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THE RETRIEVAL OF A LEGACY:
PERSPECTIVES ON PRESENCE AND PROGRESS OF NINETEENTH
CENTURY WOMEN INVENTORS IN AMERICAN CULTURE

By

Denise E. Pilato

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

American Studies
1998

 

ABSTRACT

THE RETRIEVAL OF A LEGACY:
PERSPECTIVES ON PRESENCE AND PROGRESS OF NINETEENTH
CENTURY WOMEN INVENTORS IN AMERICAN CULTURE
By

Denise E. Pilato

Nineteenth century American women inventors present a rich legacy in the
history of technology, but one that remains unrecognized. Collectively, over 5,000
women received patents during the 19th century which substantially challenges
gendered assumptions about women and technology, particularly the pervasive
cultural and ideological stereotype of the prototypical inventor as male.

Individually, women inventors experiences reveal how the social
construction of gender affected their technical creativity and how such
technological innovation was perceived, accepted, and diffused. Applying
interdisciplinary methodology which utilized patent records, legal cases,
autobiographies, correspondence, 19th century newspapers and journals, material
artifacts, and secondary scholarly sources, revealed systematic social barriers
which operated in the American system of democratic technology since the
inception of the US. patent ofﬁce in 1790. Barriers regarding law, education,
economic status, social class, gender roles, and labor practices historically
affected men and women differently in how they expressed technical creativity.

Like male inventors, what women invented during the 19‘h century bore the

imprint of social context. That context reveals a pattern of deterministic
socialization which nearly half of the population responded with wild enthusiasm
to the national mantra endorsing Yankee ingenuity and the self-made man while
the other half was socialized to function as antitechnocrats.

By studying 19th century women inventors, evidence reveals patterns and
cultural indexes which register ﬂux in the social fabric of America’s response to
women’s technological contributions. Gender based patterns of technological
invention emerged as well as patterns of social change and control. A pivotal
focus of my ongoing work in the history of gender and technology continues to
address an important lacuna in the study of the history of technology: the
contributions and impact of women inventors in the development of American

technology.

C0pyright by
DENISE E. PILATO
1998

Dedicated to my most excellent task master
and life’s partner, Thomas O. Whipple. I cannot but suggest by this mere
inclusion the depth of my gratitude for your uncompromising support and total
devotion. As I shared this goal with you, so I share this success.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with whole-hearted appreciation that I acknowledge my dissertation
committee members who solidly supported me through to successful completion.
To my chair, Dr. Ann Larabee, Professor of American Thought and Language, I
am indebted to her unwavering support in all regards. She guided and taught me
not only how to write a dissertation, but also how a cyborg successfully navigates
through an academic career path in this ﬁeld. Her enduring conﬁdence in the
face of many unexpected obstacles sustained and directed me more than can ever
be measured by a conferred degree. It is with ﬁnely tuned appreciation that I look
to my other committee members, Dr. Kurt Dewhurst, Director of the Michigan
State University Museum and Professor of English; Dr. Joyce Ladenson, Director
of Women Studies and Professor of American Thought and Language; and Dr.
Maureen Flanagan, Professor of History, as they collectively and individually
exemplify the multi-faceted meaning of what it means to be a scholar and teacher.
Their experience, knowledge, and friendship proved invaluable in my need to be
pointed and re-pointed time and again to the ﬁnish line. As I cross that line, they
remain my exemplary models.

As mentors par excellence, it is with uncompromising gratitude that
I acknowledge Dr. Judith K. Brown, Professor of Anthropology, Oakland

vi

University, and Dr. Jane Eberwein, Professor of English, Oakland University.
Both were instrumental in providing critical encouragement from the very
inception of my dissertation ideas through to its ﬁnal form. By virtue of their
wisdom, excellent scholarship, and sincere affection, they represent the epitome
of the ideal mentor, absolutely indispensable in the successful completion of this
dissertation.

It is with equal distinction, that I acknowledge my family’s contributions,
for everything, of course. To my partner, Thomas, my mother and father, Patricia
and Leonard Pilato, and my children, Bronson and Terra, who were not always
sure what I was doing, but only that I needed help doing it. I thank you for your
ingenious support in so many ways.

Also deserving of recognition and my heartfelt gratitude, I acknowledge
Philip Maxwell, Attorney at Law and friend, who cleared the way for me so I
could push ahead; and Rosemary Possanza, a most remarkable American Studies
Administrator, who then kept the way clear through the maze of procedures and
protocol. I am also indebted to independent scholar, Autumn Stanley, for her
vested interest in this project and her ground breaking work, Mothers and
Daughters of Invention. Finally, I thank the ﬁne librarians at the National Patent
Depository at the Detroit Public Library, the Special Collections staff at Michigan

State University Library, and the Henry Ford Museum Resource Center.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1 -8
CHAPTER 1

THE US. PATENT SYSTEM: A FRAMEWORK OF LEGAL
BARRIERS 9-46
CHAPTER 2

OUT OF THE REVOLUTION: SEEDS OF INDEPENDENT
INVENTION 47-8 1
CHAPTER 3

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY: YANKEE INGENUITY AND
THE SELF-MADE WOMEN? 82-122
CHAPTER 4

THE CIVIL WAR: IIVIPETUS TO INVENTING

WOMEN 123-171
CHAPTER 5

NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION VS. GENDER
CONSTRUCTION 1 72-225
CHAPTER 6

AMERICAN PROGRESS: CELEBRATED OR

RELEGATED? 226-275
CONCLUSION 276-279

BIBLIOGRAPHY 280-304
viii

INTRODUCTION

There have been very learned women as
there have been women lawyers but there

have never been women inventors. Voltaire,
1764

For whatever reason, there are few women
inventors, even in the realm of household
arts... I cannot ﬁnd a really conspicuous
exception to cite. Edmund Fuller, 1955
(Rothschild 5).
Although these views are blatantly erroneous, they represent an attitude
which has long permeated and dominated the history of technology. Voltaire, a
leading French author and historian, is well known for his enlightened views on
the nature of man. And Edmund Fuller, noted American historian, is best known
for his work in the history of technology and invention in the mid-twentieth
century. Beyond their enlightened vision and historical expertise, stands a sound
and substantial record verifying that there have been countless women inventors
through the ages.
Still, the legacy of women inventors and their technological contributions
has not been recognized in the same light as male contributions, if at all. Their

collective and individual contributions document a revised perspective of the

history of technology, underscoring the “malecentrism” of the current body of the

l

history of technology. The woman inventor has been rendered as invisible and her
inventions as insigniﬁcant. The purpose of this dissertation is, in part, to begin to
retrieve the legacy of 19th century American women inventors. Beyond the
retrieval process. this study provides a signiﬁcant cultural context which reveals a
pervasive attitude in the persistent cultural and ideological stereotype of the
prototypical inventor as male. It also explores women inventors relationship to
technology and how the social construction of gender affected their response to
innovative technology, society’s response to female inventiveness, legal
entitlement, political impetus, and educational access. The evidence clearly
undermines Voltaire’s and Fuller’s mistaken assumptions, but also explains, in
part, how they arose.

Ample evidence of their existence is found from a wide range of 19th
century sources. One of the most signiﬁcant sources is a document entitled
Women Inventors to Whom Patents have Been Granted By the United States
Government 1 790-1888 (with an extension to early 1895) compiled under the
direction of the Commissioner of Patents. Although this census is ﬂawed by
signiﬁcant omissions of some inventors and the misclassifying of some
inventions, it remains the single most useful source in documenting women
inventors. Other sources, including 19th century journals, especially women’s
journals, autobiographies, probate records, legal cases, and museum collections of

primary documentation in the retrieval of important women inventors who have

2

yet to be included in the celebrated canon of American inventors.

Technological change has historically been a process subject to struggles
for control by different groups, and women inventors certainly constitute a
different group than male inventors, one in which legal, social and economic
control surfaces (Wajcman 22; Stanley xxxvi). Since women inventors are a
group deﬁned by gender, it is important to consider gender as an ideology, not
just as a sexual or behavioral difference. Feminist historians encourage expanding
our inquiries beyond what 19th century Americans called the “separate spheres,”
and avoiding the cultural construct of male “activity” and female “passivity”
(Cutliff and Post 173). These three precepts guide my inquiry. Simply retrieving
the legacy of what women inventors contributed to technological change in the
19th century is not enough to establish their value and impact. Recognition of
women inventors must include their cultural placement in the gendered social
context in which they invented.

Assumptions such as Voltaire’s and Fuller’s have persisted for more than
200 years. Correcting them will take more than simply cataloguing the
accomplishments of women inventors, no matter how signiﬁcant they may be.
Nevertheless, it is a necessary ﬁrst step. This dissertation seeks to contribute to
the retrieval of the legacy of 19th century American women inventors by placing
them contextually within the history of American technology.

The dissertation consists of six chapters, plus an introduction and a

3

conclusion. It is organized chronologically beginning with the opening of the
Patent Ofﬁce in 1790 and concluding with the 1893 Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. My interdisciplinary methodology draws from a range of theoretical
perspectives including, but not limited to, historical, social, technological, and
feminist and utilizes primary documentation and secondary scholarly sources.
The following discussion brieﬂy outlines the focus of each chapter.

Chapter 1, “The US. Patent System: A Legal Framework for
Undemocratic Participation,” suggests that from the ﬁrst Patent Act signed into
law by President George Washington on April 10, 1790, the patent system
functioned as a legitimate and legalized system of barriers to women’s democratic
participation in technical creativity. By proﬁling the legal cases of Harriet Ruth
Tracy, Maggie Knight, Clarrisa Britain and Elizabeth Hawks , some of the legal
obstacles women inventors experienced with patent law come to light.

Chapter 2, “ Out of the Revolution: Seeds of Independent Invention,”
focuses on the hat industry in early United States history and several women
inventors connected with that industry: Betsey Metcalf, straw braiding, 1798;
Mary Kies, straw weaving, 1809; Sophia Woodhouse, manufacture of grass
bonnets and hats, 1821; Lucy Bumap, hats & weaving grass, 1823; and Henrietta
Cooper, straw leghom whitening, 1828. The function of time, place, and
resources is examined in context of gendered terminology and rhetoric which
reveals some of the early gendered assumptions about technological innovation.

Chapter 3, “The Contribution of J acksonian Democracy: Yankee Ingenuity

4

and the Self-Made Woman?” explains how and why the ideas and rhetoric of the
“Age of Jackson” related to technology’s relationship to women, particularly
those advocating Yankee ingenuity and the self-made man (Meyers 15). This
ideology of the American self-made man represented men across the class lines,
but it represented them unequally. And the self-made woman, especially one who
aspired to inventive creativity, was not represented at all (Dickenson xvii). The
work of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller
present a contextual framework in which to illustrate how women were excluded
from the characterization of the self-made man and how they mediated the
gendered power relations as technology advanced at unprecedented speed.
Inventors such as Catherine Greene, cotton gin, 17903; Ann Harned Manning,
mower and reaper, 1818; and Nancy Johnson, ﬁrst ice creme freezer, 1843, shed
understanding about the affects of republican virtue and Jacksonian democracy on
women inventors.

Chapter 4, “The Civil War: Impetus to Inventing Women,” provides
evidence of the Civil War as a time of accelerated innovation for female
inventors. Only about 50 patents were granted to women between 1790 and the
beginning of the Civil War. But in the next decade, beginning with the War in
1861 until 1871, nearly 500 patents were issued to women. Gendered patterns of
technological invention based on reception and diffusion emerged in this

patriotically charged atmosphere in which medical, military, and industrial

5

inventions abounded. Martha Coston, pyrotechnic ﬂare and signal code, 1859;
Clarissa Britain, ambulance, 1863; and Mary J. Montgomery, war vessel, 1864,
are representative of a new breed of women inventors who emerged during this
time on a newly carved professional strata.

Chapter 5, “National Reconstruction vs. Gender Construction,” explores
how the end of the Civil War affected a shift in national reform issues which
inﬂuenced the presence and progress of women inventors. At the conclusion of
the War, abolitionists realized a victory toward race equality, but the advancement
in sexual equality, however, remained unchanged. It has not been my purpose to
trace the developments of the women’s movement during the second half of the
19th century. Rather, I have made signiﬁcant connections as to how women’s
increased access to higher education, efforts at community organization, and
individual professionalization affected the status, opportunity, and success of
women inventors collectively and individually in male dominated scientiﬁc and
business communities (Rossiter xvii, 72). The prototypical inventor, much like the
prototypical scientist, continued to be constructed in masculine terminology and
imagery. Yet women inventors began an upward productive trend like never
before in American history and showed early evidence of community organization

and individual professionalization. My investigation proﬁles some of the

individuals championed by Charlotte Smith, a public advocate for women

6

inventors during the late 19th century.

Chapter 6: “American Progress: Celebrated or Relegated?” focuses on
the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago of 1893 as “signiﬁcant social and cultural artifacts that reveal much
about the times and the places that produced them” (Segal 125). They offer solid
material documentation as to what women were inventing, suggesting that social
and cultural artifacts were imbedded in women’s technological record 5: at such
exhibitions. As Henry Nash Smith pointed out, the World’s Columbian
Exposition provides “something like a mark of punctuation in American cultural
history” and one might add, in the history of American women inventors (xvii).

Nineteenth century American women inventors present a rich legacy in the
history of technology with unique opportunities to discover gender based patterns
of technological invention as well as patterns of social change and control. The
obscurity of 19th century American women inventors is buried not only in old
court documents, patent records, archives, literature, popular culture, and material
artifacts, but also in the social fabric of our national heritage which continues to
represent the prototype inventor as male (Wajcman 15).

Individually and collectively, 19th century women inventors contributed to
the increasing feminization of American technology in ways which challenged the

gendered assumptions about women and technology. Emerson believed that “we

7

are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a
private chart, of which there is no duplicate” (Emerson Letters and Social Aims).
And in a unique way 19th century American women inventors charted many
voyages and discoveries which persistently remain uncharted in the whole of the

traditional history of technology.

Chapter 1
THE US. PATENT SYSTEM:
A FRAMEWORK OF LEGAL BARRIERS

It is true that no overt discrimination was written into the Patent Act of 1790
or the subsequent major legal changes in 1793, 1836, or 1870, or any of the other
many changes that transpired during the 19th century. No one was denied due
process of a legal patent application based on gender, class, or race. The ﬁrst patent
act of 1790 ﬁrmly established this precedent when it authorized “any person or
persons” to petition the Secretary of State for a patent. The statute explicitly
recognized that “he, she, or they” might have “invented or discovered [a] useful art,
manufacture, engine, machine, or device” (Merritt 289). Since that ﬁrst patent act,
the US. Department of Commerce has historidally maintained that,

The patent system is as basic to American democracy as the

provisions of the Constitution that protect personal and

property rights. That it offers the same protection, the same

opportunity, and the same hope of regard to every

individual...the American patent system plays no favorites. It
is as democratic as the Constitution which begot it” (The Story

11).

The US. Department of Commerce astutely noted that the patent system was
representative of American democracy as established by the provisions of the
Constitution. In those provisions, one cannot overlook the fact that the Constitution
did not recognize women as voting citizens until the 20th century. Nor was there

democratic protection of personal and property rights to women through most of the

19th century. These provisions consistently correlate with the US. patent system’s
lack of recognition of women inventors throughout the 19th century.

Riding on the democratic shirttails of the Constitution, our ﬁrst patent acts
were written so as to intricately give voice to principles of equality based on race,
class, and gender. Although these principles were imbedded in the rhetorical fabric
of the various patent acts, there were exclusionary limitations which were consistent
and important cultural determinants as to who actually received a patent. As noted
in the above statement by the US. Department of Commerce, the American patent
system claimed to played no favorites. Yet, the belief that opportunity and hope was
extended to “every individual” who “invented or discovered [a] useful art” was
certainly inconsistent with the experience of 19th century women inventors. It, in
fact, cements the ironic truth of the statement that the American patent system has
been “as democratic as the Constitution which begot it.” The experience of women
inventors proves such lofty ideals to be theory at best and callused discrimination at
worst. The democratic principles which shaped and informed the US. patent system
created a ﬁ'amework of legal barriers. Exclusionary limitations regarding property
rights, education, and cultural norms affected women inventors in their creative
pursuits of American technological progress.

Such limitations and issues appear to fall quite outside of the legal due
process of the patent application, but they presented very real barriers for women
inventors in that process. Women challenged America’s constitutional notions of
democracy and due process by pursing patents in “the face of cultural, legal and

administrative barriers” (Merritt 289). Getting a patent has always involved more

10

than a simple legal transaction between inventor and patent ofﬁce. It was not merely
the act of patenting which was legally codiﬁed, but the subtle and unspoken laws of
the “business of inventing” which entered into the formula for success. Women
inventor’s experience during the 19th century clearly reveal that “social biases
diminish[ed] the power of women to compete fairly for legal entitlements” (Merritt
306). Not only did such biases diminish their power to compete for legal
entitlement but also to compete for manufacturing opportunity and recognition as
signiﬁcant technological contributors. And for women of color, these social biases
were magniﬁed and enlarged a thousand fold (Merritt 303-305; Hine 617-618).[1]
The letter of the patent law was predicated on fairness and equality, but the spirit of
the law encompassed social biases which surfaced in the decisions of the Patent
Ofﬁce as inﬂuenced by Constitutional precedents.

Early patent awards, such as one granted by the Republic of Venice in 1474,
were “grants of monopoly intended to encourage invention and industry by means of
a speciﬁed period of state protection” (Benagh 4; Walker 22—25). The Venetian
institution of patents spread to other European countries, including England, and
i from there to the United States (Walker 24). According to Christine Benagh of the
Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service:

The word “patent” derives from Letters Patent based on the

English practice of royal grants . . . In England, as in other

countries, where royal prerogative was the source of the

grants. abuses arose and public opinion was reﬂected in

complaints to the House of Commons and in the submission of

bills to curb the practice. The result was a Statute of

Monopolies passed by Parliament in 1623. English law was

reﬂected in the American colonies, many of which adopted
patent statutes of their own (4).

11

Although, the colonies eventually completely rejected royal prerogatives of any sort,
the conceptualization of letters of patent as grants of monopoly to encourage
invention and reward inventors, was inherently adopted into American law in Article
1, section 8, of the Constitution. For women inventors, Constitutional prerogatives
proved to be no less abusive than their historical antecedents, royal prerogatives.

For example, the review process for patent applications reﬂected
discriminatory biases in tandem with social prejudices. A woman’s invention was
sometimes undervalued by reviewers due merely to the fact that it was invented by a
woman, who was designated as the “weaker sex” and, therefore, considered less
technologically proﬁcient. Even if patents were granted, recognition was seldom
extended. For example, women like Sarah Mather who invented a submarine
telescope and lamp (1845), Margaret Knight, the ﬁrst machine to fold paper bags,
(1870), and Harriet W. R. Strong, a dam and reservoir construction (1887) are
among a host of 19th century women who invented things with far reaching
technological signiﬁcance but rarely received any acknowledgment or recognition
for their patents (LWP).

Unlike the afore mentioned examples, many women invented things
considered to be in “womanly ﬁelds,” like feminine hygiene, child-rearing, or
housekeeping. Due to the nature of such inventions, they were often considered less
important than those in male dominated ﬁelds such as machinery, agricultural and
mining.[2] According to a 1923 report by the US. Department of Labor’s Women’s

Bureau, the “only criterion” for a patent was “the standard of patentability set up by

12

the United State patent law for an invention or discovery” to be “new and useful.”
The Bureau’s report continued,

In other words, for the purpose of this report the records of the

United State patent Ofﬁce have been accepted at their face

value. Whatever fault there is in the standard affects men and

women equally, so no bias results from accepting the standard
in analyzing the achievements of women with those of men

(9).

What the report neglected to investigate was that “face value” reﬂected technological
male values consistent with “the sex-stereotyped deﬁnition of technology as an
activity appropriate for men.” Consequently, things such as baby bottles, uterine
supporters, or domestic appliances, appear to have lesser value when “embedded in a
culture of masculinity that is largely coterminous with the culture of technology”
(Wajcam 17-19).

Based on just these two distinct gender biases, women’s inventions
sometimes did not merit the same consideration from the patent review board
(Merritt 301). An 1869 decision by the Commissioner of Patents involving
applications from two women and a man for a patent on a “ladies safety belt,”
designed to hold sanitary napkins, began by stating “the invention is not of the
greatest magnitude, and the claims of invention must necessarily be somewhat
triﬂing.” It was with reluctance that the Commissioner “conceded that the invention
“such as it is” was useful, and [could] be patented” (Merritt 300; Bacheller v Porter,
1869, Dec. Comm’r Pat. 64(1896) ).

The basis for what was considered triﬂing was fraught with social bias

predicated upon gendered values. For example, in the same year the Patent

13

Commissioner ruled in a case for competing claims for a patent on improvements in
men’s suspenders without commenting anywhere in the decision about the triviality
of the invention. Quite the contrary, his decision was ﬁlled with the following
laudatory remarks:

The claim is for a combination of certain things described, by

which the drawers ﬁt easily, as well as being graceful, closely

ﬁtting the body and leg of the wearer, thus making not only a

genteel, but comfortably ﬁtting garment...It seems to me that

the curved ankle band, together with a removal of the surplus

cloth around the bottom of the leg and above the hips, is a very

great improvement in the ﬁt of drawers (Merritt 301).
The Patent commissioner’s decision that a “ladies safety belt” was begrudgingly
“useful and could be patented” stands in curious juxtaposition to the “great
improvement in the ﬁt of drawers” as achieved by this pair of suspenders. Face
value of such inventions were clearly evaluated on a gendered scale informed by
experience and cultural standards. As feminist historian, Ruth Schwartz Cowan,
points out, “Women menstruate, partuate and lactate; men do not. Therefore any
technology which impinges on those processes will affect women more than it will
affect men” (Cowan in Trescott 30-31). And since all Patent Commissioners in the
19th century were men, the affect not only of the processes were biased but also ﬁnal
patent decisions.

A ﬁrrther example occurred in an 1871 decision which denied an extension
on Orwell Needham’s invention for nipple shields because as the Commissioner
explained “the chief objection to the application consists in its unimportance. On the

face of it the invention is of very low order of ingenuity. The evidence as to its value

to the public is highly defective”(Orwell Nedham, 1871 Dec. Comm’r Pat. 3 (1871)

14

). One can only wonder about his lack of experience as a lactating woman in
evaluation of the “unimportance” of the invention. In this case, a male inventor felt
the brunt of gender discrimination based on the nature of his “womanly” invention.
Because women were more likely to invent in these “womanly” ﬁelds, such bias was
more likely to affect women inventors than men, but both men and women
experienced the legal consequences of gendered barriers regarding the nature of the
invention.

Cultural bias of this nature stemmed, in part, as historian Nancy Cott
explains, from women’s social position deﬁned by their submissive roles as wife,
mother, and chattel (Cott 1-18). In what was referred to as the Cult of True
Womanhood, women were judged on their application of “four cardinal virtues—
piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” in their respective roles (Welter 21).
[3] The Cult of True Womanhood further socialized women to be anti-intellectual
and the family depository of spiritual values. The ideal woman was emotional,
impulsive and supra-rational, not logical, scientiﬁc or rational (Welter 71). l f she
was rational or intellectual or displayed any of the other traits deemed masculine, she
was judged less than a true woman. Consequently, a woman who invented was
viewed as less of a woman, something of a social misﬁt.

This social position contributed to the cultural stereotype of the 19th century
American woman as an antitechnocrat, the antithesis of the characterization of an
inventor which entailed legal barriers for women inventors. A woman’s inventive
contribution of a “useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device” was decidedly

devalued by traditional norms due to her social position. The implication was strong

15

and clear that a woman’s inferior intellectual capacity presented a natural obstacle to
her in inventing anything of technological signiﬁcance, particularly if it was outside
of the domestic sphere. If she did excel in some scientiﬁc or technological pursuit,
Popular Science Monthly in 1898 advised that she must be “strong enough to stand
alone, able to bear the often unjust sarcasm and dislike of men who are jealous of
seeing what they consider their own ﬁeld invaded” (Bolton 511). Additionally, if
she displayed some quality of genius, which inventors are often assumed to possess,
she risked her very womanhood. The attitude was summarized as follows: “There
are no women of genius; when they become geniuses they are men” (Bolton 511).
The prototypical inventor was male from cultural concept to social reality in the legal
arena.

In addition to cultural bias, women inventors experienced serious educational
restrictions during the 19th century. Initially, even high school programs for women
were rare. As late as 1852, the New England states did not admit women to their
public schools (Merritt 293). By the 1820s, three female seminaries offered women
an opportunity to go beyond the most basic education. [4] But these seminaries
“never offered the classical option of the male academy” but rather “the English
curriculum of the academy--history, philosophy, modern languages, and natural
sciences,” all designed to teach to be good wives, mothers, or teachers (Horowitz 11;
Rossiter 27). Women were neither prepared for or encouraged to participate in the
pursuit for technological advancement. Not until the late 19th century did women

began to earn advanced degrees in ﬁelds such as chemistry, mathematics, and

16

physics, and even then most advanced levels of training remained hostile to women
(Rossiter 35-38; Merritt 294).

Women’s rights advocate and writer, Sarah Grimke, began her 1838 essay
“Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman” under the sub-
title “The Education of Women,” with the question, “Ought women to enjoy equal
advantages of education with Men?” She answered the query as follows:

We should neither be surprised nor daunted at the opposition

made to giving woman the same educational advantages as

men; it is but a few years since the same spirit rose in sterner

rebellion against the laws providing for the education of the

masses in some places (110).

