary Evard. In 1850, she invented the Reliance Cook Stove, a design that split the cooking surface in two: one half for dry baking, the other for moist cooking. This was a real departure from the single-temperature cast-iron stoves of the time, giving cooks far more control over their food.
Evard received two US patents and on April 7, 1868, this stove was showcased at the St. Louis World's Fair alongside her husband. Her invention was one of the earliest significant contributions by a woman to the evolution of the kitchen stove as we know it today.
Long before the pop-up toaster became a breakfast staple, Sarah Guppy, an English inventor with patents for everything from suspension bridge methods to exercise beds, created an early precursor to the toaster. Among her domestic patents was a device for a tea or coffee urn that also cooked eggs in steam and featured a small dish to keep toast warm. It was an all-in-one breakfast contraption that popularised the toaster, decades before electricity did the job.
So, this Women's Day, celebrate the fascinating woman that Guppy is, living and inventing at a time, when women couldn't file patents under their own name, she registered inventions in her husband's name and still managed to influence engineering on a national scale. The family held 10 patents in the first half of the 19th century.
It was 1075, when the Byzantine princess Theodora Anna Doukaina arrived in Venice to marry Doge Domenico Selvo, bringing with her the use of golden forks – a dining custom well-established in the Byzantine Empire but completely foreign to Western Europeans. Her refusal to eat with her fingers caused genuine scandal among the Venetians, who saw it as extravagant and even irreverent.
Saint Peter Damian, Bishop of Ostia, reportedly condemned her use of the fork in his sermons as an instrument of excessive delicacy. When she died shortly after, some attributed it to divine punishment for her 'immoderate' ways. The fork, however, survived. By the 14th century it was commonplace in Italy, and by the 1600s it had reached the upper classes of France and England.
From the kitchen layout to the fork at the end of your arm, women were behind some of the most fundamental shifts in how the world eats. Their inventions didn't make headlines the way a tech product launch does today, but they changed daily life in ways that still hold. This Women's Day, when you open the fridge, load the dishwasher, or sit down to toast with your morning coffee, you know who to credit.
