Let’s hear it for Catherine Littlefield Greene,
Whose name is largely unknown and almost unseen,
For whilst Eli Whitney’s credited with inventing the thing,
It was her brains that thought up the cotton gin,
Just at that time a woman could not put her name,
To a patent, ’twas socially unacceptable – what a shame.
Yet she was so highly thought of, this widowed mistress,
That President Washington attended her wedding as a witness.