Laws which prevented women from acquiring an education directly affected
them in their pursuit of legal entitlement in obtaining patents as noted in 1923 by the
Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor. Even though the Bureau believed that
“the inventive spirit raises no educational bars against its search for human
expression” it succinctly admitted that, “rmquestionably the educated are better
equipped to go through the processes of patenting inventions, and therefore, there
may be more educated than uneducated patentees on the record” (6). Clearly, there
were far more educated men who obtained patents than uneducated women during
the 19th century.

Thus, a lack of education hindered women in the legal patent process by
making it difﬁcult or impossible for them to obtain “technical education that would
have informed their attempts at invention.” This was particularly critical for women

because they also “lacked access to the informal training that many men enjoyed at

home or on the job.” Additionally, because women were denied access to higher

17

educational institutions with well-equipped laboratories and experimental equipment,
they generally lacked knowledge about the methods and processes of documenting
their inventions. When women did get patents, their lack of general knowledge about
the industrial world of commerce made it especially difﬁcult to exploit the
manufacturing potential of their patents (Merritt 294). Grimke concurred when she
wrote, “Open to them avenues of education, usefulness and independence, free and
unfettered they can enter the temple of science and enjoy the privileges of the other
sex” (117). But for women inventors, entrance into the “temple of science”
presented a legal challenge.

Legal challenges increased even more for married women due to restricted
property rights. Blackstone 's Commentaries, published between 1765 and 1769, left
its English common law imprint in American law after the Revolution. It determined
that married women were not legal persons. According to Blackstone, the “husband
and wife are in law but one person” and according to an American text published in
1890, The Law of Husband and Wife, Compiled for Popular Use, that single person
was the husband (18). “Single women who were over twenty-one, and widows, had
the legal rights of a citizen, but a married woman’s legal individuality was merged
into that of her husband” (Richmond-Abbot 1 1). Even after the ﬁrst Married
Women’s Property Acts were passed in Mississippi in 1839, and in New York in
1848, women were still subject to the legal dictates of antebellum courts which
regularly “upheld the claims of husbands to control the earning of their wives” (Hall

119-120).[5]

18

Legal historians generally conclude that reforms in married women’s

property rights failed to improve the economic status of most women during the

greater part of the 19th century, and for women inventors, such persistent legal

restraints contributed to the low patent rates for women (Kahn 385). This conclusion

is supported by feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, in her 1883 tract Woman as an

Inventor:

Nor is women by law recognized as possessing full right to the
use and control of her own powers. In not a single State of the
Union is a married woman held to possess a right to her
earnings within the family; and in not one-half of them has she
a right to control in business entered upon outside of the
household. Should such a woman be successful in a patent,
what then? Would she be free to do as she please with it? Not
at all. She would possess no right, title, or power over this
work of her own brain. She would possess no legal right to
contract, or to license any one to use her invention. Neither,
should her right be inﬁinged, could she sue the offender. Her
husband could take out the patent in his own name, sell her
invention for his own sole beneﬁt, give it away if he so chose,
or refrain ﬁ'om using it, and for all this she would have no
remedy.

It is scarcely thirty years since the ﬁrst State protected a
married woman in the use of her own brain property. Under
these conditions, legally incapable of holding property, and
trained, as she has been, to seclusion, dependence, and
abeyance of thought, that woman has not been an inventor to
an equal extent with man is not so much a subject of surprise
as that she should have invented at all (488-489).

Although legal reforms which entitled women use of their “own brain

property” should have reduced transaction costs and increased expected beneﬁts,

they did not substantially reduce the discriminatory affects women inventors

experienced when they sought legal redress in patent inﬁingement cases, denial of a

patent application, or other patent issues (Khan 356, 358, 365). Patent rights were

19

 

carefully protected at the federal level, but as Gage noted, it was state protection
which deemed women “incapable of holding property.” Such state restrictions
“exhibited inefﬁciencies based on the legal ﬁction of marital unity” for women
inventors which granted a husband control of his wife’s intellectual property and its
beneﬁts. Also, “commercial exploitation of patent property depended on the right to
sue and to enforce contracts, in order to produce the invented article, to assign (sell)
or license the patented invention, and to deter inﬁingers” (Kahn 356, 386).
Ultimately, in many cases, women inventors were left with no legal remedy or, at
best, a codiﬁed system of legal barriers.[6]

A brief summary of the history of the US. Patent Ofﬁce, deﬁning its original
mission and signiﬁcant 19th century changes, is useful in understanding that getting
a patent has always involved more than the actual ﬁling of a patent application.
Women inventor’s experience with patent law encompassed a much wider scope than
implied by the language of the ﬁrst Patent Act of 1790. Incentive and gain in the
face of legal obstacles and social prejudices are pivotal points of inquiry when
addressing the barriers surrounding women and patents in 19th century America.

What did women have to gain in the passage of the ﬁrst patent act? Was
there incentive for achievement from the outset? Did the system “reﬂect a
consistency in the Court’s thinking as regards women and their “rightful” position in
society?” (Otten 4). It is interesting to reﬂect on how women might have responded
to President George Washington’s Congressional address in January of 1790, which
pressed for an aggressive understanding of the importance of establishing an ofﬁcial

patent system. Washington stated, “I cannot forbear intimating to you the

20

expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction to new and
useful inventions from abroad, as to the exertions of skill and genius in producing
them at home. . .” (The Story I). Did women inventors experience encouragement
and introduction in the advancing new technologies? If so, such encouragement was
not manifested in a rush of patent applications in the early years of the patent system.
”The ﬁrst patent granted to an American woman by the US. Patent Ofﬁce did not

occur until 1809. And it was not until the Civil War era that women inventors
experienced a signiﬁcant increase in the number of patents awarded to them (LWP).

The Patent Act was signed into law by President Washington on April 10,
1790, to “promote the progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries” (Constitution of the United States, Article 1, Section 8). Congress
agreed with the President that it was imperative for the United States to encourage
invention by providing patent protection for individual inventors with careful
attention to the discouragement of exclusive monopolies (Bennett 54-67; Pursell
Machine 98). [7] Founding fathers, including William Penn, Thomas Jefferson, and
Benjamin Franklin were concerned about the negative effects monopolies might have
on the economic stability of the colonies and later on the new nation. As an inventor
of a new stove in 1744, Franklin declined a colonial patent because of the,

“Principle which has ever weigh’d with me on such

Occasions, viz. That as we enjoy great Advantages from the

Invention of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to

serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do
freely and generously” (Pursell Machine 32).

21

This kind of attitude inﬂuenced some of our early legislative development in their
efforts to prevent exclusive monopolies. But it is clear that no legislation was
enacted which rallied against the systematic legal exclusion of women from
obtaining an education or from participating in the business of invention, which
certainly had a negative effect on the promotion and progress of science and useful
arts (Pursell Machine 103).

Still, patent records indicate that a very slim minority of women were
motivated to participate in the business of invention. On the threshold of a new
democracy, women were keenly aware of what was at stake and understood the
signiﬁcance of power over property. Although they were “dead in law” and were
“denied the ability to make contracts alone,” women played an active part in
America’s “property-conscious society” as evidenced in the volume of marriage
transactions, bequests, wills, prenuptial contracts, power of executrixes of male
estates, and bargaining for remarriage on the basis of property holdings (Cott 7). The
incentive to participate as useful equal citizens hit a harmonious chord for women
who were used to directing incentive and opportunity to serving others directly,
especially family members (Cott 23). The young republic, much like a young
family, needed the support of all of its members, and the language of the ﬁrst patent
act was silent on gender, race, and class, as it solicited the support of all patriotic
citizens.

Inventors were presented with opportunities not only to support their country,
but also to gain individual recognition and perhaps even wealth (Walker 16-17).

Each patent awarded was guaranteed for a ﬁxed number of years the right to exclude

22

others from manufacturing or capitalizing on the invention in any way. At the end of
14 years (later 17 years), the public had the free use of the invention. This time
limitation was an established tradition by 1790 as Americans were accustomed to the
idea of patents as reward for invention and as a protective return for ingenuity and
effort based on the English Statute of Monopolies of 1623 (Dahn 344).

The law required that an inventor submit a patent speciﬁcation sheet which
became a public document accessible to the public to gain speciﬁc understanding of
the nature and character of an invention (The Story i, ii). They were also required to
submit a patent drawing to illustrate the invention. The drawing was accompanied by
an oath and speciﬁcation stating the object[s] of the invention (Aubrey 91, 97). This
represented a procedural change as colonial patents generally had no drawings or
written description of the invention (Dahn 345).

From 1836 until 1880, the submission of a patent model was required for
examination which aided Patent Ofﬁce examiners to understand the claims made for
an invention. Many examiners were not trained to read drawings and preferred
working models in addition to drawings. In 1870, this requirement was repealed, but
the Patent Ofﬁce, by its own rules, kept requiring them until 1880. Even after then,
some were still submitted (Vance, Taylor, et al 8). The models eventually took up
too much space and, because most were made of wood, they presented a ﬁre hazard
(Kursh 27-30;Vance, Taylor, et al 17-19). Both the drawing and model
requirements posed barriers for women inventors, as few were capable draft or craft

persons. The bottom line for most women was they had to have money to hire both a

23

draftsman and craftsman to meet such requirements. And, again, for most women,
especially married women, access to money was problematic. ‘ .

*In addition to the cost of hiring someone to produce a patent drawing and
model, one was required to pay a fee of $4 to $5, which included 10 cents a page
copying fee for the speciﬁcations (Ray 1; Strulik 129; Walker 29-33). The ﬁrst
patent law change in 1793 included a fee hike to $30 (Toulrnin 24-26). For most
women, as well as many men, that amount was prohibitive. ' 1;

Still, the 1790 Patent Act was the ﬁrst time any government in the world gave
recognition by a statute of “the intrinsic right of an inventor to the fruit of his
intellectual labor” (Calvert 398). For many inventors, male and female, this
represented substantial incentive. Case studies reveal that “women who ﬁled patents
were motivated by the same general incentives as men” despite the additional
constraints they faced (Khan 359).

The ﬁrst system was administered by a three person Patent Board of
Commissioners: Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson; Secretary of War, Henry
Knox; and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. The Board examined all
applications and discussed each in terms of the merit of their claims of being novel
and useful (Klein & Klein 39; MacDonald 4; Calvert 398; Kursh 14-15). For three
years this long and laborious examination process was utilized by the Patent Ofﬁce.
In the ﬁrst year, only three patents were awarded, the ﬁrst being assigned to Samuel
Hopkins for “a new method of [making] pot and pearl ashes” (Klein & Klein 39).
The next year, 1791, 33 patents were granted and in 1792, 11 were granted. No

known women applied for patents during this time and records of any inventions not

24

patented by American women during this period remain silent. Even during the ﬁrst
decades after the opening of the Patent Ofﬁce, few women filed for patents.
According to the government list of Women Inventors to Whom Patents have been
Granted by the United States Government, 1790-July l, 1888, (hereinafter referred to
as LWP) only 10 patents were issued between 1809 and 1828 to women. This list
does not include all known patents. Signiﬁcant omissions have been noted, and
present some interesting speculation as to why, but even combining all listed and
unlisted known patents, the number of patents granted to women was very small
compared to later decades (Stanley Conjurer in Wright 118-128).

One early problem experienced by the Patent Ofﬁce was insufﬁcient time to
devote to examining applications due to the press of their other ofﬁcial duties as
Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Attorney General. Thus, in response, the
Patent Act of February 21, 1793, was passed which established a “registration”
system designed to grant a patent to any one who swore to the originality of the
invention, submitted the proper drawings, and paid the required fees. Examination
based on novelty and utility was no longer required (Vaughan 19). This system
eliminated the Patent Board, but provided the understaffed Patent Ofﬁce with a
superintendent and a few clerks, all located in one central building under the
jurisdiction of the Department of State (The Story 1-3; Kursh 16; Toulrnin 26).

All staff members were male until the mid 18505, when Charles Mason, the
ﬁfth patent Ofﬁce Commissioner hired women clerks to work not only on
government premises, but also in the same room as men (Kursh 27-31). This was

considered highly inappropriate due to the physical proximity of men and women

25

Cases of interference were handled by a specially appointed board consisting of a
person chosen by the Secretary of State and one each by the disputants (Kursh 16).
The Board’s decision was ﬁnal with no possibility of appeal. All members of the
board were male, and thus it was implicit that although they followed the letter of
new law, the spirit of it was subject to the whims, prejudices and discriminatory
biases directed toward women inventors under the preceding law. The business of
inventing continued to be conducted within a framework of legal barriers.

This system allowed inventors to patent almost anything and was subject to a
great deal of legal abuse and outright fraud. It proved problematic in protecting the
property rights of inventors, and particularly so for women inventors (Sokoloff 818).
Valid inventions were challenged by unscrupulous attorneys, companies, and
inventors. Infringement cases and other disputes over patents ﬂooded the courts.
Finally, a Congressional committee was appointed to investigate the alleged abuses.
Senator John Ruggles of Maine began investigating the operating conditions in the
patent ofﬁce in 1835 and soon reported,

For more than forty years, the Department of State has passed

on every application for patent without any examination of the

merit or novelty of the invention. Many of the patents granted

are worthless and void. Many are in conﬂict with one another

and a great many lawsuits arise from this condition (Ray 4).

He was not alone in his discontent with the patent law or his belief that patents had
lost their value. Many shared his view that the original object of the patent law “to

promote the progress of Science and useful Arts” had been defeated (Calvert 400;

Kursh 20-21). The 1793 Patent Act simultaneously encouraged and protected the

27

working so closely together. Initially it was only as copier clerks that women were
employed. Later, in 1872, Mrs. Anne Freeman was the ﬁrst woman appointed as an
assistant examiner. According to Charlotte Smith, a 19th century advocate of
women inventors, women employees in the patent ofﬁce “slowly but surely secured
recognition, at ﬁrst in the clerical force and afterwards in the examiners work.” This
work required a “full understanding of difﬁcult inventions” and a search of foreign
and domestic patents (Smith I, 3).[8] :

Unlike the original three-man Patent Board which judged applicants based on
examination, this registration system simply required inventors to submit a written
description, pay a $35 registration fee, and swear an oath that the invention was not
based on “prior art according to my belief” (Klein & Klein 41; Ray 1-2; Sokoloff
818). The substantial registration fee “presumably served to screen out many
ﬁivolous or valueless inventions,” but in an economy where women consistently had
less money than their male counterparts, this continued to be a particularly difﬁcult
obstacle for women inventors (Sokoloff 818).

The new system allowed for increased efﬁciency in granting patents by
reducing the process to a mere clerical procedure, but it was fraught with other
problems that originated in the concept of what constituted “prior art.” It eliminated
the requirement that an invention had to be “sufﬁciently useful and important” and
established procedures to determine cases of interference (two or more persons
applying for the same patent at the same time) (The Story 2-3; Calvert 399-400). This
registration system was especially problematic when it came to protecting the

property rights of inventors, especially married women inventors (Sokoloff 818).

26

hr M...

 

Cases of interference were handled by a specially appointed board consisting of a
person chosen by the Secretary of State and one each by the disputants (Kursh 16).
The Board’s decision was ﬁnal with no possibility of appeal. All members of the
board were male, and thus it was implicit that although they followed the letter of
new law, the spirit of it was subject to the whims, prejudices and discriminatory
biases directed toward women inventors under the preceding law. The business of
inventing continued to be conducted within a framework of legal barriers.

This system allowed inventors to patent almost anything and was subject to a
great deal of legal abuse and outright fraud. It proved problematic in protecting the
property rights of inventors, and particularly so for women inventors (Sokoloff 818).
Valid inventions were challenged by unscrupulous attorneys, companies, and
inventors. Infringement cases and other disputes over patents ﬂooded the courts.
Finally, a Congressional committee was appointed to investigate the alleged abuses.
Senator John Ruggles of Maine began investigating the operating conditions in the
patent ofﬁce in 1835 and soon reported,

For more than forty years, the Department of State has passed

on every application for patent without any examination of the

merit or novelty of the invention. Many of the patents granted

are worthless and void. Many are in conﬂict with one another

and a great many lawsuits arise from this condition (Ray 4).

He was not alone in his discontent with the patent law or his belief that patents had
lost their value. Many shared his view that the original object of the patent law “to

promote the progress of Science and useful Arts” had been defeated (Calvert 400;

Kursh 20-21). The 1793 Patent Act simultaneously encouraged and protected the

27

true inventor and supported the irnpostor. It also justiﬁed arbitrary decisions
regarding the importance and value of inventions.

In effort to remedy the failing patent system, Congress passed the Patent Act
of July 4, 1836, which re-established the examination system. It was once again
necessary to determine the novelty and the usefulness of a patent application and to
determine by research if there was evidence of the invention as “prior art.” If the
patent was not original, it could be denied on that basis. [The new act also provided
for increased! personneland, for the ﬁrst time, this increased staff accepted appeals in
cases of denial or challenged interference decisions. The provisions proved very
useful to women inventors, provided they had the money to hire a good attorney to
represent them. Inventors once again had to present drawings and speciﬁcation
sheets, and also models now. If granted, the patent was valid for 14 years with a
possible 7 year extension. The Patent Ofﬁce was established by law as a distinct and
separate bureau in the Department of State. It charged increased fees in support of
the new building an additional staff. American citizens were still required to pay
$35, but British citizens had to pay $500 and all other aliens paid $300. [9] The
present system of numbering patents consecutively began with patents issued under
this law. Previously issued patents were not numbered and were recorded by name
and date only (The Story 6-7; Calvert 400-402).;

All of these changes worked together to increase the value of US. patents as
individual assets. The system operated efﬁciently and resulted in phenomenal

increases in the number of inventions patented by both men and women. Although

the ﬁrst 10 years of the new law saw a down swing of inventive activity due to the

28

more rigorous requirements, 1846 marked the beginning of increased inventive
activity (Sokoloff 819).[10]

How did the various Patent Acts affect women inventors? Did the law treat
men and women inventors differently? Or were they truly democratic? Court
decisions reﬂect, to some degree, the prevelant attitudes and thinking of American
society in general (Otten 4). In the case of patent law, a patent was not awarded
solely on merit, but required increasingly more skilled management and interaction
with businessmen, lawyers, patent ofﬁcials and specialized technicians such as
model makers, chemists, machinists and the like. The rational behind the decisions
reﬂect social, cultural, and legal dictates (Otten 4). Patent decisions reveal that the
law did treat men and women inventors differently.

The experiences of a select few individual women inventors left insightful
legal records as to how the patent system created a legal framework of barriers. By
examining the cases of Rebecca Sherwood, Elizabeth Hawks, and Harriet Ruth
Tracy, perspectives on how cultural biases, educational restrictions and property
laws affected women’s patent pursuit emerge. The signiﬁcance of their collective
and individual experiences is shaped by the limits and assets of the available primary
sources, and is drawn from a combination of “evidence and interpretation,
circumstance and ideology” (Cott 18). The impact of their legal experiences upon
traditional histories of technology and patent law suggest a redeﬁning of signiﬁcant
technology which reveals “the complex relationship between 19th century women

and the American patent system” (Merritt 237). Patent law has contributed to an

29

evolutionary germane system of socially constructed knowledge which shaped
technology and women’s submissive place therein.

This socially constructed knowledge surfaces not only in the rational of court
decisions, but also in the nature of cases which reﬂect cultural attitudes toward
women in general and women inventors speciﬁcally. Rebecca Sherwood of Fort
Edward, New York, invented an “improvement in reducing straw and other ﬁbrous
substances for manufacturing of paper pulp” in 1866 (Stanley Mothers 475). This
invention, no doubt, held particular commercial merit in view of wartime shortages
during the Civil War. Although there is no known legal evidence that she sold the
rights to anyone or made any ﬁnancial gain, she felt strongly about securing this
patent in her name as evidenced from the interference suit she ﬁled in 1864.
Sherwood’s husband initially ran tests of the process at the local mill where he was
employed. The tests met with ridicule from onlooking fellow employees, who
taunted that “no woman could improve upon their methods” (Macdonald 21). This
did not prevent Sherwood from going forth with her patent, but it necessitated the
defense of its originality when the mill owner where her husband worked ﬁled for a
patent for a “suspiciously similar process.” Sherwood was challenged to present
“reliable evidence” that she was the original inventor. In her testimony, Sherwood
described how she “converted her clothes boiler to hold a steaming cauldron of “a
pretty soapy solution” in which she boiled straw until it was pulpy enough to
substitute for wood pulp” (Macdonald 21). She produced witnesses who testiﬁed

regarding speciﬁc dates and descriptions that,

30

[S]he was attending to her household duties, but she

apologized for her dirty stove and said she had been boiling

her straw on it and it had boiled over...Some of the

preparations were in teacups and bowls scattered around on

the window sills and tables and on the mantel piece. . . She

told me she knew how to make paper pulp. She was very

positive of getting a patent and said she should have one

(Macdonald 21).

Sherwood was able to produce pulp samples as prima facie exhibits for the patent
examiners. These samples are still preserved as part of the her Patent Interference
Case File in the National Archives Federal Records Center. Sherwood won her
case, and was awarded patent #45 ,440 on December 13, 1864. This was in addition
to her patent #40,5 77, November 10, 1863, for an “improvement in reducing hemp,
ﬂax, &c to a ﬁbrous condition” (LWP).

There is no known legal record indicating that she ever sold the rights to the
process (Macdonald 22). But it is not without proﬁt that we examine her case as
evidence regarding the kind of barriers women inventors faced in the patenting
process. It is not in the ﬁling an interference suit that we ﬁnd this value. Many
thousands of male inventors also had to protect their inventions through interference
suits. But the background information contained in her case reveals the social bias
which held women as antitechnocrats. It was assumed by mill workers that because
she was a women, she was incapable of improving an industrial process. The
attorney for the defense repeatedly referred to the patent application as her “so-
called” invention and stated that it was so exceedingly vague that [it] bafﬂes all

ingenuity” (Macdonald 21). This gendered assumption about women’s inventive

ability was successfully challenged by Sherwood’s offensive legal stand which

31

resulted in a patent. As recorded in the Report of the Commissioner of Patents for
the Year of 1864, Art & Manufacturing, her invention is supported by three distinct
claims. They generally concur,

. . . the use or uses of the soapy solution prepared as herein

described, in combination with any ingredient or ingredients

which will combine with either in a heated state in a solution,

and reduce straw or any other ﬁbrous substance to a pulp for

the purpose of being converted into colored or colorless paper,

commonly known as white paper (Vol 1, 974).

It remains unknown whether this patent was ever applied in any commercial sense,
but what is certain is that Sherwood successfully overcame the socially biased
perception that women were incapable of inventing outside of the bounds of the
“womanly ﬁelds.” But technically her invention did have a connection to her
domestic duties in that she boiled the mixture on her stove and virtually turned the
kitchen into her Workshop. The kitchen has traditionally been the woman’s
workshop, but, of course, as place for the purpose of food preparation and other
domestic chores, not the development of industrial processes or technical devices.
Making paper pulp in the kitchen with the intention of patenting the invention clearly
stepped outside of proscribed womanly work.

This case reﬂects a signiﬁcant bias which prohibited some women inventors
to compete fairly for legal entitlements. As a woman, Sherwood was viewed as
incapable of contributing any technological industrial improvement, thus her
invention was suspect as to its originality and validity. The case also suggests why

some women would not ﬁnd sufﬁcient incentive or adequate gain to pursue a patent

for an invention outside of the domestic ﬁeld. For all the trouble she would endure,

32

was the payoff enough compensation? If Sherwood didn’t receive any monetary
compensation for her invention, the question of incentive and gain remains
speculative. Like male inventors, women inventors displayed perseverance,
originality, and imagination in their creative pursuits (Rossman Industrial 41). And
for some, male or female, motivation stemmed from “the excitement of pursuing an
absorbing problem, the feeling that one’s efforts are going to be a beneﬁt to one’s
fellow man” or “the simply joy of taking an idea into one’s own hands and giving it
proper form (Vance, Taylor et al 22). These driving forces were all valid in the
pursuit of creative invention and quite aside ﬁ'om dreams of fame and wealth.

Other barriers also surfaced in the pursuit for fair and equitable legal
entitlements for women inventors, particularly factors of access. These factors were
intricately connected to technology’s relationship to the segregated workplace of
women, which was primarily in the home with very limited access to higher
scientiﬁc or industrial education. Even by the end of the century, it was noted in a
Popular Science Monthly article “Scientiﬁc Instruction in Girls’ School” that “for the
large majority of girls, the science they learn in their school years represents for them
all the science they ever acquire” (June, 1898, 253). For women inventors, this lack
of accessibility constantly posed barriers in the patent process.

Such is the experience of a proliﬁc 19th century inventor, Harriet Ruth Tracy
of New York. She is credited with 16 patents, most all of a mechanical nature. They
include patents for sewing machines, a stove, a safety elevator, automatic safety
ﬂoors for elevators and a ﬁre escape (LWP; Stanley Mothers 504). But her ﬁrst

invention, a combination bureau and trunk, was not patented. Although she lost the

33

 

patent right, she gained valuable knowledge about patent law and the business of
inventing which served her well through the rest of her successful career as an
inventor. Her legal ﬁght for the patent left a record illuminating how the lack of
educational accessibility and knowledge of secular business affected even the most
successful of women inventors.

Knowing very little about patent law and even less about the business of
inventing or the wiles of entrepreneurial businessmen, she allowed a young
mathematics and military tactics instructor to process her patent for a 50/50 share of
the proﬁts. He took the invention to the patent ofﬁce of Munn & Company and
applied for a patent in his own name. Tracy had complied, stating that “it was a
matter of indifference” to have her name on the application. But what she did not
know, was that part of the patent application process required the applicant to swear
that they were the true inventors (Macdonald 62). When she realized this, it was too
late. She did ﬁle suit to have the patent reissued in her own name, but again her lack
of knowledge about patent law and her lack of skilled representation in the case, cost
her that ﬁrst patent. Her argument was defensively weak, and her inability to offer
substantial evidence (unlike Sherwood), convinced the patent examiner to deny her
request.

She argued that it was truly her original invention as the idea came to her in a
“nighttime moment of ﬂash of thought.” She had no witnesses or scientiﬁc evidence
to support her claim. To further weaken her case, she was unable to appear in person
before the examiner because she had “been in feeble health much of the time since

the model was ﬁnished [and] in very limited pecuniary circumstances” (Macdonald

34

62, 63). She knew that such absence would be detrimental to her case, and tried to
make the examiner aware of this circumstance which she felt was quite out of her
control. In a December, 1872, letter to the Commissioner of Patents, she explained,
“Women cannot always do just as they would—they are sometimes incapacitated for
all work physical and menta ” (Patent Interference Case File #753). Such a
characterization only worked to reinforce the female Stereotype as physically,
emotionally, and intellectually weak, all part of the assumptions as to why women
could not possibly be successﬁrl inventors.

The attorney for the defendant argued that Tracy had used his client and that
she had simply acted as a “conﬁdence woman,” took the entire idea from the poor
unsuspecting scholar, and was in no way responsible for the original idea. Her
defense of a “nighttime moment of ﬂash of thought” was not valid proof. She
soundly lost her right to the patent. She did not appeal, nor did she repeat this
experience. Rather she utilized this knowledge repeatedly in her career as a
professional inventor, acquiring ﬁnancial gain and respect from her
accomplishments. All of her subsequent patents were taken out solely in her name,
and a step beyond that, she insisted that each of the manufactured sewing machines
that she later produced included the name “Tracy” prominently displayed
(Macdonald 63, 183; LWP).

It was not that Tracy was denied due process in her patent application. Like
Sherwood, she had the legal right to appeal an injustice like all inventors, male and
female. But because of social biases, she faced cultural obstacles in the competition

for legal entitlement. Tracy’s competency quickly improved in her ability to

35

overcome the legal barriers necessary to compete as a successful inventor. This was
keenly evidenced more than 20 years later when Tracy entered an aggressive
interference proceeding regarding her sewing machine patent application #535,330,
ﬁled on January 18, 1895, against Francis H. Richard’s patent application #535,338,
ﬁled on January 26, 1895. This time she was represented by an attorney and was
knowledgeable about how to protect her interests, despite the fact that the court
decided on September 19, 1898, that “no substantial rights of either party” had been
violated. (Decision of the Commissioner of Patents, 1898, 217-219; Merritt 255).

What is most signiﬁcant about this case is the tenacity in which Tracy’s
counsel asserted her protective patent position. Her petition conveyed substantial
input from her. She hired a skilled and capable patent attorney to defend her claims.
The complexity of her claims suggests a well grounded knowledge of her rights as a
patentee in contrast with her ﬁrst patenting attempt. Her inventive experience
excelled to an impressive professional level. Particularly worth noting is an
incredible period of inventive activity between 1890-1893, in which she received 10
patents (Stanley Mothers 506). Public recognition of her inventions was duly noted
at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where she exhibited both in the
Woman’s Building and in the Liberal Arts Building. Her inventions were considered
meriting “great originality, ingenuity and utility” (Macdonald 183).

Tracy consistently fought hard to achieve that kind of recognition. It was
accomplished by an added measure of perseverance, originality, and imagination.
She won her hard earned recognition as an inventor not simply by inventing

innovative technologies, but by effectively maneuvering through the due process of

36

patent law and acquiring a successful level of competency in the business of
inventing .

Other women inventors, though, did not follow such a calculated path to
success. Elizabeth Hawks of Troy, New York, received a patent for an auxiliary air-
chamber for stoves on April 23, 1876. Like Tracy, her ﬁrst patent was not without a
ﬁght for legal entitlement. But unlike Tracy, she won her case. Despite this major
difference in outcome, both women’s legal records provide suggestive insight into
the adversarial relationship between female applicants and male examiners. The
process of examination has and continues to be one involving extensive
communication between the examiner and the applicant’s attorney, or as in the case
of Hawks, the applicant herself.

Hawks is a curious case, not without similarity to Tracy’s ﬁrst patent attempt,
in that she claimed her invention sprang from divine origin. She left a legal legacy in
the form of Patent Interference Case Files and Patent Assignment Files which
include numerous letters written by her to the Commissioner of Patents. She was
repeatedly concerned about the delays in awarding the patent and is convinced that
such delays “stem from men’s lack of experience with household stoves.” She stated
that if there were women examiners, the merits of her invention would have been
evaluated differently (i.e. quicker) (Macdonald 39). Although the ﬁrst woman
assistant examiner was hired in 1872, women examiners continued to be the rare
exception. It remains to this date that there has never been a woman Commissioner

of Patents (Scientific American, July 1873, 249; Merritt 236).

37

Hawk’s concern about the delay in granting her the patent were addressed in
language and context that bore a distinctive domestic social stigma. She appealed on
the basis of family need and poor health, both of which would be considered
“womanly” weaknesses and might have biased the examiners as to the worthiness of
her application. Hawks explained about her “debilitated state of health” and further,
her call “on God for help for some way to be opened for me for means desperately
[needed] as we have been very unfortunate since the beginning of the war...Therefore
I consider it a gift from Heaven” (Macdonald 39). Family, health, and divine
intervention were strongly associated with women’s social role as wife, mother, and
spiritual care giver. The connection between the delay in granting her a patent and
her basis of argumentative appeal implies a cultural bias against woman’s social
roles which characterized women as weak, sickly, family dependent, and strongly
associated with spiritual values, all cultural norms which excluded women as
inventors.

Her divinely inspired “gift” came to her as an invention of a stove attachment
speciﬁcally designed for baking bread. It consisted of an “oblong rectangular cover
open toward the ﬁre and at the bottom, [with] a slot in front for admission of a raker.
It is used for heating the air previous to its entering the ﬁre chamber” (Annual Report
of the Commissioner of Patents, 1868, 742). But although this invention had
commercial potential, her claim of divine intervention certainly lacked competitive
credibility in the world of industrial manufacture and commerce. This claim

squarely aligned her with a well known 19th century group, Spiritualists, a group that

38

advocated women’s rights as well as a departure from the traditional social order and
existing gender roles (Brande 3).

One Spiritualist leader wrote, “Women in the nineteenth century are
physically sick, weak and declining” but if “the functions depending on force and
muscle are weak. . . the nerves are intensely sensitive. . . hence sickness, rest,
passivity, susceptibility, impressionability, mediumship, communication,
revelation!” (Brande 83). And we might add, invention! Hawks, like other 19th
century women, argued from the proscribed typical female status of being weak and
declining, but still with incredible vigor and “revelation.” She argued forcefully that
her invention was divinely inspired, which did not mean watered down technological
understanding. Her divine inspiration included precise dimensions, valid claims, and
speciﬁcations, all of which translated into manufacturing potential.

Compatibility between science and spiritualism already had a public and
popular acceptance, one which mutually respected the power of the other. The
relationship between the two was not adversarial or antagonistic at mid-century.
Rather, science and religion “each understood themselves as pursuing related
inquiries into the nature of reality” (Brande 4). For example, this relationship was
particularly true concerning electricity. In 1842 the “US. Congress found the use of
electricity in the telegraph incomprehensible” and in the immediate years to follow
this national response, the principles of telegraphy found “parallels between the
instantaneous communication of messages over long distances rather by wires or

spirit mediums” (Brande 5).

39

So although 20th century readers may ﬁnd Tracy or Hawks claim of divine
inspiration completely unscientiﬁc, such claims held signiﬁcant merit during the
19th century. Hawks made the scientiﬁc boast that her stove attachment “baked
differently from what it did without it...it baked all the way through leaving a tender
crust on top.” She was sure that “every housekeeper in the country” would beneﬁt
“since dust and ashes would not scatter about the room when the baker raked or
dumped the coal grate"”(Macdonald 41). For bread bakers, this represented a
signiﬁcant improvement.

Her conﬁdence in the success of her invention may have also been divinely
inspired, but she was not convinced of the examiner’s ability to appreciate the merits
of her invention. Her determination to get this patent was suggested by the continual
modiﬁcations she sent to the Commissioner of Patents, even though they were
regularly turned over to the examiner. She argued, in addition, that her stove had
“been approved by all that has seen and used them. It has been said by many that the
invention is the greatest blessing to a sick room that was ever known for it equalized
the heat through the room” (Macdonald 41). This claim seems far aﬁeld from the
claim as published in the Annual Report of the Patent Ofﬁce in 1867, which merits
the invention simply as an auxiliary air chamber for stoves. The signiﬁcance of this
claim suggests that she tried a new tact to justify the importance of the invention. In
this case, she shifted the premise of her claim from a purely domestic one to one
more community orientated, perhaps in the hope that it would be more favorable

received if it was not so closely aligned with feminine motivation and inspiration.

40

Hawks was in a position to understand ﬁrst hand what would take another 50
years for the government to admit. In 1923 the US. Department of Labor stated that,
“behind and beneath the patent records are conditions and inﬂuences which have an
intangible but far-reaching inﬂuence” (Bulletin of the Women ’3 Bureau, No. 28,
1923, 4). This same government publication admits that although there are “no
actual restrictions attach[ed] to women under the American constitutional and
Federal laws providing for the issuance of patents. . . American invention has carried
a general assumption of women’s disability for creative labor” (4-5). As evidence of
that long standing conviction by the general public, the pamphlet asserts, “ Minors
and women and even convicts may apply for patents under our law” (5). Even to the
US. Department of Labor, it was apparent that women inventors had to overcome
exclusionary limitations in the patent system, limitations which have culturally
deﬁned the prototypical inventor as male and relegated female inventive powers with
minors and convicts, individuals considered as legal nonentities and social inferiors.

Both the democratic patent examination system and the registration system
presented obstacles to women inventors. As the system evolved, it necessitated more
skillful management, quite apart ﬁ'om the actual legal process of inventing a
signiﬁcant technological contribution. For both men and women inventors, the
business of inventing and patenting grew steadily more complex. It was not enough
to simply invent or discover “a useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device”
(The Story 1). It required increasingly sophisticated knowledge of business and

commerce, higher levels of scientiﬁc and technological education, legal recognition

41

and representation, economic presence, and professional and personal cultural
acceptance in the face of increasingly more rigid gendered role deﬁnitions.

The democratic patent system legalized and legitimatized social biases which
“diminished the power of women to compete fairly for legal entitlements” (Merritt
306). The complex relationship between women and the American patent system
required successfully circumventing legal baniers built into a socially exclusionary
ﬁamework. Lack of economic resources, educational access, and business know-
how impacted how women secured patents which was, in part, premised on their
subordinate legal status. A blend of written code and social assumptions permeated
women’s experience in their competition for patents and recognition as inventors.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in The Common Law, 1891, that “the law
embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot
be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of
mathematics.” The patent system, like the body of Constitutional law from which it
arose, is not a book of mathematics. The patent application and award system was
codiﬁed from its inception, but it remained far from being a mere formulaic equation
with a right or wrong resolution. Rather, like Holmes suggests, it reﬂects the
nation’s development, and in this case, the nation’s technological development. It
also reﬂects the nation’s cultural assumptions about the differences between women
and men’s relationship with technology and inventive innovation. Holmes continued
to observe that, “the substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly
corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient” (Otten

1). It was “convenient” in many respects to establish a male dominated system of

42

technological innovation. It does not take a math problem to determine the value of
socially castigating half of the competitive population as legally subordinate and
intellectually inferior in the quest for progressive technological contributions.

Opinions of the Patent Commission, patent inﬁingement cases, and patent
assignment cases provide insight on the combative turf where women competed for
legal entitlement of patents. Although these experiences have yet to be included in
the traditional history of the US. Patent Ofﬁce or standard histories of technology,
they have not gone totally unrecognized by historical observers.

As Matilda Joslyn Gage noted, it was not surprising that under the prevailing
legal conditions that woman has not been an inventor to an equal extent with man,
but what was “a subject of surprise was that she should have invented at all” which is
soundly substantiated by patent records (489). Despite the lack of equal Opportunity
and access, and despite the short comings of a democratic patent system, women
penetrated the legal boundaries and left a rich legal legacy reﬂecting their inventive

spirit.

43

Chapter 1 - NOTES

[1] In addition to facing the obstacle of gender, African-American women faced
racial discrimination. During the 19th century the number of Aﬁ'ican-American
women who received patents was very small. Between 1885 and 1898, ﬁve are
known to have received patents. Ellen Eglin of Washington DC. who invented a
clothes wringer in the 1880s, expressed the collective attitude of African-American
women inventors when she was asked why she had sold the invention for a mere $18
in 1888. Her reply was to the point: “You know I am black and if it was known that
a Negro women patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer; I
was aﬁaid to be known because of my color in having it introduced in the market,
that is the only reason” (Smith Women Inventor I, 3). Very little has been published
about Aﬁican-American women inventors to date. In addition to Charlotte Smith’s
brief article, “Colored Woman Inventor” in Women Inventor in 1890, other
publications include Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, by
Darlene Clark Hine; Creativity and Inventions: The Genius of Afro-Americans and
Women in the United States and their Patents by Patricia Carter Ives; “From Africa
to America: Black Women Inventors” by Autumn Stanley and “Sister Act: Inventing
Runs in the Family” also by Patricia Carter Ives (Sluby). None of these represent a
comprehensive study of African-American women inventors.

[2] Feminist historian of technology, Ruth Cowan Schwartz, observed the
importance of female technologies is blatantly apparent in the exclusion of such in
standard histories of technology. She cites the baby bottle as a “signiﬁcant cultural
artifact” which does not merit a single reference in any of the indices to the standard
histories. She explains, “Here is a simple implement which, along with its attendant
delivery systems(!), has revolutionized a basic biological process, transformed a
fundamental human experience for vast numbers of infants and mothers, and served
as one of the more controversial exports of western technology to underdeveloped
countries, yet it ﬁnds no place in our histories of technology.” She concludes that
the history of uniquely female technologies has yet to be written, with the single
exception of the technologies of contraception. This tremendous oversight occurred,
in part, because “we do not usually think of women as bearers of technological
change nor do we think of the home as a technological locale,” both of which are
“incorrect assumptions” (Trescott 31-32).

[3] “Authors who addressed themselves to the subject of women in the mid-
nineteenth century used this phrase as ﬁequently as writers on religion mentioned
God. Neither group felt it necessary to deﬁne their favorite terms; they simply
assumed -- with some justiﬁcation--that readers would intuitively understand exactly
what they meant” (Welter 204). Historians today understand this term to deﬁne the
19th century character of woman as virtuous, religious, domestic, and submissive.

44

[4] Although the early seminaries offered limited curriculum, by the 18205 three
offered women unusual opportunities for intellectual development unheard of prior
to this time: Emma Willard’s in Troy, New York, 1821; Catharine Beecher’s in
Hartford, Connecticut, 1828; and Zilpah Grant’s in Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1828
(Horowitc 11).

[5] The early manied women’s property law reforms were often premised not so
much on ensuring women increased economic rights, but rather had the “intent to
secure the property of a married woman from her husband’s creditors in order to
protect family assets.” This was typiﬁed in 1839 Mississippi law which “merely
protected slave holdings of white married women from seizure by creditors” (Kahn
361). These early little laws did very little to increase economic freedom for women
inventors.

[6] The precedents established by this 1793 Patent Law continued to challenge
women’s property rights throughout the 19th century. “In Fetter v. Newhall, the
defendant inﬁinged a patent for drive screws, and tried to overturn the case by
arguing that Mary Fetter, a married woman, had no right to assign the patent to the
Fetter Drive Screw Company nor to sue for inﬁingement, for “at common law a
patent-right granted or assigned to a married women would be such personal
property that her husband could by virtue of his marital right, reduce it to possession
and make it his own.” The judge ruled, though, that “a married woman, an infant, or
a person under guardianship, might be an inventor, or the assignee of an inventor, . .
.but the ability to make the instrument, or the aids to the disability, must be found in
the laws of the states where all such rights are regulated.” In this legal maneuver the
judge believed that she “could make the instrument in writing by the laws of the
state, and when she had made it, it fulﬁlled the requirements of the laws of the
United States (Khan 382-383). So although the state and federal legalese beneﬁted a
married woman in this case, it was still an issue which she had to ﬁght and even
then, her consideration came under the categorization the same as an “infant or a
person under guardianship.”

[7] “Monopoly means control over supply: the total supply offered on the market
is controlled by a single interest” and in the American patent system, a patent was
designed as a legal monopoly granted on the theory that it promoted the progress of
science and the useful arts (Bennett 70, 122). In this sense it was not truly a
monopoly because a “monopoly takes something away from the public and a patent
“gives the community something of value by adding to the sum of human
knowledge” (61). Initially, monopolies were considered to have a negative economic
impact on the newly independent United States by many of the democratic founding
fathers. But eventually even Thomas Jefferson, who was particularly opposed to the
idea of monopolies, came to favor the patent system while acting as ﬁrst
administrator of the patent system. In a letter to J arnes Madison he commented;

45

An act of Congress authorizing the issue of patents for new
discoveries has given a spring of invention beyond my
conception. Being an instrument in granting patents, I am
acquainted with their discoveries. Many of them indeed are
triﬂing, but there are some of great consequence, which have
been proved of practice, and others which, if they stand the
same proof, will produce greater effect (67).

[8] Historian Ann Macdonald claims that it was not until 1873 that the ﬁrst
woman, Miss Anna Nichols, was hired as an assistant examiner (39). Charlotte
Smith makes no mention of Nichols in her 1890 article, “Women Employees in the
Patent Ofﬁce” in which she lists six early female assistant examiners. To date, I
have not found adequate research sources to verify or deny either claim. For the
purposes of this study, I have used the earliest dated sources.

[9] The difference in fees paid by inventors based on nationality established in
the 1836 Patent Act represents a clear example of the Patent’s Ofﬁce discriminatory
standards beneath the guise of democratic principles. In explanation of such
desparity, it was, in part, based on the way Americans were treated by other national
systems, particularly the English systems, which required Americans to pay higher
fees for patent rights and extended waiting periods (The Story 6-7; Vaughan 242-
243)

[10] Increase inventive activity is documented the following data: in 1830 the US.
population was approximately 12,800,000 and the Patent Ofﬁce issued 544 patents;
in 1850, the country’s population had almost doubled, while patents increased to
884. But in 1870, with the population at about 40,000,000, less than double the 1850
population, more than 12,000 patents were granted. By 1900, the population reached
76,000,000 and 24,660 patents were issued. Since the Patent Act of 1836 was passed
until 1900, the rate of invention increased more than 40 times (Kursh 25).

46

Chapter 2
OUT OF THE REVOLUTION:
SEEDS OF INDEPENDENT INVENTION

As historian David Noble correctly suggests, inventions are a function of
time, place, and resources. The time is post-Revolutionary America, the place is
New England, and the resources are American manufactured straw hats.

Post-Revolutionary America germinated a spirit of independence outside the
realm of political freedom. It fostered the potentiality of a unique American
character, distinctly different from its British ancestry. The roots of this American
character grew out of the victorious ﬁght for independence. But it also coincided
with another momentous in-progress revolution centered in British culture, the
Industrial Revolution. Both revolutions signiﬁcantly affected the emerging
American character, one which celebrated innovation and technological
advancement.

From the issuance of the ﬁrst American patent in 1790, this celebration has
been shared by women and men in the creative pursuit for technological
achievement. Although women and men shared in this emerging national innovative
spirit, the American characterization was nurtured and reﬂected by masculine
terminology and imagery from the beginning. National imagery grew and f
proliﬁcally sprouted complex cultural and ideological responses which generally

restricted and relegated women inventors from full participation in what was to

47

become characteristically a national past-time according to some historical observers.

[1]

Although women were restricted and relegated from full participation in this
national past time, as inventors they contributed technologically, socially, and
culturally to the development and progress of the new nation. Seeds of independent
invention germinated among the female population as well as the male population.
The accomplishments of women inventors during this period are generally buried
under historic neglect and cultural obscurity. Women inventors, like male inventors,
have contributed some signiﬁcant and some not so signiﬁcant inventions. But unlike
their male counterparts, women inventors technological contributions, regardless of
their value, have not been considered in the traditional histories of technology. Their
accomplishments go beyond the introduction of important technological
developments in our early national period. They reveal some important early and
persistent gendered assumptions about invention and women’s roles in the pursuit of
technological achievement.

Some of these assumptions surface through an examination of the straw hat
industry in colonial and post-revolutionary New England. This speciﬁc industry
serves as a particularly useful context in which to discover and understand some of
the earliest contributions of women inventors in America. This context also provides
a revealing framework of how women’s inventions, like men’s inventions, were a
function of time, place, and resources.

Six women inventors are noteworthy in the early American straw hat

industry: Sybilla Masters, Mary Kies, Betsey Metcalf Baker, Sophia Woodhouse

48

Wells, Lucy Bumap and Henrietta Cooper. Although their available biographic
proﬁles are generally quite minimal in this period of early national development,
they still reveal some of the gendered assumptions which confronted women
inventors from the beginning of the 19th century. Their contributions were both
technological and socially signiﬁcant but generally ignored. But before considering
the speciﬁc innovative contributions of these women, a brief historical summary is
necessary to contextually place the manufacture of hats as an important component
in the economic and technological development of early American culture.

It is a matter of historical record that the American hat industry, and the straw
hat industry speciﬁcally, became an important element in shaping America’s
economic status prior to and after the Revolution and contributed a signiﬁcant
dimension to the national American character. By the 1820s it was acknowledged
that, “There is, perhaps, no manufacture (of its amount) that can be regarded as so
important to the welfare of society in the United States, as that of hats and bonnets,
from straw, grass, &c” (Niles Register, April 17, 1824, 98).

The manufacture of hats was an early colonial endeavor, one which the
British cultivated through an aggressive capitalist approach. An interesting record of
such evidence is found in the premiums which were offered by the British during the
seventeenth century to colonists “for the promotion of industry, especially in relation
to cloth material” which included wool and felt hats (Bishop 321). For example, in
1662 the Assembly of Virginia offered “10 pounds of tobacco for every good hat
made of wool or fur” (Bishop 321). A good hat in 1662 was skillfully crafted by

hand. This skill had been transported to America with the Pilgrims who ﬁrst settled

49

at Plymouth. Godbert Godbertson, a skilled hatter, was among the ﬁrst colonists, as
was Timothy Hatherly, one of the ﬁrst investors to back the American hat industry
(Severn 99). Along with this kind of expertise and backing, Colonists also had the
advantage of abundant natural resources. Fur supplies were readily accessible by
hunting, trapping and trade with Native Americans. This “plentiful supply of raw
materials for hats soon attracted skilled workers from Europe” (Severn 100). It was
a formula for success: plentiﬁrl raw material, skilled craftsmen, and British support
through premium incentives and investment backers.

Colonists responded enthusiastically. Ten years after the ﬁrst premium
inducements were offered to the colonists, an association of Massachusetts hatters
asked for “privileges and protection” from the colonial government to encourage
American manufacture. A few years later in 1672, Massachusetts passed a tax law to
keep traders from sending certain furs to England in order to make sure that local
hatters had a good supply” (Severn 100). From existing records, it appears that
colonists made productive use of the “good supply “of furs in the hat manufacturing
industry. Reports from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the New England
region in general all attested that “great quantities of bats were being produced’
(Bishop 340-371). It is interesting to note that “great quantities” produced in a
preindustrial factory setting actually meant a maximum of 3 hats a day per
manufacturer. Most colonial hats were produced in a home based cottage industry.
The earliest pre-industrial hat factories typically employed males and included, on
the average, one journeyman and possibly two apprentices in addition to the owner,

who functioned as a productive member of the work force. But as the industry

50

expanded under the forces of the Industrial Revolution, women became the
predominate operatives (Severn 102). [2] The cottage industry origins of the hat
industry placed women as participants early in the industry’s history, at ﬁrst only as
observers, later as unskilled labors, and eventually as skilled ﬁnishers.

By 1731, British support dramatically changed as evidenced by a complaint
lodged in a “Report Made by the Board of Trade” in which “the company of hatters
in London have complained to us that great quantities of these hats are exported to
Spain, Portugal and our West India Islands” (Bishop 340). By this time, Americans
had begun to proﬁtably export hats to such an extent that it cut into the British
market. Consequently, the Hat Act was passed which prohibited the exportation of
hats from the American colonies (Bishop 342, Tunis 46). [3] The law was designed to
cut American proﬁts which eliminated British concerns.

It prohibited anybody connected with the “British plantations”

from putting hats aboard any vessel with the intent to export

them “ﬁ'om thence to any other plantation or to any other place

whatsoever, under penalty of heavy ﬁne. . . Colonists were

indignant and feeling ran high (Severn 101).

Colonists were further restricted by law to limiting the number of apprentices to two
who could learn the hat trade. These restrictions were all part of the British
govemment’s mercantile economic theory which was imposed on the colonies with
increasing pressure. [4]

The American response was anything but submissive. They persisted in the
manufacturing of hats despite the loss of their most lucrative foreign markets. By

1748 restrictions had increased even further and fueled “some irritation of the public

mind in New Englan ” (Bishop 345). Rather than slow down hat production, it

51

 

appears that Americans were motivated to maintain a proﬁtable market for their hats,
which targeted their own burgeoning domestic market. Ironically, some of the same
strategies employed by the British “for the promotion of industry” were adopted
internally by colonists to encourage the continuance of quality manufactured hats.
For example, the following premium was offered in 1753:

“Liberal public offer was made by an individual in Delaware,

which then formed a territory of Pennsylvania, to promote the

industry of the lower countries:...for neatest and best hat, 40s,

the premiums to be awarded on First Tuesday in November,

1754, and to be increased in following years” (Bishop 346).

By 1767, records indicate that “the manufacture of hats was...brisklycarried
on in Carolina, and a proﬁtable export trade in hats existed with the Spanish Islands
(Bishop 371). A resolution was passed that same year which revealed the colonists
resolve to promote successful industry and also hinted at the growing disloyalty
fermenting among the colonists. It stated that “resolutions were made by the
colonists to abstain from the use after lst December” of several foreign articles
including “men’s and women’s hats” (Bishop 372). The American rebellion was
fueled by such subversive economic actions which most Americans admired and
abetted (Tunis 13).

Economic discontent and continued British discrimination fostered increasing
disloyalty among American industrial subj ects. More than hats were produced and
marketed. A spirit of independence was fostered by the British imposed legal
restrictions and the controlling economic competitiveness aggressively displayed by

British industry. The winds of revolution blew across the American economic market

and fueled Americans with “the spirit of a self-dependent industry.” [5] It was

52

observed that this spirit “animated more or less every household, from the wealthy
planter and oldest towns to the bark or log cabin of the frontier settler” (Bishop 415).

While the spirit of independence escalated throughout the 18th century, the
British felt conﬁdent that the legal embargo on the exportation of hats had
sufﬁciently stiﬂed technological innovation in that ﬁeld and, therefore, had
successfully curbed the development of hat manufacturing technology. For 30 years
following the law prohibiting the exportation of hats, British authorities were pleased
to report that no “material advances [had been] made toward the introduction of the
manufacture of cloth” (Bishop 342). They considered this a signiﬁcant advantage
for their economic prospects in the hat industry as such a technological lag impinged
on the American manufacture of felt and wool hats, and to some extent, on straw and
fur hats. But the accuracy of this conclusion is highly suspect given the proﬁtability
of hat manufacturing immediately following the Revolution when the new nation
experienced the emergence of pre-industrial factories, which included hat factories
(Tunis 48; Severn 101-103). [6]

The advantage of having raw materials and a well established domestic
market for hats stimulated Americans to pursue technologically innovative ways to
produce hats. According to economic historian Kenneth Sokoloff, inventive
activity was positively related to growth in markets in early industrial America.

With the interruptions in foreign trade caused by British restrictions, patented
inventions emerged in a pro-cyclical pattern and began to grow rapidly particularly

in the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812 (Sokoloff 813, 817).

53

Women inventors were part of this contextual history of the hat industry, but
questions arise as to what extent they were involved. Ensconced within a traditional
historical context, women participated only as consumers of hats. Records speak
plainly that there existed a division of labor in the production of early hat
manufacturing like in other manufacturing concerns. What motivated women
inventors to produce technological contributions to the hat industry at this time
suggests a division of labor outside of a woman’s proper place and capabilities.
What gendered assumptions about invention did they challenge or support?

A prevalent and enduring assumption regarding the relationship between
women and hats has been that women have been socially controlled by fashion
dictates. There is ample evidence to support that early American women were
certainly inﬂuenced by European styles and imitated such style in dress, manners,
and cultural tastes in the arts. As early as 1698 it was reported that “millinary ware
exported to the colonies had reached a substantial amount” (Stephenson l). [7]
Continued demand throughout the next century required shop owners, as exempliﬁed
in Williarnsburg, Virginia advertisements, to “frequently employ trained rrrilliners or
mantua-makers from abroad to keep the business alive and up-to-date with the
newest and most fashionable modes of the day” (Stephenson 3). Like other
enterprising colonial entrepreneurs, “Virginia milliners were very style-conscious
and eager for the devotees of fashion to be their customers” (Stephenson 2).
Generally, the relationship between colonial American women and hats has been

predicated on this slavish notion of European fashion imitation. Although it

represents a limited relationship between women and the hat industry during the 18th
century, it is not without some merit.

For example, “a new madness” was started by French women during the later
half of the eighteenth century. Mounds of false, stiffened hair were piled over
elaborate wire ﬂames, standing several feet tall. They were fantastically decorated,
sometimes depicting “entire scenes, such as a group of sportsmen hunting in the
woods, a doll on a swing that swayed back and forth, or a company of toy soldiers on
dress parade” (Severn 37). This quickly became the fashion rage in England and was
subsequently transferred to the American colonies, as noted by John Lord Shefﬁled
(1783) that “America takes its fashions ﬁom England” (Stephenson 17). Although it
never reached the extreme levels of popularity that it did in Europe, American
women imitated this trend enough to provoke the ridicule of the American press.

The Boston Gazette in 1771 told of a young women who was thrown from
her carriage and her great headdress was thrown off which “proved a revelation, for it
was ﬁlled with tow, wool, yarn, curled hair, and hay.” In 1777 a New Yorker wrote
of a “party of eleven fashionable ladies who had among them on their heads “an acre
and half of shrubbery, grass plots, tulip beds, kitchen gardens, etc.” (Severn 39).

The following anonymous poem published in 1768 describes the underlying ridicule
toward this extreme fashion and women’s effort to imitate it:

When he scents the mingled steam

Which your plaster’d heads are rich in,

Lard and meal and clouted cream,
Can he love a walking kitchen (Severn 39).

55

Attesting to the popularity of such styles, most women needed the assistance of a
hair dresser to construct such fashionable towers and, in New York alone prior to the
Revolution, more than forty-one hairdressers were registered and newspaper ads
testiﬁed to the stiff competition for “composing heads” (Severn 39). These popular
responses help to understand just how pervasive the wearing of hats was in colonial
America. The relationship between women and hats as supported by the above
examples, deﬁnes women as consumers motivated by conformity to the dictates of
fashion.

But there was also another dimension in the relationship between women and
hats, one which involved production rather than consumption. This aspect has
traditionally been ignored in representative cultural images depicting women and
hats. Generally, production modes have been dominated by masculine imagery
which depict men in the role of producer as factory owner, skilled craftsmen, and
producer of technological machinery and techniques. But the evidence is clear that
women participated actively in the hat industry work force, both in the cottage
industry and pro-industrial factory setting. The division of labor in these early
manufacturing enterprises was quite typical, with women functioning as the
unskilled laborers doing tasks which were classiﬁed as “women’s work” such as
needle and ﬁne detail work. One source from a Danbury, Connecticut, hat
manufacturer in 1780 reveals that, “The hat, once formed, was transferred to the
gentler sex, whose ﬁngers in the vicinage of a factory, found regular employment in
picking out with tweezers the unequal tougher hairs from the nap” (Bishop 497).

This description supports a later, more extensive description of women who work at

56

the alleged largest hat factory in the world in Bermondsey, England. In that factory
women worked in the preparation of crude materials, by attending a machine that
removed the fur without being cut, while others ﬁnished this process by using a
small instrument shaped like a cheese cutter to remove remaining hair (Dodd 141 -
142). Women also were employed as trimmers, “all plying the industrious needle,
and earning an honourable snbsistence” (Dodd 154).

As much of our early technology was transferred from British origins, it is
not surprising to ﬁnd large numbers of American women employed and performing
similar tasks in the early American hat industry. The following entries from the
Niles ’ Register provide some insightful examples:

“In four counties in the state of Massachusetts, the

manufacture of straw and grass bonnets recently employed and

subsisted 25,000 persons, chieﬂy females, and the value of

their products was $825,000 a year... There is perhaps , no

manufacture, (of its amount that can be regarded as so

important to the welfare of society in the United States, as that

of hats and bonnets, from straw, grass, &c. It is ahnost

exclusively the work of young girls, and , at least so far as

such things are necessary, the whole amount of the product is

a clear gain to the country—for the females, if not so

employed, would be idle or doing worse ” (April 17, 1824,

98).

Ten years later, the hat industry still continued to supply hats and proper female
employment. “No other pursuit, perhaps affords so large a sum to each person
employed as these beautiful manufactures--so happily ﬁtted for females, and
rendering thousands of them independent” (Oct. 25, 1834, 114).

Not only was the hat industry a lucrative one, but it provided employment for

women outside of the home. This employment was particularly desirable, because it

57

was “so happily ﬁtted for females.” The manufacture of hats and bonnets provided
women with appropriate female employment. Some even considered that working in
a “straw shop” fostered attributes which made desirable wives (Copeland 36-37; 46-
49).[8] Ideologically, masculine and feminine concepts have been, in part,
traditionally constructed in relation to each other through division of labor and work
experience. Technological change, such as occurred in the hat industry, is a useful
context for understanding such gendered constructs. The sexual division of labor was
not only a structural feature of modern capitalism, but also in this case, a basis for
gendered assumptions about women’s relationship with technology (Wright 6).

The evidence in this case challenges the assumption that women ﬁrnctioned
as only consumers in a capitalistic technological innovative industrial system.
Women participated in the hat industry as both consumers and producers, and,
thereby, were in place as a function of time leading to productive innovation. As
consumers, women continued to be interested in fashion while simultaneously
committed to American economic independence and technological progress.

Consequently, American women took the lead in rejecting European fashion
trends, including hats. Several distinctly “American” styles made with natural straw
resulted, especially in women’s bonnets. The Wethersﬁeld bonnet and the Dunstable
bonnet became popular American styles. Many variations and innovative styles
using different kinds of braids became popular in the American marketplace.[9]

It is particularly signiﬁcant that the function of time under consideration
includes a strong sense of patriotic fervor. As England steadily increased taxation

and trade restrictions, colonists rebelliously responded and worked toward economic

58

as well as political independence. Female inventors, like male inventors, were
participants in this national quest for independence. The Revolution and its
aftermath fostered a community spirit united in the goal for economic success based
largely on the ability to produce goods from natural resources for a domestic and
foreign market. This national endeavor in turn fostered an atmosphere ripe for
technological innovation (Gies 21-24). Women played an important part in the
success of the industry not only by creating a consumer market for such products, but
by inventing signiﬁcant hat technologies and advancing the success of American hat
manufacturing (Stanley Mothers 44; Macdonald 6-7).

By the advent of the Revolution, the hat industry was well established in the
colonies. Quietly growing up in conjunction with this industry was the manufacture
of straw goods. By 1794, after the war, American made woven straw hats were
introduced and became a signiﬁcant and important element of not only the economic
structure, but also as a political statement about the country’s emerging national
identity which favored domestic manufactured goods over foreign imports (Meyer
278; Klein & Klein 304). The introduction of straw manufacture spawned
signiﬁcant inventions by women and represent some of their most important
technological contributions to early American industry. The industry prospered,
advanced, and became critically important during the post Revolutionary period and
crucially important during the War of 1812 (Macdonald 6).

As producers, women inventors played an important part in the history of the
success of the industry. The ﬁrst woman inventor connected to the hat industry was

Sybilla Masters, a Quaker women who lived in Pennsylvania during the early 18th

59

century. By some authorities, she is considered the ﬁrst American woman inventor,
but due to the fact that she did not receive an American patent and the British patent
was granted in her husband’s name, her distinction is somewhat obscured. English
Patent No. 401, granted on November 25, 1715, for a machine to prepare Indian corn
was issued to Thomas Masters, Sybilla’s husband. The document clearly credits “a
new invention found out by Sybilla, his wife” (Vare & Ptacek 31). The next English
patent issued to Thomas Masters was in 1716, “for the Sole Working and weaving
in a New Method, Palmetto, Chips, and Straw, for covering hats and bonnets, and
other improvements in that ware.” This invention, too, was credited to his wife.
“On July 15, 1717, the Provincial Council granted permission for recording and
publishing Sybilla’s patents in Pennsylvania” (Vare & Ptacek 33). What was
particularly signiﬁcant about this invention was that it presented a “new way of
working and staining in straw and palmetto leaf to produce women’s bonnets with
New World materials.” Later on, the palmetto leaf became as important to the
manufacture of men’s hats as straw was to women’s hats (Stanley Mothers 44).
Masters sold her bonnets in London, though, and did not cultivate an American
market for her product or her technique. Nor did she live to realize how important
hats were to become in sustaining the domestic American market. She died in 1720
and her husband died shortly thereafter in 1723.

It was 93 years later when the ﬁrst woman ﬁnally received an American
patent in her own name, and signiﬁcantly, the invention pertained to the hat industry.

That distinction goes to Mary Kies in 1809. But she was not the next women to

60

contribute a signiﬁcant technological invention to the hat industry. That distinction
clearly belongs to Betsy Metcalf Baker.

In 1798 Betsy Metcalf Baker of Providence, RI, invented the braid and weave
which later became known as the American Dunstable bonnet which was in imitation
of an Italian leghom bonnet. Along with her aunt, she also developed a bleaching
method in which the straw bonnet was held over hot coals and then sprinkled with
sulfur. Although Pennsylvania Quaker girls were making straw hats for their own
use in the late 17th century, Baker is generally credited as the one who ﬁrst started
the commercial manufacture of straw hats in American (Severn 83). At the age of
72, Baker wrote to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Jesse Metcalf, an account of how the
process and business ﬁrst started:

At the age of twelve I commenced braiding. My father, Joel

Metcalf, brought home some oat straw which he had just

mowed. I cut the straw and smoothed it with my scissors and

split it with my thumbnail. I had seen an imported bonnet but

never saw a piece of braid, and could not tell the number of

straws. I commenced the common braid with six straws, and

smoothed it with a junk bottle, and made part of a bonnet, but

found that it did not look like the imported ones. I added

another straw, and then it was right. An aunt, who resided in

the family encouraged me, while most of my friends said I

should never learn” West Dedham, MA, February 11, 1858

(Baker 59-60). [10]

After experimenting ﬁrrther, she found that seven straws produced a braid that
looked like the popular imported Italian braids in straw hats. The hats were made by
hand, ﬁnished with ribbons and satin linings and sold for one dollar a piece. This

was the beginning of one of the most important and successful post Revolutionary

American industries, one which not only survived the economic upheaval of the War

61

of 1812, but actually prospered during that time (Tharp 3-5; Bowen 71-73; 108-109;
Macdonald 6).

Baker did not receive a patent for her innovative technique because she did
not apply for one. She said that she “did not wish to have my name sent to
Congress” (Baker 60). According to her own ﬁnther account, she was satisﬁed with
her earnings, which she wrote, “could easily earn one dollar per day, and sometimes
one dollar and ﬁfty cents, for several weeks at a time” (Baker 60). She did not see
any merit in obtaining a patent.

She, like other women of the time, dreaded the idea of being recognized
publicly for something outside the traditional role of women. One account based on
an interview with her late in life said that she was “then, as now, quite tenacious of
her reputation as a Christian” and that “her name should never go to Congress”
(Bowen 73; Baker 60).

Her response reﬂects a persistent and prevailing attitude among women
inventors during the nineteenth century. Ida Tarbell, a late 19th, early 20th century,
journalist and women’s rights advocate published an article in 1887 entitled,
“Women as Inventors” where she reﬂected on the relatively small number of known
women inventors. She wrote:

“There are good reasons why the list is not more extensive. If

a woman does contrive a useful article it is ordinarily for her

convenience; she is satisﬁed in meeting her own wants, or

doing something “original.” Her ingenuity usually has no

higher ambition. Her life is so circumscribed that she does not

see the advantages to herself and family of a patent on her
device” (357).

62

For Betsy Metcalf Baker and countless other women inventors who followed after
her, to be identiﬁed as a professional inventor was outside acceptable social bounds.
Her relationship with the technology of hats was conﬁned to consumer and laborer.
Working in the hat industry was an acceptable form of female employment and was
recognized as one that “seemed to foster attributes that made desirable wives”
(Copeland 46). But inventors, producers of hat technology, made good husbands, not
good wives. The sexual division of labor strongly categorized men as inventors, not
women.

Because Baker did not pursue a patent, though, did not mean that she was not
interested in sharing her innovative technique. To the contrary, she wrote that she
“learned them [women] to braid from nearly all the towns around Providence, and
never received any compensation for it. I learned all who came, to make bonnets,
free of expense” (Baker 60). Nor was she focused on maintaining total anonymity
as her role of inventor. In the same account, she gives careful attention to setting the
matter straight as her claim of inventor. She wrote,

It has been published that they ﬁrst began to braid in

Wrentham, but it is a mistake. Mrs. John Whipple, after she

was aged, told some one that she thought it was Hannah

Metcalf who ﬁrst braided; but this was a mistake for she never

braided (Baker 60).

She chose not to acquire formal public recognition or monetary gain from her
invention due to the circumscription of her role as a woman in the community. It
appears from Baker’s comments and others, that it was considered immodest,

unfeminine and inappropriate for a woman to be an inventor. It went against the

social norm of women’s primary role as wife and mother. The image of the inventor

63

L4

was not just visually male, but socially determined as masculine. Women had long
been socialized to be generous, virtuous, submissive and domestic, not mechanically
creative, technologically innovative or as part of the creative moving force of the
industrial revolution. For some women, like Baker, the idea of patenting was outside
their appropriate place and they found it more acceptable and in line with feminine
virtue to “freely pass their ideas on to relatives and friends, rather than seeking to
patent and proﬁt” (Stanley xxxix).

This kind of circumscription was commented on by women’s rights
advocates who were contemporaries of Baker and surfaces as an unspoken,
subconscious social dictate from the earliest national records. Seventeen years
before Tarbell published her thoughts on women inventors, Matilda J. Gage
published an article entitled “Woman as Inventor” in 1870. Both articles introduce
some of the early women inventors who were involved with the hat industry and, like
Tarbell, Gage concluded that many women chose not to be recognized in this ﬁeld
due to pressures to conform to the standard restrictive roles proscribed as proper for
women. She wrote eloquently how such standards affected women inventors:

If women have ideas, they are taught to repress them as

improper for their sex, and the genius which does them and

their sex honor, is deemed a matter to be hidden from light.

Instances have come to my knowledge in which families have

been raised to afﬂuence through some invention of a woman,

which she was ashamed to acknowledge as hers lf in this

day of respect for woman, and of the printing press to

disseminate knowledge, we ﬁnd multitudes of such instances,

we can well imagine of how much inventive reputation she has
been robbed in ages past” (21).

It is impossible to tell how many women inventors have been “robbed” for
the reasons Gage suggests, but the records verify that there were thousands of
American women during the nineteenth century who applied for and received
patents. Why did some defy conventional standards of proper female roles and
occupations? Were they motivated by economic gain, patriotic duty or the creative
spirit, all of which were characteristically associated with an emerging national
image based on male imagery?

Although most existing records and primary sources provide minimal details
regarding women inventors, there are valid clues which suggest that some women
were motivated by a combination of such things. The male centeredness of the
national image was culturally deﬁned during the early years of the 19th century and,
while most of the traits that were associated with it did exclude women in some very
signiﬁcant ways, the distinction was less apparent in its formation than when
retrospectively considering the social status of women inventors.

In some ways, colonial women participated in a less rigidly deﬁned social
and cultural atmosphere. At a time when neither innovation nor individuality was
nationally celebrated, women’s roles in pre-Revolutionary New England appeared to
be much more integrated with males roles, motivated and dictated by the reality of
time and place. Historian, Laurel Ulrich, provides evidence from this time period
suggesting that women’s lives “were deﬁned not only by gender but by a political
structure, a geographic and demographic setting, and a matrix of cultural and
religious values” (241; 4-5). The emergence of a national image based on male

characteristics and values may have appeared less deﬁned to some during this time

65

(Ulrich 3-10; Meyer 27 8-280). As the gap progressively expanded, deﬁned
increasingly by women’s access to education, legal entitlement, restricted social roles
of mother and wife, and employment opportunities, women inventors, ironically
gathered force in growing numbers. Inequality based on gendered assumptions
continued to present obstacles, but such circumspect deﬁnition of roles also created a
collective view among women involved in the inventive pursuit as testiﬁed to by
writers like Gage and Tarbell.

As mentioned the ﬁrst woman to receive a patent in the United States was
Mary Dixon Kies of South Killingly, Connecticut, in 1809. Like most women
inventors, very little is known about her life, her aspirations or motivations. Her
invention is often referenced simply because it was the ﬁrst one patented by a
woman. Kies invention is merely listed as “straw weaving with silk or thread”
(LWP). It remains ambiguous as to how this invention should be cOrrectly classiﬁed.
It has been referenced as a machine, a device, and a process (Tharp 6; Jurate &
Kazickas 34; Scientific American, 1903, 247; Macdonald 6). There is no consensus,
and the one piece of conclusive evidence which might have provided some insight,
the original patent record, was destroyed in the Patent Ofﬁce ﬁre of 1836 (Stanley
445).

The fact that it was accepted by the patent ofﬁce, though, indicates it ﬁrlﬁlled
the patent requirements which stated that an invention should be “sufﬁciently useful
and important” (The Story 2). Although the speciﬁc nature of Kies invention may
never be known, it may be assumed that it was useful in the preindustrial

manufacture of hats and provided a transitional link to the industrial age where

66

mechanized factories revolutionized the way things were produced. The bonnet and
hat remained a cottage industry for many years, but by the 18303 it had evolved to a
factory industry (Tharp 9; Bowen 108). Kies was involved in the industry in some
capacity other than consumer by virtue of her invention. Adequate biographic details
remain hidden as to the original nature of her relationship to the hat industry, but
enough evidence exists which merits a long over due in recognition of her inventive
contribution to the success of the straw hat industry.

The next signiﬁcant invention by a woman related to the hat industry was in
1821, and it is said to have superseded Kies invention. This lends some credibility to
the assumption that Kies invention was a machine or device rather than a process or
technique. A process or technique would be continually improved upon and not
merit a patent, especially without the listed designation as an “improvement in”
which became a common listing description in patent records.

But what is certain about Kies invention, is that it was a function of the time,
a most fortunate function for the struggling and war threatened young United States.
In 1807, just two years before Kies patented her invention, President Thomas
Jefferson passed the Embargo Act which prohibited all exports. The Act had a two
fold design: 1) to keep United States merchant ships off the seas to end all chance of
attack and provocation, and 2) by denying American goods and markets to Britain
and France, it was hoped that great economic pressure would effectual be leveled and
cause them to moderate policies toward American shipping (Garraty 121). In reality,
the Embargo was an economic disaster. It caused prices to fall for farm products and

manufactured goods, searnan were unemployed and business were severely

67

disrupted. "\1 This was a time of national economic ﬂux, with potential for ruin and

.J

renewed dependency upon France and England. TAny technological contributions to
advance and support American manufacturers were all too welcomefiThe hat
industry is one of the few American manufacturing business that prospered during
the upheaval prior to the War of 1812 and its aftermath, fdue in part to its strongly
developed domestic market and advanced manufacturing techniques and
mechanization (Macdonald 6; Copeland 36). V‘-

Unlike Baker, Kies patented her invention and received very public
recognition for her contribution with no extent record of any reluctance on her part.
By 1809, President James Madison was in ofﬁce and his ﬂamboyant wife, Dolly,
made public recognition of Kies invention by commending her “genius in
discovering a process to boost New England’s hat industry” (Macdonald 6). Such
public praise is evidence that some women did defy the gendered assumption
regarding the male centered image of the prototypical inventor by accepting full
public credit and recognition for participation in a socially determine male role.

The signiﬁcance of this invention goes well beyond individual genius in its
complex and diverse contributions to America in a time of crisis, By serving as an
impetus for expanded and improved industrial factory technology, it was an
important component of the early Industrial Revolution. Economically, it was a
boost to the American economy. The process offered effective production of
American made hats to a well developed domestic market and, thereby, helped to

effectively combat the negative effects of 1807 Embargo Act. The invention also

made a social statement about the potential for female creativity, which although

68

seems to have been very moderately received at the time, it was not without some
measure of meritorious recognition. It would some time, though, before women’s
potential for technological creativity received consistent recognition and positively
affect how technology, invention, and national identity were shaped.

Although this shaping was not always in clear terms, the affect of some of
the early women’s inventions encouraged and paved the way for other women to
follow. Such was the case of the invention that is said to have supersede Kies’ straw
braiding process. Like Kies who was from South Killingly, Connecticut, the next
woman inventor contributing to the hat industry was also from Connecticut. Her
name was S0phia Woodhouse Wells and she was from Wethersﬁeld. Wells was
awarded a patent for substituting native straw grass, a kind of grass called spear grass
and red top hay (Klein & Klein 304; Tharp 6). Although Wells’ patent was not
included in the 1888 LWP, she is listed as joint inventor with Gardner Wells in the
List of Patents 1 790-184 7 published under the direction of Edmund Burke,
Commissioner of Patents in 1847. The invention is catalogued in that list as “hat,
bonnets of grass” and the inventors are listed as being from Wethersﬁeld,
Connecticut. Gardner could have been her husband, brother, father or some other
male relative.

The validity of her patent is further established by the fact that she sent a
sample of one of her Wethersﬁeld bonnets to the London Society of the Arts
exhibition in 1821 and won a medal (Patterson 63). There is contradiction whether
the medal was a gold or silver, but her invention was documented as being “superior

in color and ﬁneness to the best Leghorn Straw.” She was requested to submit seeds

69

and a description of the process so British merchants could import and cultivate the
grass. But she informed them that she had patented it already, and, therefore, was
not at liberty to do so (Macdonald 7). I

Although her patent was not included in the LWP, it did not go unnoticed by
some of her contemporaries. It attracted attention from a New York business
entrepreneur and in his efforts to market the process, he sent a “Wethersﬁeld” bonnet
to Louisa Adams, wife of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and later ordered
several of them. It is not certain that she ever wore the hat sent to her by the New
York businessman, but it was interesting that the hat was not returned which was
Adarn’s customary practice to return all giﬁs. He later wrote in his diary that “it was
an extraordinary specimen of American manufacture...[and] ingenuity of our
country” (Macdonald 8; American Woman ’5 Gazetteer 35). Although Adams made
no mention in his diary that a women invented the process, he had to have been
aware of the fact because as Secretary of State, he signed all patents along with
President Madison (Macdonald 8).

Wells, with another unnamed woman, also won a prize for the “Best Grass
Bonnet” at Hartford County’s Society for Promoting Agriculture and Domestic
Manufactures (Patterson 63). It was apparently this prize that prompted the
enterprising William Cobbett to share Wells accomplishments and “his own
extensive knowledge of American agriculture with British manufacturers” (Sloat 97).
It does not seem merely coincidental that at about the same time “Parliament
initiated protection for the British braiding industry by increasing the list of dutiable

items in the tariff regulations of 1822” including imported straw (Sloat 97).

70

It is not certain what economic gain Wells made from her invention, but
references imply that recognition involved manufacturing concerns. Her motive may
very well have been, in part, for monetary gain given the lucrativeness of the straw
market and it being one of few industries that women were able to participate in with
the potential of economic compensation and social approval. Many women
inventors who followed Wells were highly motivated to make a proﬁt from their
inventions regardless of the social criticism.

Both Kies’ and Well’s inventions were functions of time, place, and
resources. Their inventions in the hat industry were signiﬁcant in promoting the
national economy in times of political and economic turmoil through technological
advancement, a pattern followed by both male and female inventors. Also like male
inventors, women inventors during this time utilized American resources. But unlike
male inventors, women inventors deﬁed the gendered assumption about their
abilities and roles as mother and wife by stepping into the industrial creative sphere
where technological invention occurred. And for those women who ventured to
invent technologies in the hat industry, they broached a three-fold barrier. One, of
course, was simply by inventing something; another was by inventing something in
the industrial and manufacturing sector of society which was clearly segregated by
gender roles and division of labor. The third barrier came in the form of defying a
moral Shibboleth. The following account illustrates how this barrier pressured the
female population, and particularly would have targeted women who were interested

in promoting the straw industry through invention.

71

Dr. Stanley, a minister in Attleboro, Massachusetts, delivered his sermon
entitled “Vanity of Straw Hats in the Meeting House” which “protested the
appearance of straw bonnets in the meeting house sometime during the early
nineteenth century. It was reported that,

He made direful forecasts of dissolution of character, sinﬁrl
luxuries, neglect of duty, passion for balls and fashions, and
carelessness as to health and studies. Women who earned
money, he said, would become independent of men and assert
their superiority. He implored them to give up their bonnets
and return to the industry and frugality of the past (Bowen
108).

An opposite viewpoint countering the above moral chastisement is exempliﬁed in
Niles ’ Register of April 17, 1824. Speaking of the manufacture of “hats and bonnets,
from straw, grass, &c,” it argued that the industry,

...is almost exclusively the work of young girls, and, at least,
so far as such things are necessary, the whole amount of the
product is a clear gain to the country--for the females, if not so
employed, would be idle or doing worse. Industry is better
than preaching, for the preservation of morals; and the idea of
independence, which naturally follows a knowledge of the fact
in the mind of a young woman that she can maintain herself, is
the greatest, perhaps of all the preventives of vicious and
depraved habits...And besides, if we must or will have articles
of luxury, hats at 40 or 50 dollars a-piece, is it
disadvantageous that the manufacture of them should give a
decent support to so many females, and essentially contribute
to the checking of crime? What is the effect of the female
character on society? Who so amiable as a virtuous girl
earning her support by the labor of her own hands, and
providing for the wants of others-~who so injurious to the
community as young females becoming worse than brutes to
get bread? (Niles ' Register, April 17, 1924, 98).

Moral conﬂict concerning “dissolution of character, neglect of duty and the

admonition to “return to the industry and frugality of the past” was not an

72

atmosphere wherein women were encouraged to publicly present innovative
technologies which would place themselves distinctly outside of the acceptable
perimeters of their proper social roles. But as the editorial piece in the Niles’
Register suggests, there was some support for women who ventured outside of
gendered social roles. This conﬂict continued to overshadow women inventors
throughout the 19th century, a pressure male inventors did not confront on any social
level.

Although the evidence is clear that women did participate in the industrial
creative sphere from our earliest national period, traditional histories about American
invention and technology consistently minimize women’s contributions. Historical
writers during our early national period were predominantly male and were
inﬂuenced and biased against women inventors in the same vein as Dr. Stanley.
Such bias has had a long and rich tradition and produced fodder to the prototypical
image of an inventor as male. Most recorded history of technology bears the imprint
of this long standing traditional male bias, thus it is not without surprise that so few
early women inventors are known, let alone celebrated (Wajcman 15).

Even though the available documentation on Kies and Woodhouse is
minimal, there is enough evidence to verify the validity of their inventions. Others,
though, are shrouded in even denser obscurity. Such are the inventions pertaining to
the hat industry of Lucy Bumap and Henrietta Cooper. On February 16, 1823,
Bumap of Merrimac, New Hampshire, was awarded a patent listed as “hats, weaving
grass” (LWP). This has been noted as an improvement on the process patented by

Wells, but it is not listed as such in the Patent records. According to the same

73

source, this process was adapted by a hat manufacturer and led to big business in
women’s straw hats (Klein & Klein 304).

Three years later, in 1826, Henrietta Cooper was awarded a process for
whitening leghom straw. This invention is different than Bumap’s in purpose and
substance. Whitening was a process whereby the straw was bleached to a white
color before braiding. Originally, this was a very simple process sometimes done by
just scalding the straw in a barrel of hot water to remove the green sap and then laid
out in the sun for bleaching (Sloat 91-92). “After thirty days, it might be bleached
further in sulfur fumes: bundles would be stood on end in boxes around a dish
containing pieces of sulfur, which were then ignited” (Patterson 63-64)
Reminiscence about “Straw Towns” are characterized by the memory of the sulfur
odor produced by bleaching straw (Patterson 64). There is no known description of
Cooper’s invention, but the brief name implies that the invention, either process or
machine, would have ﬁlled the need to bleach straw quicker, in greater quantities,
and with more uniform whiteness. As the demand increased for whitened straw
when hat factories became more mechanized, relying on sulfur fumes and 30 good
dry days in order to bleach a bundle of straw would certainly have been risky at best
and ruinous at worst.

The biographical proﬁle on Bumap and Cooper remain illusive, and the
nature of their inventions reveals a skeletal suggestion as to the functions of abundant
natural resources such as indigenous straws and grasses. They shared in the quest for
a national identity based, in part, on technological innovation, advancement, and

economic self-sufﬁciency. Like Kies and Wells, they stepped outside of their proper

74

sphere as women and publicly claimed credit for their inventions by patenting their
inventions. And given some of the ﬁnancial records available, it appears that they
would have stood to make a proﬁt by their inventions in the straw industry (Niles
Register April 17, 1824, 98; Dec 5, 1835, 232; Jan 8, 1848, 298)

Like Kies and Wells, too, their inventions were functions of time and place.
They actively participated in the sweeping industrialization that shaped the American
factory system. The 18205 ushered in a trend of declining prices for straw braid due,
in part, to the effects of an 1822 British tax law and the US. Tariff Act of 1824. It
was argued by Congress that the law would not “impose a higher rate of duties on the
consumption of the poor than on the rich” and when enforced it “virtually exempted
all imported Leghorn hats and braid from duty” (Sloat 97). This put an undesirable
competitive edge on American produced hats, as Italian Leghorn hats and braid were
considered to be of the highest quality. The “renewed importation of hats from Italy
[caused] a decline in the value and quantity of hats manufactured in the United
States” (Sloat 96). In addition, the British tariff regulations of 1822 added “a new
duty upon Leghorn hats...on plat not made up and even a duty...upon IMPORTED
STRAW” (Sloat 97). The economic forecast for the American straw industry was
not promising. Efforts to produce a quality hat more efﬁciently and cost effective
was badly needed and, consequently, well received. Recognition of women’s
speciﬁc technological contributions in the hat industry lay historically dormant
today, but at the time of their utilization, the importance was not totally overlooked.

Sophia Wells was duly recognized by the Hartford Agricultural Society for

her grass bonnet. Although Wells patented the use of native grass for hat

75

manufacturing and was recognized by some of her contemporaries, her contribution
has received little recognition in the annals of the traditional history of technology.
It is not surprising that Bumap and Cooper have received even less, but their lack of
recognition does not diminish the importance of their inventions. All three of these
New England women who invented signiﬁcant hat industry technologies in the
1820s, were motivated by some of the same factors: national interests, economic
gain, and technological curiosity.

From Sybilla Masters on, women inventors have stepped outside of their
properly proscribed social roles of mother and wife. Although American culture has
consistently celebrated technical innovation as a national heritage, both men and
women were socialized to view gender as an ideological construct which dictated the
proper relationship each sex should have with technology. In post Revolutionary
America, women’s relationship with technology was constructed and deﬁned as
consumer. Those women who chose to function as producers by creating innovative
technology were an anomaly. Social characterization of the inventor was steeped in
masculine ideology, and that enduring trend has been predicated not upon biological
sex difference but rather the historical and cultural construction of gender. In
particular, the concept of masculine and ferrrinine were produced in relation to each
other through work, with technological change functioning as a causal variable.
Early American women inventors, such as Kies and Woodhouse, have been excluded
from the indices to the standard histories of technology because since the inception

of the Patent Ofﬁce, “the history of technology represents the prototype inventor” as

76

male which has infused an overwhelming male bias in most technology research and
traditional histories (Wajcman 137, 17, 15).

The recovery of these women’s contributions lay not in some treasure chest
of old forgotten documents, but rather buried in the annals of the history of the straw
hat industry in early America. The function of time, place, and resources helps to
contextualize and docmnent their illusive contributions as part of the whole of the
history of American technology. Their inventions provide insight not only into
technological progress, but how such advancement was affected by political,
economic, and social contingencies.

Gendered assumptions about the proper role of women shaped their
technologically innovative contributions, which most of the time meant it was
prudently “deemed a matter to be hidden from light.” Gage commented upon this
unspoken but widely acknowledged assumption as, “custom, that unwritten law.”
Her indictment against custom concerning inventive women was scathing:

Custom, that unwritten law, has for years frowned upon any

attempt of woman to take such a step [get a patent in her own

name]. If she has been giﬂed with an inventive genius, she

has either stiﬂed its exercise, expended it upon style of

dress—that being deemed her legitimate province...Women

have not dare to exercise their faculties except in certain

directions, unless in a covert manner. A knowledge of

mechanics has been deemed unwomanly (Gage 6).

To misuse or “stiﬂe” inventive talent, Gage elaborated was an “outrage against
society” (Gage 6). Although incomplete in most cases, solid evidence exists

suggesting that women inventors such as Sybilla Masters, Betsey Metcalf Baker,

Sophia Woodhouse Wells, Lucy Bumap and Henrietta Cooper deﬁed custom and

77

invented signiﬁcant hat technologies. While half of the population in the post-
revolutionary period and through the 1820’s were socialized to participate in the
celebration of Yankee ingenuity, the other half was conditioned to view their
participation in such national inventive activity as another sort of “outrage against
society.”

Yet women were motivated like men by economic gain, patriotic duty, and
creative technical talent. The women inventors who contributed to the hat industry
in the early 19th century carried a germinated spirit of independence from the
political realm that fought and won the Revolution for Independence to the scientiﬁc
and technical battleground where the Industrial Revolution was in ﬁrll bloom.
Despite their historical neglect, their contributions represent signiﬁcant evidence that
women inventors were part of American seed of independence. The persistent
gendered assumptions about invention and women’s roles in the pursuit of
technological achievement was an on going a struggle for independence long aﬂer
the war was over. Despite the brilliant potentiality of women as inventors, their
contributions were suppressed by “custom, that unwritten law” for the duration of the

century.

78

Chapter 2 - NOTES

[1] Historian, M. D. C. Crawford observed that although “the industrial
revolution belongs to Europe, especially to England” that in the United States “the
physical results” were more manifest than in any other part of the world due to
Americans ability to increased the use of the machine and develop a greater amount
of power than Europe (383). By the 1830s French philosopher, Alexis de
Tocqueville, observed that American’s progress was premised on American minds
being “predisposed” to “every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth,
every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of
production, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect” (Oliver 23 6-23 7).

[2] List of sources supporting women’s predominance in labor force of hat industry:
Niles Register: April 17, 1824, p 98; Oct 25, 1834, p 114; Patterson 63-64

[3] Act of Parliament, King George 11, January 13, 1731: AN ACT to prevent
the Exportation of Hats out of any of His Maj efty’s Colonies or Plantations in
America, and to reftrain the Number of Apprentices taken by the Hat-makers in the
faid Colonies or Plantations, and for better encouraging the making of Hats in
GREAT BRITIAN (Tunis 46).

[4] The British government imposed a mercantile economic theory and practice
on the colonies. This system held “that a nation is more important than its parts--or
its colonies; that it should try to make everything it uses; that it should strive to sell
abroad but not to buy there; and that it should ﬁll its vaults with all the coin it could
lay hands on--and keep it” (Tunis 12). This system encouraged the colonists to
produce whatever would best serve the interests of England, and became increasingly
oppressive to American subjects. Sanctions and restrictions were imposed beginning
in 1660 with the Navigation Acts which included a published list of “enumerated
articles that the colonists could ship to British ports only. Such restrictions
continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and as late as 1774,
the last control law was implemented which forbade export to America of tools used
to make wool cloth, an industry which was designated as strictly British. Americans
were to continue to supply raw materials and were expected to buy British wool, but
they were not to produce it themselves for domestic consumption or export. The
mercantile system extended to importation laws, whereby colonists were expected to
buy for cash certain items from England only. These restrictive policies had
application in the hat industry, and contributed to the increasing discontent and
rebellion toward the Crown (Tunis 12). They fueled a nationalistic spirit which
motivated technological contributions in support of American industry, which
included the highly successﬁrl American hat industry.

79

[5] During the last quarter of the 18th century Americans exhibited a strong
degree of determination to resist dependence on British industrial support. They
were determined to be economically as well as politically free of British domination.
The hat industry ﬂourished, in part, because of this kind of motivation. Materials
and labor were readily available from native American resources, and there was an
enthusiastic market for anything American made. Dependence on foreign import or
export was largely avoided in the early American hat industry (Bishop 345-3 72;
415)

[6] According to hat historian, Bill Severn, the establishment of Zodac
Benedict’s hat factory at Danbury, Connecticut, in 1780 was among the earliest of
the ﬁrst real factories in the United States. Within the next 20 years, Danbury
witnessed the establishment of 50 more hat factories. The 18205 marked the
introduction of mechanized equipment which increased the speed of production and
the quality (101-102).

Massachusetts also was a noted center of early hat factories. The following
are representative examples of speciﬁc straw hat manufacturers: 1810, Asa & David
Thayer, Franklin, MA; 18205, Stoddard & Knowlton Company, West Upton, MA;
and 18208, Union Straw Works, F oxborough, MA (Tharp 6; Patterson 63; Brown
108)

[7] “The Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes rrrilliner thus: “a. A vendor of fancy
wares and articles of apparel, esp. Of such as were originally of Milan manufacture,
e.g. ‘Milan bonnets,’ ribbons, gloves, cutlery. B. In modern use, a person (usually a
woman who makes up articles of female apparel, esp. Bonnets and other headgear.
From the many literary references noted under haberdashery or millinery, one sees
that the two were closely connected in the 17th and 18th centuries, and that at no
time were milliners conﬁned to the trimming and selling of hats exclusively. This
connotation is of modern use. The 18th century milliner was a dealer in small
articles, ribbons, gloves, trimmings, jewelry, as well as hats” (Stephenson 1)

[8] The idea that women working in a straw shop produced good wives was
idealized in an early American poem entitled “The Straw Shop Girl”. The poem
praises the shop girl as being industrious. They work, “From early morn ‘til twilight,
/ And often later still.” They are intelligent: “The styles I can’t name over, / And it
takes more brains to make them /Than most of them will cover.” They are spiritually
minded” The Straw Girl goes to meeting/ On a pleasant Sunday night.” And, She
looks uncommonly pretty / Is richly dressed, perhaps, / And excites the admiration /
Of all the nice young chaps . . .” It is this kind of girl the poet writes is “the angel of
my dreams” and the one he wants to take as wife.

The poem also lends insight on the capabilities and appropriateness of
women working in a straw shop in the almost rebuttal-like lines as follows:

Yet, in all our cities

One cannot fail to see
Men occupying places

80

Where women ought to be.
If men are really better,
What is the difference, pray?
Both work in shops together
Because they need the pay.
No shame, nor yet dishonor,
Can rise from one’s condition,
But rather in the manner
Men slight their occupation (Copeland 46-49).

[9] The hat collection held by Henry Ford Museum & Greenﬁeld Village in
Dearbom, Michigan, holds several ﬁne example American-made straw bonnet types.
Their collection contains numerous examples of a late 18th century and
predominately 19th century straw bonnets, both hand sewn and machine sewn. For
speciﬁc examples note the following ID numbers for archival computer access:
41.214.1775.39; 94.0.1870; 94.0.18.128; 68.5.18; 91.0.11.2880; 94.0.18.115; and
94,0,18.117.

[10] Betsey Metcalf Baker referred to smoothing the six straw braids with a “junk
bottle” because the braid began to curl. A junk bottle was a “general utility container
of thick dark glass, the result of early European and American efforts at glass
making.” It was a “junk man” who bought and sold these bottles and broken glass to
be melted and used again.” Such bottles, of course, are not considered junk by
today’s standards and collectors criteria (Tharp 3-4).

81

f

Chapter 3

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY:
YANKEE INGENUITY AND THE SELF-MADE WOMAN?

When Andrew Jackson ﬁrst became president in 1828, he embodied the
ﬁ'uition of democratic individualism, an elevation and celebration of the self-
reliant common man made possible through the free pursuit of economic gain.
The appeals of J acksonian democracy are exempliﬁed in the ideas, rhetoric,
policies, and public gestures which mark his eight-year presidency (Meyers 15).
The ideas and rhetoric of the “Age of Jackson” bear close scrutiny in the
discussion of technology’s relationship to women, speciﬁcally addressing women
inventors, because they reﬂected Yankee ingenuity and self-reliance at a time
when the social construction of gender promoted and celebrated invention in
context of only approximately half of the population, the male half. [1]

The rhetoric and ideas voiced by President Jackson, reformers, and literary
voices offer substantial insight into this paradox. Such historical texts explore the
affects that republican virtue and J acksonian democracy had on women inventors
by describing how the American character was perceived, shaped, and idealized.
Gendered assumptions which socialized women as antitechnocrats were enriched
and perpetuated in the celebrated American characterization of Yankee ingenuity.
During a period of heightened national celebration of technological advancement
and scientiﬁc progress, the self-made woman embodied as inventor was not

celebrated. She was hardly remembered.

82

Although the historical documentation of her contributions is obscure, the
traits and values ideally inherent in the celebrated individualism of J acksonian
America surface in the annals of women’s patent records. Patent records bespeak
of resourceful, self-reliant, determined, and creative women inventors who
challenged the image of the prototypical inventor as solely male. The perception
of the ideal national character as exclusively the “self-made man ” possessed of
exemplary Yankee ingenuity is contested by the record of women inventors. [2]

The historic ﬁmction of the self-made man and the idea of self-help had
both positive and negative affects on American culture. It gloriﬁed material
progress and the encouraged lowly and common man to defy socially stratiﬁed
class distinctions and rise as far as their talents would take them. It honored
activity above response which judged merit on the basis of achievement (Wyllie
151). In no activity was this more apparent than in the pursuit of technological
advancement.

On the negative side, however, it inspired new dimensions in the pursuit of
the American dream which could only be had by a relative few. It condemned the
majority who failed and dismissed their attempts as a delinquency in character. It
fostered and enriched values in which “success required no explanations and
failure permitted no excuses” (Wyllie 151). The ideology of the American self-
made man represented men across the class lines, but it represented them
unequally. And the self-made woman, especially one who aspired to inventive

creativity, was not represented at all. “For women J acksonian America was not

83

the land of opportunity: rather the land of shrinking opportunity” (Dickenson
xvii).

Such distinctly American characteristics were revealed, in part, by those
who lived and observed life in antebellum America. Cultural conditions owing to
abundance, mobility, and environmental conditions helped to create the
phenomena of the self-made man and the collective view of the dependent woman
(Pessen 5-7). The composite version of this self-made man emerges from
contemporary accounts encompassing political, intellectual, and literary voices.
The work of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller
and others, present a contextual glance of how women were generally excluded
from this characterization. It also reveals how, at times, women mediated
gendered power relations as technology advanced at unprecedented speed.

The American character was idealized in heroic proportions during the
Age of Jackson. Heroes were virtuous men, honest, brave and forthright (Bode
xvi). They also possessed the ranking virtue of inventiveness, proudly referred to
as Yankee ingenuity. This was a new category of hero, the inventor (Breeden 78).
Individuals produced new ideas, new products, and new systems that were “so
spectacular [that] they revolutionized entire industries, created new industries, or
developed new processes which advanced the industrialization of the nation”
(Remini Revolutionary 14). Inventors were inspired to pursue new levels of
technological development and advancement because they “had a notion that they
could do anything if they tried hard enough and long enough. They could

outshine anybody under the sun” (Breeden 78).

84

v

[These were individuals who moved aggressively forward to transform
America from an agrarian and rural nation into an urban and industrial one. ‘These
exemplary characteristics were culled from an ideology which arose from two
distinct and different political persuasions, the J acksonian Democrats and the
Whigs. While the Democrats fought against capitalism in every form, be it banks,
corporations, or manufacturers, the Whigs staunchly believed that Americans
“depended on the proﬁtable investment of the moneyed capital of the country”
(Rozwenc, Ideology 352-353). Despite the largess of these political pirrions, the
country came together in support of the elevation of the common self-made man
and his ability to gradually rise from small beginnings. [3] Notwithstanding the
opposing political ideology, both parties supported the enormous energy that
people poured into economic development where,

. . . as the reward of merit and industry, and where they can

attain to the most elevated positions, or acquire a large

amount of wealth, according to the pursuits they elect for

themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment

of estates, no civil or political disqualiﬁcation, stand in

their path; but one has as good a chance as another,

according to his talents, prudence, and personal exertions.

This is a country of self-made men, than which nothing

better could be said of any state of society (Colton qtd. in

Rozwenc Ideology 356).
This idea that “one has as good a chance as another,” written in 1844 by leading
Whig intellectual, Calvin Colton, was what many believed. [4] It was clearly far
from the truth when even the most superﬁcial examination of the social position

of blacks, native Americans or women is considered. And although women

inventors held particular kinship with this J acksonian ideology in their “merit and

85

industry” and “according to [her] talents, prudence, and personal exertions,” the
value of their technological contributions and their role as inventor remained
circumscribed by the sincere belief that “women did not need equality” (Remini
Revolutionary 17). Historians suggest that Americans did believe democracy had
come to America, but not because it actually had. Rather, “the people at the time
believed democracy had come to America and they believed it in part because it
was repeated to them over and over” (Remini Revolutionary 79).

By the end of Jackson’s second term as President, the rhetoric and politics
of opportunity had become the premise of Jackson’s administration. On March 4,
1837, the last day of his second term as President, Jackson addressed the nation
summarizing the leading principles of the Democratic party. His speech has been
characterized as one of the most “eloquent and comprehensive statement[s] of the
Democratic version of the politics of opportunity” (Davis 188). In it he reviewed
“America’s proud heritage, present greatness, and future mission” (Davis 188).
He assured his “fellow citizens” that the test of the last 50 years proved that,

Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at

the end of nearly half a century we ﬁnd that it has preserved

unimpaired the liberties of the people, secured the rights of

property, and that our country has improved and is

ﬂourishing beyond any former example in the history of

nations. . .

In the legislation of Congress also, and in every measure of

the general government, justice to every portion of the

United States should be faithﬁrlly observed. No free

government can stand without virtue in the people and a
lofty spirit of patriotism . .. (Davis 188-195).

86

His lofty and noble choice of words regarding “rurimpaired liberties,” ring with
stinging poignancy when applied to women inventors. In order to preserve such
liberties, they ﬁrst had to be secured. For women inventors during Jackson’s
administration, they never were. Quite to the contrary, legal, economic, social,
and educational liberties, which were necessary in the pursuit of technological
advancement, were systematically denied to women inventors. The celebration of
the nation’s advancement was, in fact, distinctly and ironically characterized by
its socialization of half of its population as antitechnocratic. But nevertheless, it
was with a sense of triumph that Jackson concluded his address:

. . .The progress of the United States under our ﬁee and

happy institutions has surpassed the most sanguine hopes of

the founders of the Republic. Our grth has been rapid

beyond all former example in numbers, in wealth, in

knowledge, and all the useful arts which contribute to the

comforts and convenience of man, and from the earliest

ages of history to the present day there never have been

thirteen millions of people associated in one political body

who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people

of these United States (Davis 194).
The echo of the Patent Ofﬁce’s national mission cannot be missed in Jackson’s
laudatory praise of the “knowledge, and all the useful arts which contribute to the
comforts and convenience of man.” But what is missed in the ideology of
progress is the collective contribution of the entire populace. Technology and its
scale of advancement can be viewed as a symptom of our culture. It has not been
merely a means to an end, but a human activity ladened with values (Rybczynski

106). The values inherent in the politics of opportunity reﬂect an inequity of

national proportion for women inventors. The spoken values and the practiced

87

values of American antebellum culture for women inventors was symptomatic of
impaired liberties in their pursuit of technological advancement in “all the useful
arts.”

The spoken values ﬂourished, though, in the rhetoric of the democratic
party. For example, the noted Harvard scholar, historian, and J acksonian
democrat, George Bancroft, in his “philosophic essay on the natural wisdom of
the common man” wrote in 1835, “The absence of the prejudices of the old world
leaves us here [in America] the opportunity of consulting independent truth; and
man is left to apply the instinct of freedom to every social relation and public
interest” ( Rozwenc Meaning vii, 17). There is ample evidence that women
inventors applied “the instinct of freedom” to the public interest in some of the
their inventive pursuits. But such names and inventions as Nancy Johnson, ice
cream freezer (1843), Emma Stienhauer, cook stove (1831), Sara Mather,
submarine telescope and lamp (1845), and Mary Ann Cook, the sad iron (1848),
along with more than 30 other known women inventors during the J acksonian
Age have evanesced from the annals of the history of American technology. And
while men and women alike may have believed in the democratic mantra of equal
opportunity, the lack of equal competitive opportunity and recognition for women
inventors was to be their threnody for most of the 19th century. In 1883, Matilda
J. Gage, author and women’s rights activist, wrote that “the inventions of a nation
are closely connected with the freedom of its people” and the reason that “the

proportion of feminine inventors is much less than of masculine...arises from the

88

fact that woman does not possess the same amount of freedom as man” (Gage
NAR 488).

Still, women, like men, were motivated to invent with the prospect of
economic success, by a community spirit motivated to improve society, or out of
sheer inventive talent and ambition. And like male inventors, women heard over
and over how all America loved the inventor and the patriotic opportunities to
contribute to America’s national mission of progress. But unlike their male
counterparts, women inventors in antebellum America were subject to the
“prejudices of the old world” along with all the new world prejudices that saw
women ahnost exclusively as mothers and wives committed to upholding “piety,
purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Pessen 85). Such prejudicial social
casting oftenrled women inventors to invent in men’s names or jointly with a man
(which then were usually listed under the male name), and it can be surmised that
many women simply did not patent their inventions (Gage NAR 483-484; 488-
489). The incentive and gain to go through the trouble and expense was more
than minimal when faced with the reality that a woman had no rights which would
ensure her success, proﬁt, or recognition:

She could not vote or hold ofﬁce; her “right” to property

was limited; she could not enter most professions; she

could not make a will, sign a contract, or witness a deed

without her father’s or husband’s consent; and her children

could be taken from her if her husband so directed (Remini

Revolutionary 17).

The ideas and rhetoric of J acksonian democracy, no matter how many times they

heard it, remained just that for women inventors, ideas and rhetoric.

89

This rhetorical pattern had been well nurtured from the proceeding
revolutionary era. Its tenants and application were strongly entrenched even as
the ﬁrst women entered into the inventive arena. Although it was not until 1809
when the ﬁrst woman received a US patent, the experience of 18th century
American women inventors such as Sybilla Masters, Betsey Metcalf Baker, and
Catherine Greene foreshadowed the barriers that would challenge women
inventors in the Age of Jackson. Although most proﬁles of early women
inventors are relegated to historical obscurity, Greene’s case remains additionally
obscured in urrresovable controversy. Her experience reﬂects how women’s
relationship with technology was socially constructed to devalue her inventive
contributions on the eve of J acksonian democracy,.

There are many historical references linking Catherine Greene with Eli
Whitney and the cotton gin. The accounts of the invention of the cotton gin are
varied with little agreement and no conclusive evidence as to the truth. They do
agree that Whitney came to stay with Greene at her Mulberry Grove plantation in
1792 and that Whitney had a reputation as a mechanic (Gies 71-73; Gage NAR 3).
Beyond that, three basic theories as to her involvement are summarized as
follows:

First, that Catherine Greene was the real inventor and

Whitney merely her model maker; second, that Whitney

was the inventor but Greene solved a crucial problem with

the ﬁrst model; and third, that the story of Greene’s

contribution is just a pleasantuor puerile--fantasy (Stanley
796)

90

Several 19th century sources support the ﬁrst and second theories, but modern
sources generally site the third theory as fact or simply omit the account entirely.
[5] Some variation of this account surfaces in more than 15 consulted sources,
which makes it “hard to imagine such acres of smoke without at least a small ﬁre”
(Stanley 47). Despite the fact that Greene’s participation cannot be conclusively
substantiated, the conﬂicting accounts reveal some of the basic power struggles
women mediated in their relationship to technology during the inventive age.

One interesting aspect of this relationship was embedded in a woman’s
identity. Unlike Eli Whitney, historical records about Greene’s personal life are
scant. Little is known about her childhood or education (Stanley 797). She is
usually cited as “the widow of General Nathaniel Greene of revolutionary fame”
and later the wife of Phineas Miller, who entered into partnership with Whitney
(Burlingame 170, 174; Gies 72). She is also noted as Mrs. Gen. Green [sic] and
the other usual addresses denoting her marital status (Shaker Manifesto 164;
Mozens 351; Gies 71). Her identity is consistently connected with her role as
wife. Her support in the inventive process is often characterized as a helpmate,
much like the submissive role of wife (Burlingame 172).

One account, begrudgingly mentions her in the context of “a popular
story, origins unknown but not conﬁrmed by Whitney” as the one who suggested
that he try using stiff-bristles like that of the hearth brush instead of his idea of
wooden teeth to separate the seeds from the cotton. She is said in this account to

have further supported him by inviting “the neighbors in to admire the new

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invention” (Gies 72). Her identity in relationship to the invention is in context of
her domestic position to hearth and hostess.

Interestingly, in another account which credits her as inventor in fact, not
popular story, her identity is constructed differently. Matilda Gage opened her
1870 Woman Suffrage Tract-No.1, “Woman as Inventor” with Greene’s account.
She wrote that Greene,

. . . proposed to Whitney the making of such a machine,
and upon her idea he commenced.

The work was done in her house, and under her immediate

supervision. The wooden teeth ﬁrst tried did not do the

work well, and Whitney, despairing, was about to throw the

work aside, when Mrs. Greene, whose conﬁdence in

ultimate success never wavered, proposed the substitution

of wire. Whitney thereupon replaced the wooden by wire

teeth, and within 10 days from the ﬁrst conception of Mrs.

Greene’s ideas a small model was completed (4).

In this account, the gendered language denoting a submissive role as wife,
helpmate, and domestic is conspicuously absent other than in the marital title.
There is no mention that the wire came from a domestic tool, that she facilitated
his fame as hostess, or that she functioned as a submissive helpmate. It was her
house, her instructions, her idea and her persistence, according to Gage, that
resulted in the invention which became the object of “inﬁnitely great national
importance” (5).

Although there is some limited evidence that Greene eventually saw some
ﬁnancial gain in the form of royalties paid to her which supports that she had

more than a cursory involvement in the invention, the record stands clear and

uncontested that she did not patent the cotton gin (Stanley 797 ). Whitney holds

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that singular distinction. Gage responded to the still anticipated question, Why
didn’t Greene patent the cotton gin herself? Gage explained further in her
suffrage tract,

To do so would have exposed her to the contumely and

ridicule of her ﬁiends. Custom, that unwritten law, has for

years frowned upon any attempt of woman to take such a

step. If she has been gifted with an inventive genius, she

has either stiﬂed its exercise, expended it upon style of

dress--that being deemed her legitimate province--or, like

Mrs. Greene, suffered some man to claim the award her

due. She shrunk from the persecution that would have

attended her claiming the patent, while by associating

herself with Whitney as his partner in the manufacture of

the machines, she hoped at least to share in the pecuniary

advantages of the invention (6).
While Greene’s part in the invention of the cotton gin may never be certain, her
experience, although in the end of the 18th century, signiﬁcantly impacted women
inventors in the 19th century. Her experience exempliﬁed the basis for the
emerging rhetoric and ideology of J acksonian democracy which socially
constructed a circumscribed politics of opportunity, one in which the legitimacy
of women’s experience as inventor was undermined and devalued. Women’s
relationship with technology was mediated by cultural barriers signiﬁcantly
deﬁned by gender.

The annuals of patent history ring loud and strong the accomplishments
erupting from half of the nation who were socialized to become cultural heroes as
inventors. Unlike the names of Greene, Johnson, Stienhauer, Mather and Cook,

exciting and spectacular inventions from male inventors became fused into the

national fabric as sterling examples of the American character. Names and

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inventions such as Eli Whitney, cotton gin (1793), Cyrus Hall McCormick, reaper
(1831), Samuel F. B. Morse, electric telegraph (1844), and Samuel Colt’s revolver
(1835), continue to be canonized in our national litany of celebrated inventors and
representative of the fruit of the Age of Jackson (Oliver 132; Pursell Technology
in America 2-3).

It is not suggested that these famous inventors be debunked or expunged
from our national canon, but rather expanded to include those women inventors
who through their inventions characterize themselves as self-made women in the
pursuit of national progress and economic gain. Other women inventors, too, who
may not necessarily be contenders as cultural heroes in the age of Jackson, bear
integration into the mainstream history of technology as contributors to America’s
emerging identity as a progressive industrialized democratic nation and as part of
the enduring J acksonian legacy. Not only do women inventors of this period
merit recognition for their technological contributions, but they also hear
recognition for the contributions in mediating gender power relations which
signiﬁcantly affected the development of technology.

For example, Cyrus Hall McCormick’s patented his reaper machine in
1834 (Breeden 66). From the focus that has been heaped on this invention in the
history of American technology, one gets a sense that his was “the” invention that
characterized and embodied the technology of the J acksonian era with its ability
to replace human manual labor with profoundly efﬁcient machinery. [6] In
addition to the McCormick reaper’s mechanical ability, the cultural impact of this

invention seemed to “herald the dawn of American agricultural technology”

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(McGaw 345). In reality, the McCormick reaper represents not a heralding of
new American agricultural technology, but rather an individual contribution to the
collective advancement of mechanized agriculture.

McCormick was not the ﬁrst or only mechanized reaper invented. His
invention was predated by others, the most famous being Obed Hussey’s machine,
which was very similar differing “mainly in the design of the knife” (Gies 190).
Hussey and McCormick maintained an aggressive, hostile legal competition until
the 18505 when Hussey lost his position as McCormick’s chief rival (Gies 196).
McCormick’s success was not based on the superiority of his reaper, but rather he
proved to be an exceptional businessman. He developed new aggressive selling
techniques which included written guarantees for his machines, selling at a ﬁxed,
published rate on an installment plan, and a widespread and innovative
advertising program (Breeden 70). The historical accuracy of his technological
contribution is mired in legend, as his was not the ﬁrst, best or only reaper which
contributed to the revolutionary mechanization of agriculture. McCormick
successﬁrlly mediated a dominant power relationship with technology even
though he, in fact, did not meet the legendary criteria.

Actually both McCormick’s and Hussey’s reaper was predated by William
Manning’s 1831 reaper (Stanley 113). Manning’s reaper, unlike Hussey’s or
McCormick’s, draws very little attention in the history of technology despite the
fact that he won an important legal case against McCormick with the aid of
Abraham Lincoln as his attorney. His position as an inventor, though, like others

was mediated by inﬂuences quite outside the realm of technical creativity. One

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4"

signiﬁcant inﬂuence affecting his ability to mediate his position was the
involvement of his wife in his inventive sphere. Mrs. William Manning is
credited by some sources as the inventor of one of the earliest reapers. Although
her husband took out the patent in his name, it was suggested by historian H. J.
Mozans and sufﬁagist Matilda Gage that Ann Harned Manning invented a mower
and reaper as early as 1817 -1 8 1 8. Gage was personally acquainted with Ann
Manning and wrote about her twice (Stanley 114). In 1883, Gage wrote,

A third great American invention, the mower and reaper,

owes its early perfection to Mrs. Ann Harned Manning, of

Plainﬁeld, New Jersey, who in 1817-18, perfected a system

for the combined action of teeth and cutters, patented by

her husband, William Henry Manning, as “a device for the

combined action of teeth and cutters, whether in a

transverse or revolving direction.” Mrs. Manning also

made other improvements, of which, not having been

patented, she was robbed after her husband’s death by a

neighbor whose name appears in the list of patentees upon

this machine. Mrs. Manning also invented a clover cleaner,

which proved very lucrative to her husband, who took out

the patent” (Gage NAR 484).
It is not surprising that Manning did not get a patent for the invention or that she
has received virtually no recognition for her contribution. Such an invention falls
well outside of the domestic coterie by its singularly agricultural nature. She,
even less so than her husband and considerable less than Hussey or McCormick,
did not have the ﬁnancial, legal, or educational resources nor the social access to
compete successfully with male inventors on the J acksonian democratic stage.

As the J acksonian decades closed, the paradox of nationally celebrating

some inventions while simultaneously relegating others, took on greater scope and

signiﬁcance. The number of patents awarded to women inventors slowly rose and

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gained real momentum in numbers alone by the 18505 (LWP). But it becomes
increasingly clear that women inventors did not even place in the bottom rungs of
canonized inventors because of their comparatively lower numbers or the nature
of their inventions, but rather due to the relationship between technology and
power in stratiﬁed societies. Despite all the loud oratory and great rhetorical
platforms proclaiming America’s unique brand of J acksonian democracy where
“no exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political
disqualiﬁcation’s” stands in anyone’s way, Americans practiced the same old
world forms of inequality that had consistently socialized women as inferior,
dependent and, in this unique era of technological change, as antitechnocratic. It
has been pointed out by historian, Edward Pessen, that the one great difference in
form between old world European inequality and that in new world America was
that “money rather than blood divided men into rigidly separated worlds.”
Women were divided even ﬁrrther as they historically have always had less
money than men and, in this case, based on prejudicial gendered assumptions
about their relationship with technology, they were judged incapable and inferior.
(Pessen 28). Despite women sharing some of the same cultural conditions as
abundance, mobility, and environmental conditions, the phenomena of the self-
made man placed women inventors in a distinctly undemocratic position.

From the onset of the industrial revolution and even before, gendered
assumptions about women’s relationship with technology reinforced their
dependent roles, and J acksonian democracy perpetuated such assumptions.

Women have traditionally been considered as consumers of limited kinds of

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technology, especially domestic technology. The perception of their contributions
as producers was even more limited. If women produced “appropriate” products
or processes according to their relative role as mother, wife, daughter, or sister,
such contributions supported their proscribed social roles and did not cause or

encourage them to cross the social penumbra. In support of this standard,

~—

women’s patent records, not only during the antebellum era but also after, show a
predominance for many kinds of domestic technology, such as clothing, food
processes, furniture, cleaning devices and processes, childcare products,
reproductive technology and technologies to promote women’s health (LWP). All
of these contributions effectively improved domestic labor, and although many of
these technologies successfully revolutionized the way both men and women
lived, the inventions themselves were not considered as valuable or as important
as mechanical inventions. And when women did invent mechanical inventions
and/or things which clearly fell outside of domestic technology, they were
considered in an inferior and subordinate light due to rigid gender boundaries.”

Such new world prejudices were, ironically, part of the same J acksonian
legacy which celebrated Yankee ingenuity, which has been characterized by Gage,
as “male yankedom” (Gage “Women as Inventor” 1870 Tract, 4 (hereinafter cited
as Tract) ). Values surrounding the celebration of Yankee ingenuity were
politically charged and culturally restricted. A woman’s support of J acksonian
democracy was not validated by her participation as inventor. She was not to be
busy creating, building, or inventing new technology in order to support the

expansion of the industrial horizons of America. Rather, a woman’s supreme

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contribution was succinctly epitomized in a prize winning essay published in 1851
in The Ladies ’ Wreath entitled “How May an American Woman Best Show Her
Patriotism.” The winner, Miss Elizabeth Wetherell, wrote that it wasn’t through
the vote, since that would only result in a “vast increase of conﬁrsion and expense
without in the smallest degree affecting the result.” Instead “a woman could best
show her patriotism by staying at home, where she brings her inﬂuence to bear
“upon the right side for the country’s weal” “ (Welter 39). While in this
environment she could experience “natural reﬁnement and closeness to God,”
which was a “blessed advantage of a quiet life.” She would be at home with “her
Bible and a well balanced mind” (Welter 39).

In her quiet life, the inﬂuence that she exerted on behalf of her “country’s
weal” during and after the Age of Jackson did not put her in motion with the other
half of the population, which, according one historian, “throbbed and pulsed with
energy.” This energy was observed as “the relentless need to be better off. . . .
[where] there are no limits within which the hopes of any class of society must be
conﬁned as in other countries.” America was purportedly a country where “life
consists in motion,” but it was stagnating slow in recognition of women inventors
regardless of whether they believed or not in the deeply entrenched democratic
rhetoric that there were “no limits” to “any class” (Remini Revolutionary l4).
Cursory recognition of the collective body of women inventors during the Age of
Jackson remains embryonic. And even a superﬁcial retrieval listing in the annals
of the history of technology of such names and inventions as Diana H. Tuttle,

spinning wheel heads (1824); Phoebe Collier, wheel-feelies, sawing (1826); Luna

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Bishop, bellows (1831); and Margaret Gerrish, asclepias syriaca, manufacturing
external ﬁbers (1834) remains merely superﬁcial (the only mention of these
names appear in LWP, 1888).

The democratic limits which relegated women inventors in antebellum
America persistently manifested a rhetorical guise of equal opportunity.
Contradictions in values about men’s and women’s relationship to technology and
an ensuing double standard caused tensions which added a distinctly difﬁcult
barrier for the few women who ventured into a life full of motion outside
domestic conﬁnes during the Age of Jackson. Women’s technical creative
opportunities were severely limited by the gendered assumption that they were
incapable of producing signiﬁcant technological inventions. Cast as passive
antitechnocratic consumers, the politics of equal opportunity extended a socialized
justiﬁcation to restrict women’s movement during the inventive age. The
“development of technology has been mediated by gender power relations” which
have long been constructed by cultural values (Wajcman 163).

The central paradox regarding the national celebration of Yankee
ingenuity worked against women inventors like a strong undertow. The
excitement surrounding all the ideas, political rhetoric, and public gestures which
touted invention as a nationally celebrated vocation, caused an undercurrent of
simultaneous resistance and acceptance to ripple through the American populace.
For those who had the adventurous spirit to enter the water, the currents of
resistance and acceptance functioned as cultural boundaries which required

specialized skills and resources to successﬁrlly navigate the treacherous waters.

100

And if one did not personally possess such skills or resources, they could be had
with a little Yankee ingenuity, or so the myth ﬂourished. Because of the very
different social construction of technology’s relationship with men and with
women, equal access to such resources, such as money, education, and social
roles, remained a part of the restrictive rhetorical pattern, not part of the
celebration.

Yet, even though the course for women inventors presented a navigational
challenge without precedent, the patent records testify that a few pursued the
uncharted waters with determination, ingenuity, and ultimately, with a relative
degree of success. Such was the case of Nancy M. Johnson (1795-1890) who
patented the ﬁrst ice cream crank freezer on September 9, 1843. The ﬁeezer had
“three major parts: a tall tub, a slender cylinder with a close-ﬁtting lid, and a
dasher with a removable crank” (Funderburg 34). In the next 30 years, at least 70
additional ice cream freezer patents were issued, all of which were variations on
Johnson’s basic combination of a revolving freezer and dasher model. Johnson’s
name, though is rarely cited in the history of the ice cream industry or the history
of technology. Rather, it was a patent issued to William G. Young in 1848 which
is consistently cited as the ﬁrst patented ice cream freezer in the traditional
histories of the ice cream industry. [7]

Despite this oversight and the relatively little information we have about
her and her invention, Johnson contributed a signiﬁcant technology which helped
to pave the way for a new and progressive industry, one that eventually developed

new processes and contributed to the industrialization of America. The

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wholesale ice cream industry was founded seven years later in 1851 under the
direction of Jacob Fussell, a Baltimore milk dealer (Arbuckle 417). Her
invention made ice cream more accessible to Americans by making it easier to
make at home, better quality, and cheaper, thus readying American palettes for an
industry that has never since faltered in its prosperity. This invention reﬂects the
J acksonian character embodied in the self-made woman and the spirit of Yankee
ingenuity.

Prior to her invention, making ice cream was labor intensive work,
requiring a good deal of expertise and was considered by most a luxury food.
Although “cream ices” appeared to be popular since the Revolution based on
advertisements, they were not something served frequently by average families
(Burke 9—10). Ice cream was initially served by prominent Americans of noted
upper class like Mrs. Alexander Hamilton and First Lady Dolly Madison
(F randsen 2). And even though ice cream was growing in popularity, the ﬁrst
truly American cookbook published in 1796 by Amelia Simmons, had no ice
cream recipes. [8] In part, this was likely due to the difﬁculty of making ice
cream. Within the next few years after Simmons’ book, other cook books were
published with a plethora of ice cream recipes and instruction on how to make ice
cream, such as the following 1814 directive: “place the mixture in a pot,
surrounded by ice and salt, inside a pail and alternately turn the pot and scrape the
ice off the sides until the cream was the consistency of new butter” (F underburg
31). This laborious process continued with no noticeable improvement over the

next few decades as demonstrated in an 1837 edition of_ Directions for Cookery;

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Being a System of the Art in Its Various Branches by Eliza Leslie, who advised,
“Keep turning the freezer about by the handle till the cream is ﬁozen, which it
will generally be in two hours” (Funderburg 32).

Johnson’s freezer represented a signiﬁcant improvement over such time
consuming processes because in her invention “the crank turned the dasher,
moving the frozen particles from the wall of the cylinder toward the center,
causing the cream mixture to freeze more evenly and giving it a smooth, ﬂuffy
texture.” This was substantially less fatiguing than turning the freezer pot by
hand (Funderburg 34).

Johnson did recognize a proﬁt from her invention, but in retrospect the
$1,500 that she and her husband sold her patent assignment rights for was grossly
undervalued considering the large fortune amassed by individuals like F ussell
who utilized such basic technology in the early days of the wholesale ice cream
industry and the manufacturers of the freezer (Stanley 76). [9] She may have
reaped other monetary beneﬁts, but veriﬁcation of such is still yet to be
uncovered. Patent ﬁles indicate that she and her husband assigned her rights for
$200 and “other considerations” to Isaac S. Williams and Samuel E. Riessier,
manufacturers and importers of tin ware under the name of Williams and
Company (F underburg 35). What the “other considerations” may have been were
not speciﬁed.

One is poignantly reminded of the limitations of her situation as a married
woman, when she must do business and sell “her” rights in partnership with her

husband. Her “instinct for freedom,” as so eloquently stated earlier by Bancroft,

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in her “social relations and public interest” regarding the business of invention
apparently meet with other obstacles that are only hinted at but never clearly
revealed. While waiting for a letter of acknowledgment from the patent ofﬁce,
she wrote a letter of complaint to the commissioner stating that, “I had some
difﬁculty in obtaining your letter of acknowledgment ﬁom the post ofﬁce in
consequence of its having been directed to Mr. N.M. Johnson” (Patent
Assignment File, Group 214, Liber R 365 qtd in F underburg 35). These were her
initials, not her husband’s initials, which were W .R. Johnson. This suggests the
patent ofﬁce’s assumption that the inventor, N.M. Johnson, was naturally a man.
This invention ﬁts appropriately within a women’s domestic sphere as a food
process and merited as such insufﬁcient monetary value and even less recognition.
The identity of Nancy M. Johnson remains shrouded in her one and only
patent record. Her maiden name, her status, her occupation, and her personal
history remain unknown. Her invention and its reception in the 18405 is not
completely obscured, but could hardly be considered as celebratory status despite
its acknowledged ingenuity which inspired more than 70 others to patent ice
cream freezers in the next three decades (F underburg 35). Feminist historians
argue that it is “social structure that undermines the legitimacy of women’s
experiences as innovators,” which in turn “also structures society’s reaction to
women’s creativity, making it insigniﬁcant or invisible” (McDaniel, Curnmins,
Beauchamp 2-3). Nineteenth century observation concurred by recognizing that,
“Inventors must not only possess full freedom to exercise their powers, but there

must also be a certain welcome and protection to their ideas” (Gage NAR 488).

104

And that welcome and protection “depends in large measure on the experience
and values of males being perceived as the only valid frame of reference”
(McDaniel, Cumrrrins, Beauchamp 2-3). Although Johnson’s invention of the ice
cream freezer was a signiﬁcant contribution in the industrialization of a very
successful food processing industry, her invention is but a shadowy entry in both
the history of technology and the history of the wholesale ice cream industry. As
a food processing technology, the freezer was categorized as something within a
women’s domestic range of experiences, therefore, excluding it from the
experience and values of the majority of males.

This is not to say that the argument is reduced to what is the most valid,
agricultural technology or food processing technology. But it certainly raises
questions and elicits further inquiry as to why the celebratory status is heaped
upon one and excluded from the other. Why did Whitney and McCormick
became names synonymous with the mechanization of farming and not one
celebrated name comes to the historical forefront in early food processing
technology? A restricted and limited frame of experiential reference based on
biased gendered values, consequently placed such technology as less important by
making it less visible. The legacy of J acksonian democracy socially deﬁned what
was technologically signiﬁcant and what was nationally visible in its celebration
of the self-made man by its rhetorical fabrication of an egalitarian ideology. If the
triumph of democracy is visible in the canonization of such distinguished

inventors as Whitney, McCormick, Morse and Colt, its defeat is equally visible in

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the silent shadows of such neglected inventors as Greene, Manning, Johnson,
Stienhauer and Mather. [10]

It was not only the political rhetoric of the times which perpetuated the
democratic myth that ours was a nation built on egalitarian virtues. The
J acksonian legacy was supported and further characterized by some of the
contemporary writers of the day as well as some of the earliest American writers.
Some writers, though, such as Charles Brockden Brown and Margaret Fuller
challenged its mythical proportions. Others like Ralph Waldo Emerson reﬂected
the tensions Americans felt in the national pursuit of progress. A dominant
patriarchal social structure overshadowed this compelling democratic pursuit.

One of America’s ﬁrst professional authors, Charles Brockden Brown,
published Alcuin: A Dialogue in 1798, which eventually consisted of four parts.
It was reprinted later in a shorter version in the Weekly Magazine of Philadelphia
as The Rights of Women, one of the earliest American writings on the subject
(Clark 31). Brown’s views on women’s rights and capabilities were played out in
a dialogue between the “priggish schoolmaster Alcuin and the widowed Mrs.
Carter” (Clark 37). Although the dialogue did not speciﬁcally mention women
inventors, it challenged the hypocritical basis of an egalitarian society which
“makes the circumstance of sex a reason for excluding one half of mankind from
all those paths which lead to useﬁrlness and honour,” which would certainly
include women inventors (Brown 24). The words of the ﬁrst Patent Act in 1790,
to “promote the progress of Science and useful Arts” ring with an accusatory echo

in Brown’s writing. At the time of Alcuin’s publication, the patent system had

106

been operating for eight years and a woman had yet to receive an American
patent.

Mrs. Carter argued in favor of women’s political and economic equality
and baited Alcuin’s less radical view of equality. Alcuin acknowledged and
excused that without a doubt “there is abundance of injustice in the sentence; yet
it is possible to misapprehend, and to overate the injury that ﬂows from the
established order of things” (Brown 24). The dialogue continues with Alcuin
pondering that, “Perhaps this inequality is incurable” or in other words
unavoidable because it is “rational.” Alcuin is willing to concede that while he
could admit to “the claims of the female sex to an equality with each other, we
cannot allow them to be superior” (Brown 25). The collective voice of “we” and
the controlling verbiage of “allow” reverberates with J acksonian tenants of a
democratic social structure which placed women in a subordinate and dependent
role as passive consumers of technology which, consequently, affected how
women inventors competed with their male counterparts.

One barrier which consistently mediated women’s successful competition
as inventors throughout the 19th century was the lack of equal education. It is
with clear notice in this early work that such a calculated exclusion placed
creative and intelligent women at a distinct disadvantage. Mrs. Carter developed
her argument about why women were excluded from “all those paths which lead
to usefulness and honour” and “equal opportunity” by pointing out “that, for some
reason or other, the liberal professions, those which require most vigour of mind,

greatest extent of knowledge, and most commerce with books and with

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enlightened society are occupied only by men” (Brown 34). Alcuin admitted such
facts, but saw no reason for “drawing mortifying inferences from them” (Brown
34). Mrs. Carter pointed out the mortifying inferences regarding her extremely
limited education meant she could only “make a pie” and “cutout a gown,”
because “being of this sex is to be instructed in a manner different ﬁ'om those of
another.” She continued that because although there were “schools, and colleges,
and public instructors . . . in all the abstruses sciences and learned languages,” one
must ask, “Are not women totally excluded from them?” (Brown 38).

Consistently, this lack of education excluded women inventors ﬁom such
vital knowledge as chemistry, physics, advanced mathematics and other science
related disciplines which support inventive creativity. Such exclusionary
educational opportunities contributed to socializing women as less capable,
especially in anything considered scientiﬁc, such as mechanical inventions.[11]
This early reﬂection of women’s inferior capabilities created a fertile bed of
social inequity which underscored the tensions that preceded antebellum America
and persisted throughout the 19th century.

Although the ink of the Declaration of Independence was barely dry, the
tensions of social inequity were already festering when Brown wrote through the
character of Mrs. Carter in the conclusion of Part II:

I am tired of explaining this charming system of equality

and independence. Let the black, the young, the poor, and

the stranger, support their own claims. I am a woman. As

such, I cannot celebrate the equity of that scheme of

government which classes me with dogs and swine (Brown
59).

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And although Mrs. Carter may have been tired of explaining “the charming
system of equality and independence” to Alcuin, the argument was far from
exhausted. It had only begun. Even during the heightened national celebration of
democracy and the politics of opportunity in J acksonian America, little was
resolved in equalizing the classiﬁcation of women inventors on a level par with
male inventors. In reality, gendered assumptions about women’s relationship
with technology as subordinate, passive, and antitechnocratic stabilized with iron-
like rigidity. Considering Mrs. Carter’s classiﬁcation of women with dogs and
swine, the possibility of narrring one famous dog or one famous women inventor
during the ﬁrst half of the 19th century shared the same potentiality. Persistently,
now at the end of the 20th century, it remains far more likely that college students
and educated adults can name more famous dogs than women inventors. [12]

Brown challenged the hypocritical democratic foundation of the United
States by publicly debating that the distinction between men and women was
based on the clearly undemocratic difference of opportunity (Clark 38-39). The
threads of this argument were continually taken up by a host of early feminists
including Francis Wright, Sarah Grimke, Lucy Chase, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
others.[13] Such arguments reﬂect how women were socialized as antitechnocrats
by the impingement of equal opportunity and why the prototypical image of
inventor was shaped and reﬁned as male during the inventive age.

One of the most famous and inﬂuential 19th century feminists who wrote
on the undemocratic state of women’s opportunity was Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

Her best known work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), was widely read

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and sold out in a week after its ﬁrst publication (Dickenson vii). Her high
idealism was embedded with romantic values in her description of the female
nature as “electric, vital, magnetic, ﬁrll of life” and she consistently sought
liberation through psychological means rather than political (Dickenson xxviii-
xxix; 66-67). She was also acknowledged as a “shrewd judge of character” in
regards to masculine nature (Violette 82; Dickenson 17-25). Born in
Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810, Fuller lived her life of 40 years
in the fullness of J acksonian democracy (Miller xi-xxviii). She astutely
recognized that during this time women lived in a relegated world where self-
dependence among most women was “deprecated as a fault” (Dickenson 22). She
elaborated on this conviction:

I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much

greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their

latent powers...I have urged upon the sex self-subsistence in

its two forms of self-reliance and self-impulse, because I

believe them to be the needed means of the present juncture

(Dickenson 1 16,117).

This was critically true for women inventors. The ideas of self-reliance
and self-impulse were circumspect to varying restrictive degrees as illustrated in
the cases of Manning and Greene. Even though they lived in an age that
trumpeted self-reliance as a national characteristic, their inventive ability
functioned as latent powers because they were either not free to pursue their own
patents due to economic, legal, or social restrictions or they chose not to do so,

which also suggests an imposed personal restriction based on gender and/or sex.

It remains forever unknown as to what kind of inventive abilities lay hidden or

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dormant in these women due to repressive restrictions which limited their
occupational opportunities, especially as inventors. The disparaging difference in
opportunity is even more apparent when compared with the encouragement and
support heaped upon both Whitney and McCormick throughout their entire lives
and beyond. Fuller believed that women would be represented fairly only when
“inward and outward freedom for woman as much as for man [was]
acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession” (Dickenson 20).

Even when bestowed as a concession, women who pressed for inward and
outward freedom and who utilized self-reliance and self-impulse in their pursuit
of creative genius were “very commonly unhappy” Fuller noted. Women who
possessed what Fuller termed “the electrical and magnetic element” were
particularly proned to be repelled “more rudely” because “their quick impulses
seem folly to those who do not discern the motives” (Dickenson 66-67). This
bears unique application to some women inventors who claimed to have been
motivated or inspired to invent by some divine intervention. In the antebellum
scientiﬁc community there was an understood relationship between electrical and
magnetic transference of ideas from the spiritual realm and appears to have been
the prerrrise of some of those who claimed a ﬂash of genius when it came to
inventing. [14] Regardless of motives, women inventors, like male inventors,
possessed a measure of energy and creative genius which went mostly
unrecognized and undeveloped in J acksonian America. Fuller was particularly
perspicacious when she observed that it was said of a women possessed with

energy or creative genius that, “She has a masculine mind” (Dickenson 24). It

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was not generally conceivable that women possessed the intellect or ability to
produce something meriting creative genius. One 19th century author noted,
“There are no women of genius; when they become geniuses they are men”
(Bolton 511). Thus, if a women exhibited such intellect, she had abilities like a
man or as good as a man.

Because of Fuller’s own energy and creative genius, not as an inventor,
but as “a woman, editor, essayist, political journalist and arts critic in an otherwise
largely male domain,” she was an intellectual superstar, a woman without parallel
in her day. To some, she possessed a masculine mind steeped in the tenets of
J acksonian democracy. She understood the ideology of the American self-made
man and how it represented people, speciﬁcally women, unequally. In her
reﬂections of energy and creative ability, she provides keen insight into a
monumental challenge women inventors faced.

Fuller did not advocate sweeping equal rights for women or make radical
political demands like those which surfaced in Brown’s work (Bartlett 105).
Rather, she believed that women and men were different, but such different
masculine and feminine traits were of equal worth (Bartlett 108). But she did not
conceptualize that worth and value, such as in women’s inventive contributions,
was mediated by a social construction which undermined the legitimacy of
women’s experiences as innovators. She did not deem such contributions, like
her own intellectual ones, as less valuable than male contributions and certainly

never as virtually invisible (McDaniel, Cumrnins, Beauchamp 2).

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To some, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fuller’s individualistic and self-
reliant solutions to women’s social disadvantage were visionary. He recognized
that many did not appreciate her strong intellectual bearing when he wrote that,
“crowds of vulgar people taunt her with want of position” (Porte Journals 429).
[15] On the contrary, Emerson saw Fuller as “representing an interesting hour &
group in American cultivation” (Porte Journals 429).

Emerson respected Fuller’s sense of self as indicated in his journal entry
after her death. He wrote, “she was the largest woman; & not a woman who
wished to be a man . . . her conﬁdence in herself was boundless, & was frankly
expressed,” July-August, 1850 (Porte Journals 414). No doubt, he recognized
his own ideas about the individual in Fuller’s application of individualism to
women (Dickenson xx). Emerson celebrated the individual on many levels, but
he especially, like Fuller, admired those Americans who exhibited inventive
energy and creative ability. Unlike Fuller, though, he did not see such energy and
ability stagnated and repressed because of gendered restrictives. He did not
criticize the social structure which mediated technological power in a
circumscribed patriarchal system, but rather celebrated the inventor along with the
poet because of their respective ability to yield “us a new thought,” one who
“unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene (Emerson “The Poet” Library
of America 463 (Library of America hereinafter cited as LA) ). Emerson saw
invention as producing a new scene of national industrial expansion.

Like others in J acksonian America, Emerson admired the keen

imaginations of those who directed America on a path of technological

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advancement, and in them, he saw the emergence of an “independent national
spirit” growing out of machine power” (Marx 234). Inventions such as the
steamboat and railroad were able to “annihilate distance” and “like enormous
shuttles, pattern the various threads of American life into one vast web” which
contributed to a strong sense of national unity (Marx 234; Emerson “The Young
American” LA 213).

Emerson believed that inventors helped to shape and create the character
and substance of modern America. Like 19th century historian Thomas Hughes,
. Emerson saw “values of order, system and control embedded in machines” that
were produced in a time of technological enthusiasm (Hughes 4). And in
agreement with later historian and social critic, Lewis Mumford, he recognized
that technology was both a shaper of, and shaped by, values. Technology was
undeniably “value-ladened” (Hughes 5). But in time, Emerson’s critical voice
came to question the integrity of American values of order, system and control.
As an eye witness to the tradeoffs of technology, he expressed serious concern
about some of the consequences brought about by the unlocking of the “chains”
and America’s admittance to a “new scene.” By the late 18605, Emerson wrote,
“The progress of invention is really a threat” (Porte Journals 452). He lived to
see the invention of “deadlier weaponry” and observed the degradation of the
industrial worker abused by an innovative, highly successful factory system
(Emerson “Works and Days” Centenary Edition 163, 165 (Centenary Edition
hereinafter cited as CE) ). He eventually feared that progress, the fruit of

invention, would exterminate us (Emerson “Fate” LA 958). He never reconciled

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his celebration of invention with his criticism of it which reﬂects some of the
basic tensions that shaped America during the “age of invention” (Hughes 7).

Inherent in that tension was the value-ladened ideology based on gendered
assumptions about who could participate in America’s technological mission and
what constituted celebratory invention. Emerson observed that there were,
“certain ideas...in the air. We are all impressionable, but some more than others,
and these ﬁrst express them. This explains the curious contemporaneousness of
inventions and discoveries” (Emerson “Fate” LA 965). He correctly observed that
there was something unique in this time compared to all preceding generations.
But he ignored the part of that “curious contemporaneousness of inventions”
which restricted and generally excluded half of the population from freely acting
upon their inventive impressions even if they were the ﬁrst to express such ideas.
Women inventors such as Elizabeth Buckley sheet iron shovel (1828); Phebe
Atwell, fur extraction from skins and manufacturing it in yarn (1834); Ethel H.
Porter, straw cutting and fodder (1834); and Sarah Hammond, ﬁreplace (1839), no
doubt, heard and felt what ideas were “in the air” and regardless of whether they
were impressionable and were the ﬁrst to express such inventive impressions with
or without a patent, they were not part of the 50 year legacy that Emerson noted
nor mentioned in his celebratory litany (Emerson “Works and Days” CE 159). He
wrote with characteristic national pride that “the inventions of the last ﬁfty years
counterpoise those of the ﬁfty centuries before them” (Emerson “Works and
Days” CE 158). Emerson lived during one of the most proliﬁc periods of

American male invention and the most restricted period for female inventors. His

115

contribution and support of that legacy remains saturated with gendered
assumptions about the prototypical national image of inventor as male.

Like Brown and Fuller, Emerson’s voice reveals how the American
character was perceived, shaped, and idealized to either ﬁt or reject the mold of
the self-made man. And although his public voice is conspicuously silent on how
women were socialized as antitechnocrats, his writings reﬂect the central
gendered assumption about the inventor and inventions: Women were not
inventors. The inventor was unquestionably male and the inventions were
undeniably masculine.

Emerson projected invention as a national symbol of prosperity and
success and recognized it as it was in progress, not merely from an historical
perspective. With keen insight he wrote, “We anticipate a new era from the
invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old
checks...it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors” (Emerson “Nature 11”
LA 554). Those “modern aims and endeavors” cut a path to the standard American
dream of economic self—sufﬁciency. The steamboat, railroad, sewing machine,
power-loom, reaper, mowing machine, and gaslight reﬂected America’s ﬁrll store
of proliﬁc inventors (Emerson “Works and Days” CE 159). They held promise of
emancipation and exhilaration which served as a ﬁtting national symbol of
expansion and progress. Emerson held that “a fascination resides in the symbol”
and invention as a national symbol fascinated Emerson (Emerson “The Poet” LA

453)

116

That symbol holds ﬁrrther fascination, because it reﬂected America’s
values of order, system and control by its economically, socially, and legally
excluding women inventors ﬁom equal participation or even marginal recognition
as contributors to America’s modern aims and endeavors. The promise of
emancipation and exhilaration was not enough to raise women inventors up to an
equally competitive playing ﬁeld. Their invisibility was part of the intricate mesh
of a socially determined relationship with technology.

Some male inventors and their inventions, too, were lost in the vast web of
American progress. Emerson pondered on this selectivity, giving rise to issues of
not only creative ability but also reception. He reﬂected,

But now one wonders who did all this good. Look up the

inventors. Each has his own knack; his genius is in veins

and spots. But the great, equal, symmetrical brain, fed

from a great heart, you shall not ﬁnd. Everyone has more

to hide than he has to show, or is lamed by his excellence

(“Works and Days” CE 166).

The genius of the inventor, like the mother lode in a rich mine, surfaced in “veins
and spots” leaving other space unproductive, possibly untapped. And sometimes
the deposits that were mined were so rich that they became more valuable than the
miner and were to be had at any cost. The knack and genius of Catherine Greene,
Ann Harned Manning, and Nancy Johnson are representative of the untapped
mother lode of women inventors during the Age of Jackson.

Perhaps, like Margaret Fuller, they were lamed by excellence. Their

equal, symmetrical brains were hidden and submerged in a socially constructed

system where the development of technology was mediated by gendered power

117

relations. Cultural values infused with democratic ideas, rhetoric, policies, and
public gestures supported what Fuller termed “the great radical dualism.” Male
and female represented two sides of the same whole, a whole which constituted a
national mission in pursuit of technological progress and scientiﬁc advancement.

Although women inventors responded to what was “in the air” with
Yankee ingenuity and self-determination. the self-made woman embodied as
inventor was not celebrated. Her submerged legacy is symptomatic of our
cultural response to the development of technology. Technology is a human
activity and as such, it is ladened with human value. During the Age of Jackson,
gendered values contributed to the emergence of the prototypical inventor as
male. The measurement of an inventor’s worth was weighed on male criteria,
experience, and value. As technology advanced at unprecedented speeds, how
one mediated the power relationships was socially determined by gendered
politics of opportunity. The role of the J acksonian woman was idealized and
conceptualized within the contextual roles of mother, wife, sister or in some
capacity as a dependent helpmate. The pursuit of technological advancement in
speciﬁed male dominated ﬁelds, such as agriculture, socialized women to
respond and be perceived as antitechnocratic.

President Andrew Jackson’s conﬁdence that our constitution was no
longer a doubtful experiment at the end of 50 years, reinforced his
administration’s democratic mantra of equality and justice across all lines. Like
others, Jackson, undermined the signiﬁcance of women inventors as producers in

antebellum America. His celebration of the inventor and the self-made man

118

rendered the self-made woman inventor virtually invisible. As Emerson so
prophetically waxed, invention became a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors. During the Age of Jackson, it was a national endeavor to submerge

women inventors in the opaque guise of democratic rhetoric as antitechnocratic.

119

Chapter 3 - NOTES

[1] Historians refer to the “Age of Jackson” with various descriptors and time
boundaries, “roughly bridging the years from the end of the War in 1812 to the
coming of the Civil War” (Remini Revolutionary 3). For the purpose of this
study, the reference to the Age of Jackson includes the 18205 through the 18405,
the decades when Andrew Jackson reckoned as a political force which
characterized this period as “an age of change, an age of innovation, an age of
reform” (Remini Revolutionary 3).

[2] According to historian, Irvin Wyllie, the term “self-made man” was ﬁrst
used by Henry Clay on February, 1832 , to a group of successﬁrl manufacturers.
“Clay was defending the protective tariff in the Senate against charges of his
Southern opponents that a tariff would widen opportunities and enable humble
men to rise in the industrial sphere. He said, “In Kentucky, almost every
manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising self-made men, who
have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor” (10).

[3] “Recent scholarship has shown that the ideological gulf between the two
parties was not so great as was once believed and that both parties appealed to
similar middle-class constituencies. Furthermore, it is generally agreed today that
both parties operated within a liberal democratic framework that accepted
constitutional government and majority rule” (Miller xiii).

[4] Taken from Calvin Colton’s Junius Tract No. VII, entitled “Labor and
Capital”. Colton was a Yale graduate who enjoyed an intellectual reputation and
was associated with American Whiggery in the Jacksonian era. He wrote a series
of ten Junius Tracts (1843-1844), which represent a codiﬁcation of Whig
positions. Tract No. VH emphasizes the centrality of the image of the self-made
man in the Whig mythology (Rozwenc Ideology 346-347).

[5] Autumn Stanley provides a comprehensive discussion of the prevailing
theories regarding Catherine Greene’s involvement in the invention of the cotton
gin in Mothers and Daughters of Invention, Notes for a Revised History of
Technology in “Appendix A-2: Catherine Greene and the Cotton Gin.” The
Appendix provides a range of 19th and 20th sources which support the persistent
controversy.

[6] For further context of the Cyrus McCormick’s reaper see Chapter 7,
“Cyrus Hall McCormick and the Mechanization of Agriculture” in Carroll
Pursell’s Technology in America and Ronald M. Fisher’s contribution in Those
Inventive Americans, edited by Robert L. Breeden, pp. 64-74.

120

[7] See Tumbow, Grover, et al. The Ice Cream Industry; Burke, A.D.
Practical Ice Cream Making and Practical Mix Tables; F randsen, J .H. and W.S.
Arbuckle. Ice Cream and Related Products; and Arbuckle, W. S. Ice Cream
which consistently do not credit Nancy Johnson as the inventor of the ﬁrst ice
cream freezer based on the principle of a combination of a revolving freezer and
dasher. These sources either do not mention the ﬁrst patent at all or mention it as
attributed to William Young in 1848.

[8] “American Cookery; or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and
Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puﬁfs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings,
Custards and preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to
Plain Cake by Amelia Simmons, published in Connecticut in 1796, claimed the
distinction of being the ﬁrst truly American cookbook. Although Simmons
borrowed a few recipes from British sources, she emphasized native American
foods, such as buffalo steak, corn bread, wild turkey, pumpkin, cranberry sauce,
papaws, and new England election cake. Simmons, who stated her recipes were
for American women of all classes, did not include an ice cream recipe”

(F underburg 31).

[9] For a good historical overview of the wholesale ice cream industry and
speciﬁcally its founder, Jacob F ussell, see Chapter 3, “Wholesalers and
Heavyweights: 1850-1900” in F underburg’s Chocolate, Strawberry and Vanilla:
A History of American Ice Cream.

[10] Christian Schussle’s 1851 painting, Men of Progress, depicts 19 inventors,
all male, with some of their notable patent models. Included in the artistic
canonization are some inventors whose names alone speak their creative
inventiveness: Cyrus Hall McCormick, Charles Goodyear, F.B. Morse, Charles
Goodyear, Thomas Blanchard, Elias Howe, and Samuel Colt. But others in the
painting are not generally as well known: James Bogardus, use of cast iron in
construction; Henry Burden, horse shoe making machine; Isaiah Jennings,
dentistry tools ; Jordan Lawrence Mott, a coal stove; Eliphalet Nott, a coal stove;
John Ericsson, screw propeller; and Frederick Ellsworth Sickels, mechanisms for
steam engines (Breeden 79). It is not surprising that women inventors were
completely excluded as it expresses cultural values which symptomatically
devalued women inventors position in American Progress. Appropriate female
inclusions in this painting, should the title have been People of Progress, may
have included: Emma Stienhauer, cook stove; Nancy Johnson, ice cream freezer;
Sarah P. Mather, submarine telescope; Mary Ann B. Cook, sad iron; Tilly Flint,
weighing scale; and Phoebe Collier, wheel-fellies, sawing.

[11] Augusta Genevieve Violette argues in her Economic Feminism in
American Literature Prior to 1848, that Alcuin’s response to Mrs. Carter’s views

121

on women being excluded from college reﬂected the conventional attitude which
considered American women as the least oppressed women in the world (41-42).

[12] This observation is based on personal teaching experience of the course
Introduction to Science & Technology at Michigan State University (1996-1998).
Students consistently were able to name numerous famous dogs and not one
women inventor from any time period or of any nationality. The closest they
came was Madame Currie, a scientist, not an inventor.

[13] For a good overview of some of the leading arguments from both the
famous and not so famous early feminists, see Nancy Woloch’s, Early American
Women: A Documentary History, 1600-1900 (1992); Ann Russo and Cheris
Kramarae’s, The Radical Women '5 Press of the 18505 (1991); and Linda Kerber
and Jane De Hart-Mathews’ Women 's America Refocusing the Past, 2nd ed.
(1987). Together these works include a wide range of reprinted essays,
documents, tracts, speeches, correspondence, journals, personal narratives, and
other documentation which sought not merely to “assert “women’s rights” but
also to redress “women’s wrongs,” and above all to renogotiate the contemporary
rules of the game under which women and men interacted (Woloch xi),

[14] See the examples of Haniet Ruth Tracy and Elizabeth Hawks in Chapter 1
of this dissertation and Ann Braude’s discussion in Radical Spirits of the
connection between spiritualism and science. Braude cites the 1842 example of
when F. B. Morse went to Congress to request $30,000 to construct an
experimental telegraph linking Washington and Baltimore. He found little
understanding of the principles of electricity and the Chairman was of the opinion
to “require a scientiﬁc analysis to determine how far the magnetism of mesmerism
was analogous to the magnetism to be employed in telegraphs” (4-5; 192-193).

[15] Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the leading voices who discredited

Fuller’s intellectual contributions. He was joined by others such as Henry J arnes
and J arnes Russell Lowell (Perry xvi, xxiv).

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Chapter 4

THE CIVIL WAR: IMPETUS TO INVENTING WOMEN

Like other war periods, the Civil War era (1850-1870) sparked the
inventive mind to produce at accelerated rates as veriﬁed by patent statistics.
What women invented and the increased number of inventions by women marks
this era as one of social ﬂux in women’s relationship to technological creativity.
What they invented bears an imprint of social context, both historically and
culturally. Gendered patterns of technological invention based on reception and
difﬁrsion were altered during the patriotically charged atmosphere before, during
and alter the Civil War. Unlike the previous J acksonian Age of Democracy which
touted Yankee ingenuity and the self-made man as national mantras while
socializing half of the population as antitechnocrats, the Civil War consumed the
entire populace in support of resolving the irrepressible conﬂict between the
North and the South (Craven 2). The generation of women inventors who were
swept up in this cataclysmic course responded with unprecedented inventive
activity.

Since the inception of the US Patent Ofﬁce in 1790 until 1850, just a little
more than 30 patents were granted to women (LWP). But during the next two
decades, at least 350 patents were issued to women. Consideration not only of the

increased number of patents, but also the varied kinds of inventions during this

123

time reveals a shifting pattern in women’s relationship with technology.
Inventions by women related to war activities, such as a self-inﬂator for raising
sunken vessels, planking for war vessels, a pyrotechnic ﬂare and code system, an
ambulance and a submarine telescope, provide fascinating evidence that women
inventors signiﬁcantly expanded their technological boundaries well outside of
the domestic parameters. Such parameters limited women inventors to invent
things relating to domestic functions rather than for industrial, scientiﬁc, or other
application which fell outside of the proper social ﬁrnction of women as wife or
mother. Embedded in this expanded relationship is the imprint of social context
during a period when women struggled for increased accessibility to higher
education, new job opportunities, and legal entitlement The Civil War served as
an impetus to inventing women not only by increased numbers of inventions and
the variety of what was invented, but also by reshaping the paradigms of their
relationship with technology which contributed to the propulsion of women into
an era of heightened feminist consciousness.

The generation of women who experienced the Civil War lived during a
time characterized by rapid growth and expansion, a growing development of
sectionalism and an era marked by “democratic and humanitarian stirrings”
(Craven 3, 4, 10). Both women and men were shaped by such national
development, and in many instances, they were shaped differently. Women who
were swept into the “irrepressible conﬂict” experienced all three of the above
characteristics to varying degrees directly or indirectly. Some relocated with

their families to wilderness tenitory in search of new opportunities (Massey 297-

124

303). Some witnessed ﬁrst hand the growing tension between states rights
advocates and unionists (Clinton 53-57). And many felt the affects of reform
movements, particularly abolitionistism and women’s rights (Massey 355-3 65;
Russo & Kramarae 324).

Although still strongly connected to the domestic sphere as these changes
rippled over the national landscape, the War forced many women to venture into
new uncharted social territory. As more and more men were recruited for military
service, by necessity for the sake of survival women integrated into the
mainstream workforce outside of the home. [1] Like other wars, the demand for
ﬁghting men during the Civil War greatly affected the work force leaving women
at home with little or no support. Many were forced to work in industrialized
ﬁelds previously restricted to predominately male workers. Technology’s
relationship to the segregated world of women’s employment broadened to
include employment outside of the previous domestically conﬁned domain of
women. Increased numbers of women worked in factories, on farms in male
capacities, and in urban environments.[2]

In the absence of fathers, husbands, and sons, women experienced
increased access to technical, industrial, and business knowledge. In addition, a
heightened sense of patriotic fervor motivated women to invent necessary and
useﬁrl things in support of the war effort such as Clarissa Britain’s ambulance
(1863) and Mary J. Montgomery’s war vessel (1864) By considering what
women invented during the Civil War era and the increased numbers in previously

male dominated categories such as war related and mechanical inventions, an

125

emerging pattern underscores the changing relationship with technology that
women began to experience, one that challenged assumptions about their abilities
and potential to participate in national technological development as more than
mere consumers.

Women inventors especially participated in this development by resisting
male construction of a distinct and inferior female patriotism. Resistance came in
the form of increased inventive activity in areas clearly outside of their proper
culturally proscribed roles as mother, wife, and passive dependent. Such prior
social construction had systematically undermined and devalued their
technological contributions. in part, sometimes due to the nature of the invention
and/or simply the fact that it was invented by a women. This devaluation was
based on gendered assumptions about women’s limited and narrow interaction
with technology, mostly deﬁned in domestic terms. During the Civil War era
discriminatory reception as experienced by antebellum women inventors was
reshaped by nationalistic factors which produced a heightened degree of
patriotism by men and women alike. Reception to women as inventors and what
they invented was transformed from rigid rejection to moderate and conditional
acceptance. Unyielding gendered assumptions about women and technology were
relaxed into productive moldability, one which served to unify a country in crisis.

Changing patterns of reception were interwoven in a complex social
system in which women gained credibility for their contributions on several
fronts, technologically and otherwise. It became increasingly difﬁcult for

women’s contributions to be submerged in a moiled system of patriarchal

126

dominance simply because they did not ﬁt into an appropriate social category.
Women were recognized as vital contributors in the war effort by both sides. A
British journalist, George Augustus Sala, who observed the American people at
war, wrote in his diary that “there was probably no conﬂict in history which was
as much a “woman’s war” as that of 1861-65.” He noted that women in both

,9 6‘

camps were “the bitterest, most vengeful of politicians, unanimous” in their
“exasperation and irnplacability” (Massey 25).

Women experienced the impending storm by keeping abreast of campaign
developments even though they were not allowed to vote. Southern women,
particularly, had always been discouraged from any kind of political involvement
previously as it was “considered extremely unladylike to meddle in politics”
(Massey 26). But as the nation passed the point of no return, women from both
sides understood implicitly that war was certain. [3] By 1860, “Southern women
were avidly reading the newspapers and leaving their homes “to attend a speech or
process,” and “by November they were convinced that Lincoln’s election would
mean the complete destruction of their way of life” (Massey 26).

Likewise, Northern women were riveted to political developments.
Following the attack on Fort Sumter, Sophronia Bucklin wrote in her Civil War
memoir, In Hospital and Camp, that women responded with the “same
patriotism” as the hundreds of thousands of men who responded to Lincoln’s call
for 75,000 militiamen (Leonard 3). Like American men, many women responded

with action, not just words. But unlike most men, they were unable to respond as

soldiers, although historical records indicate that approximately 400 women did

127

serve in this military capacity (Massey 79). What surfaces predominately in
most traditional Civil War histories is women’s response to the conﬂict on both
sides as members of aid societies, relief organizations, and as nurses. In
conjunction with this kind of war activity, women patented at least 36 inventions
relating to medicine, hospitals, and general health improvements (LWP). [41' The
reception to women participating in these kind of activities, even though outside
of their normal functions as wives and mothers, was for the most part
overwhelmingly supportive. Functioning in this capacity stretched the nurturing
boundaries to include a national cause with the same kind of emotional and
physical commitment that most women lent to their familial responsibilities.

The reception to women’s political awakening and interest was meet with
general support and approval by most men. In the “Introduction” to LP. Bracket
and Mary C. Vaughan’s Woman ’s Work in the Civil War (1867), Henry W.
Bellows commented:

. . . Probably never in any war in any country, was there so

universal and so speciﬁc an acquaintance on the part of

both men and women, with the principles at issue, and the

interests at stake. And of the two, the women were clearer

and more united than the men, because their moral feelings

and political instincts were not so much affected by

selﬁshness and business, or party considerations

Everywhere, well educated women were found fully able to

understand and explain to their sisters, the public questions

involved in the war. . . (57).

This kind of favorable public reception to women’s political involvement during

a period of heightened patriotism helped to shape and shift the boundaries that

demarcated the proper narrow scope of women’s lives. It allowed women to

128

challenge convention in a new and acceptable way. It also encouraged some to
defy the conventional limitations in the name of patriotism. Such was the case
with the shifting reception to some women inventors and their inventions.

Prior to the Civil War very few women patented their inventions, in part,
because of the stigma of being labeled an inventor, a distinctly masculine
occupation. Many women shared the same sentiment as Betsy Metcalf Baker, an
early inventor of a process for straw braiding when she wrote that, “Many said I
ought to get a patent; but I told them I did not wish to have my name sent to
Congress” (Baker 60). In 1797 it seemed to Baker completely inappropriate for a
woman to have her name before Congress for recognition as an inventor. Twelve
more years passed before a women applied for a US patent. Reception to the
very idea of woman as inventor was so negatively circumscribed and so masculine
in its very concept that most women chose to not expose themselves to public
ridicule and social censure. The War of 1812 motivated a very small percentage
of women to patent inventions in support of the national crisis, especially the hat
industry, as noted in Chapter 2 of this dissertation. But with the onset of the Civil
War nearly 50 years later, the reception to women’s inventions experienced
increasingly more acceptance.

It was not that the idea or prototypical image of the inventor became more
androgynous. It didn’t, but rather remained decidedly male. What did undergo a
conceptual change, though, was the development and application of technological
innovations for the purpose of supporting a nation in crisis. This application ﬁt

into a masculine world view which reinforced economic and political survival

129

with the prospect of expansion through military strategy. [5] Technological
innovations not only supported the War, but it was seen as vital to the victor.

War has traditionally been a male domain throughout much of history, and. in this
case, the reception to women participating in a male domain was viewed by the
entire population as a form of noble and necessary patriotism. This shift in
reception could be classed as part of the “grand convulsion in society” which
rocked the very foundation of the American culture. [6] Women as producers of
technology, especially technology which had some military application, whether
mechanical or otherwise, reﬂected the shifting paradigms women inventors
experienced which motivated some to apply their technical creativity to other than
house and hearth. The experience of Martha Coston, inventor of pyrotechnic
signal ﬂares and night signals, exempliﬁed how reception to women as inventors
and their inventions shifted toward increased acceptance of women’s inventions in
a wider circle of technical activity.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1826, Martha Hunt’s life began as a
model of conventionality. By the age of 21, she was a wife and mother of four
(Coston 33). That was the beginning as well as the end of Coston’s conventional
life. She found herself at a critical juncture when her beloved husband, Benjamin
Coston, an inventor of some promise who was assigned to a Washington, DC.
naval research lab, died after a short illness (Coston 23-25; 35-36). Within the
next year, she lost her infant son and mother. She found herself virtually alone

with three small dependent children. Adding further to her emotional desolation

130

and economic privation, shortly after her husband’s death, she discovered that his
business partners and relatives had bankrupted his estate (Coston 38).

Besides leaving his wife such a heavy burden, he also left her a valuable
piece of his inventive genius as well as some useful political and social
connections into Washington society that his position had afforded. Coston
utilized all of these as opportunities to make a living for herself and family
beyond expectations. She turned to invention and manufacturing as a means of
support. Like other women inventors both before and after her, she was highly
motivated by economic factors.

In November of 1847, Coston’s dej ection hit bottom as she contemplated
her economic options as to either “to dig” or “ to beg.” She was sure she could
do neither. What she did do was morosely rummage through an old box of her
husband’s papers which contained mostly inventions that were either unﬁnished
or too expensive to produce. That was a turning point which led her down an
unconventional occupational path. She wrote in her autobiography, A Signal
Success, that it came to her “like an inspiration that perhaps in that same box I
should ﬁnd the means of retrieving my fallen fortunes” (Coston 38).

What she found was a large envelope containing papers and drawing plans
for a signal to be “used at sea, at night, for the same purposes of communication
that ﬂags are used by day” (Coston 38). She was able to persuade the Navy to
return her husband’s prototype models, but as they were only in an early
developmental stage, they didn’t work. She focused on this incomplete idea for

the next 10 years. Although the reception to the ﬁnal invention was received

131

favorably, the process was ﬁ'aught with the traditional obstacles that women
inventors faced illustrating how their relationship with technology continued to be
mediated by male values. She wrote,

It would consume too much space, and weary my readers,

for me to go into all the particulars of my efforts to perfect

my husband’s ideas. The men I employed and dismissed,

the experiments I made myself, the frauds that were

practised upon me, almost disheartened me; but despair I

would not, and eagerly I treasured up each little step that

was made in the right direction, the hints of naval ofﬁcers,

and the opinions of the different boards that gave the

signals a trial (43-44).

Particularly, Coston’s reference to the men she employed, the experiments she
made herself and the frauds practiced upon her represent some what she
considered the most trying of her obstacles which primarily resulted because of a
lack of education or any legitimate prospect of acquiring the necessary education.
Because she did not possess a knowledge of chemistry, scientiﬁc experimentation
methodology or an understanding of business, she had to rely on those who had
such knowledge, men. Based on gender alone, she felt she had been ignored, not
taken seriously, or deceived.

Especially because Coston lacked the necessary knowledge in chemistry,
she found it an exceedingly difﬁcult and complex process to produce the desired
three colors that she wanted for the ﬂares. She was able to perfect a red and white
one, but was stuck on producing a third color that would work with the standard
maritime codes. “Blue I had my heart on,” she later wrote, “in order to use the

national colors, but I could not obtain it with equal strength and intensity to the

others” (Coston 44).
1 32

As a woman, she experienced difﬁculty in ﬁnding a chemist to work with
her. After watching a ﬁreworks display in honor of Cyrus Field who had
successfully sent a message to Queen Victoria on his Atlantic cable, she
determined that “among the New York pyrotechnists I might ﬁnd some one

‘6

capable of helping me. Thus, she “opened communication with several of them,
under a man’s name, fearing they would not give heed to a woman, asking for a
strong, clear, blue or green light, but not saying for what purpose” (Coston 45-46;
Macdonald 19). She ﬁnally narrowed her collaboration down to working with
one chemist which resulted in the successful creation of a third color, not her
desired blue, but a strong bright green. It ﬁt her other requirements, as well, that
it be powerful, clear, distinct, clean and of uniform goodness when manufactured
in large quantities (Coston 46).

She ﬁnally patented her invention in 1859, but not in her own name. She
was clearly the true inventor since the inventor is the one who reduces to practice
the idea, but it has been suggested that she deferred to her deceased husband in
obtaining the patent as the adrrrinistrix of his estate “because he had a well-
established reputation that gave her special credibility---and respectability”
(Macdonald 16). As a woman inventor, her credibility and respectability was
suspect. But the successﬁrl reception of her invention signiﬁcantly adjusted those
parameters to make it more favorable for her to patent the 1871 improvement in
her own name.

Her success was hard won, but it economically sustained her for the rest of

her and her children’s lives. Early on the Navy agreed to test the signals, which
1 33

proved highly successful. As a woman, though, she was not allowed to be present
at the testing, but nevertheless, she was able to secure her ﬁrst order for $6,000
worth of ﬂares from the United States government. By the summer of 1859, she
decided to take her signals to Europe, where over the next 15 year she
successfully patented and marketed them in England, France, Holland, Austria,
Denmark, Italy and Sweden (Coston 54, 60).

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Coston returned to the United States
because she believed that the Coston Signals would prove to be a “valuable
auxiliary” and that “the night would lose half its terrors at sea” if the signals were
used by the Navy.” True to her expectations, the really ﬁrst successful utilization
of the signals occurred during the Civil War. They proved vastly superior over
the old Fresnal lanterns the Navy had previously used. That system consisted of
three colored lanterns run up a pole, which were virtually indiscemible in
anything but clear weather. In comparison, the Coston signal could be “discerned
at a distance of from ﬁfteen to twenty miles, and penetrating with a radiant glow
of color the thickness of mist and fog (Coston 84, 101). The extensive use of the
Coston Signal during the Civil War proved highly effective by enabling
battleships to communicate strategic information over long distances. Coston
wrote that she, “felt particularly thankful during the war that while the signals
were made the means of capturing the enemy, they also played an important part
in saving the lives of our own men” (102).

Coston not only contributed something of signiﬁcant military value, but

by persistent determination, creative strategies and shrewd business management,

134

she mediated a competitive vantage point. Successful aggressive marketing and
manufacturing represented a signiﬁcant inroad for other women inventors who
would beneﬁt from the relatively favorable reception and diffusion that her
invention received both at home and abroad.

In country after country, she overcame the obstacles common to business
negotiations, but with the added impediment of being a women without business
experience, education, or status. Perhaps if she had been trying to patent and
market an innovative corset or a domestic appliance, she might have had a
somewhat different experience. But marketing and manufacturing a military
device that involved advanced technology and implicated issues of national
security during a period of national conﬂict, was truly far aﬁeld for a 19th century
woman. Even today, one just has to imagine for a moment the probability of an
American woman traveling alone to Europe to sell even a seemingly
insigniﬁcant, but innovative, navel military technology to comprehend some of
the insurmountable obstacles Coston experienced and recorded in her
autobiography.

She reﬂected on gender discrimination she experienced in the following,

We hear much of the chivalry of men towards women, but

let me tell you, gentle reader, it vanishes like dew before

the smnmer sun when one of us comes into competition

with the manly sex...It was a most bitter thing to ﬁnd in the

lofty institution of our country, the Navy, men so small-

rrrinded that they begrudged a woman her success , though

achieved after long years of struggle and patient industry
(Coston 272).

135

While her success was begrudged, it was not totally denied. Although she
did not get fair market value for her patent rights, she did realize a ﬁnancial
success from the total proceeds. She established a manufacturing ﬁrm to produce
the signal and it apparently enjoyed a measure of success. Available records are
very sketchy, but the Coston Signal Company was listed as surviving as late as
the early 19705 in a Washington, DC. directory. The Naval Historical Center has
indicated they have no record of her or her company (personal correspondence
June 27, 1997). But it is very possible that no one has actually pursued this
investigation seriously or thoroughly to date.

What we do know from her autobiography is that she asked $40,000 for
her patent rights from the Union Congress . She received $20,000. During the
Civil War, Coston Manufacturing Company produced and supplied the signals at
“cost price” which through wartime inﬂation and government ceilings meant that
Coston was selling at a 1055. She was promised remuneration in the future, but
despite her many attempts, it never materialized (Coston 142). This was a
repeated experience in most of her foreign business negotiations. She provides an
especially insightﬁrl account of her business relationship with the French
government who continually attempted to reproduce the “American recipe” by
ordering shipments of the ﬂares over a ﬁve year period, while refusing to
negotiate for the purchase of the patent rights (Coston 154).

Still Coston’s experience as a woman inventor merits recognition as one of
marked successful reception and diffusion compared to the experiences of the 30

or so American women inventors who came before her. She was recognized with

136

favorable and credible public reception for her invention. The successful
diffusion of her invention was merited in the economic success she ﬁnally
achieved. Her experience and participation in military technical creativity
represented how women’s technological contributions crossed clearly demarcated
gendered bounds during the Civil War.

Martha Coston did not change the image of inventor from male to female,
but she did successfully mediate a competitive position as a women inventor. She
accomplished this by participating as a producer of masculine technology which
reinforced economic success and military advancement. She challenged and
deﬁed in many instances, a woman inventor’s value in a male dominated social
structure where technology was empowered and mediated by gendered
relationships.

Her experience categorizes her as one of the earliest known professional
woman inventors. While other previous women inventors may have relied on
their inventive talents to sustain them economically and may have pursued
invention as an occupation, there is no substantial documentation to prove that in
patent or general historical records. As in the case of Coston, the number of
patents does not necessarily determine if one has pursued invention as an
occupation, but rather the successful cultural reception and economic diffusion of
one or any ntunber of inventions. This kind of historical documentation still
remains illusive for the majority of women inventors.

But it is during the Civil War that we ﬁrst see patent evidence of women

who received multiple patents, suggesting a changing pattern of diffusion for

137 '

women’s inventions due to an altered war—time social structure. Changes in
business, industry and commerce surfaced in recognition of women’s inventions
in the commercial world, especially if they met pre-existing male criteria as to
technological signiﬁcance (i.e. outside of the domestic sphere). Along with
Coston, both Mary J. Montgomery and Clarissa Britain ﬁt the loosely emerging
category of the ﬁrst professional women inventors by the number and kinds of
patents they patented during the Civil War era.

For example, Montgomery received four known patents, only two of
which are recorded in the LWP in her name. Both of these were in 1864, one for
an improved war vessel and one for an improvement in locomotive wheels. Later
in 1866 she was assigned a patent from Richard Montgomery (relationship
unknown) for an improved apparatus for punching corrugated metals. The fourth
patent for a bridge was issued in 1868 jointly with Richard Montgomery. While
this is not necessarily an impressive sum of patents, the inventions are all of a
mechanical nature and particularly the ﬁrst two, have some war-time application.
They represent a diversity in potential application in transportation, clearly
outside of the domestic ﬁeld. The evidence of application remains obscure, but a
few sources indicate that Montgomery did enjoy some kind of economic success,
another criterion for a professional inventor. The Shaker Manifesto of July 1890
under “American Women Receiving Patents” noted that Mary J. Montgomery of
N.Y., patented an improvement on locomotive wheels and has invented other

devices out of which she has made considerable money” ( 164).

138

This information was later collaborated in a 1903 issue of Scientific
American which called Montgomery the “one professional woman inventor in
America” and made reference also that her inventions had made money for her
(Stanley Mothers 502). This indication along with the mechanical nature of her
inventions suggest that Montgomery received favorable recognition and proﬁtable
diffusion for her contributions which crossed gender lines.

The mechanical nature of her improvement in locomotive wheels was
described by Ida Tarbell in her 1887 article, “Women as Inventors”:

The invention consists in substituting a curved corrugated

beam to the periphery of the wheel instead of the usual

fellies of wood or other materials, as in the iron wheels of

locomotives, and in applying a tire of iron or steel with ribs

or tongues ﬁtting into the grooves formed by the curved

corrugated beam. To give certain elasticity to the wheel,

where this may be desirable, a sheet of India-rubber is

introduced (356).

Based on this description, her next patent for an improved apparatus for punching
corrugated metals seems to have a probable connection to the curved corrugated
beam used in her locomotive wheels. And her previous invention of an
“improved war-vessel, the parts applying to other structures for defense” also
involved an innovative use of corrugated beams. The United States Patent Office
ofﬁcial speciﬁcation included the following description:

“. . . an improvement in the nature and arrangement of the

materials used as iron or steel clad armor in all kinds of

vessels of war; and second, of an improved mode of

planking the sides and bottom of ships or vessels of all

kinds, and of applying planking to all other structures

where corrugated beam-iron is used as ribs, beams, rafters,
& c” (Letters Patent No. 41,167, dated January 5, 1864).

139

These inventions suggest some kind of relationship with the manufacture
of corrugated iron materials and the transportation industry. But in what capacity
she was connected to these industries is unknown at this time. Likewise, her
personal proﬁle remains unknown other than that she was from New York.
Unlike Coston, she left no written record of her life’s accomplishments, nor did
anyone else. It seems apparent that Richard, her possible co-inventor, was a
relative, but not necessarily her husband as she was referred to as “miss” or by her
full ﬁrst and last name with no marital title in the few afore mentioned references.
What she did for a living, what her family connections were, what her educational
status was, and virtually all important and signiﬁcant biographical information
remains historically obscure.

Her connection to the transportation industry merits further investigation.
From 1860 to 1870 it has been estimated that in trades and transportation, “there
was a 7.3 per cent increase in women employed” (Massey 152). While this is not
one of the most dramatic increases in women’s employment in new ﬁelds, it does
indicate signiﬁcant new opportunities in a previously restricted ﬁeld of
employment. [7] The nature of Montgomery’s inventions suggest that she was
able to cross technological gender boundaries because she was part of that 7.3 per
cent who experienced expanded opportunities during the Civil War in trades and
transportation. Montgomery and Coston, along with hundreds of other women,
utilized such opportunities to become successﬁrl inventors.

War-time opportunities were more diverse for women inventors

speciﬁcally and, in general, for women who sought employment in what was once

140

considered a man’s world. As women’s social position changed within the
context of the Civil War, many had to reevaluate conditions women experienced
as wage earners. It is estimated that female wage earners increased by 60 per cent
between 1860 and 187 0, ushering about 300,000 women into the work force who
might never have sought jobs before (Massey 151; Kessler-Harris 75-76).

Although women’s employment opportunities and interactions in business
broadened to include options previously considered improper for women’s
participation. many of these new employment opportunities proved to be short
lived without any permanent positive changes in broadening women’s
employment opportunity after the War was over. They were “last hired, ﬁrst
ﬁred, least paid,” according to feminist historian Gerda Lerner (Lerner, Female
Experience, 273). But for women inventors, changing opportrmities fueled them
to invent in new directions, and this trend continued to increase consistently after
the War was over. Through exposure to dominate forrrrs of business structure,
innovative and established systems of commerce and, most importantly,
industrial manufacturing development, women inventors began to carve out new
ﬁelds of inventive activity which led to sustained and increased production in
post-Civil War America.

According to women’s labor historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, “A variety of
factors pulled and pushed women into the work force, and individual women
manipulated and structured their lives in direct response to their own reference
groups as well as in dim recognition of a larger social ideology” (Kessler-Harris

108). Like other women in the burgeoning work force, women inventors were

141

pulled and pushed by the prospect of economic proﬁtability. Some invented
things relating to their new forms of employment. And in their jobs, many
women found new social relationships with other working women, some of
which would later surface in organized solidarity in women’s unions. From these
early enclaves of working women, especially those working in the industrial
sectors, women inventors began to sense a changing social ideology. Reception
to their inventions was increasingly more favorable and economic diffusion more
successful. A new respect and credibility loomed ahead for women inventors. It
pushed and pulled them into new and successful arenas of technical creativity.

' Their newly expanded occupational opportunities supported untapped
industrial creativity on two premises. First, many 19th century famous basic
inventions were invented by men who had little or no technical knowledge and
who invented things outside of their occupational ﬁeld. Instead of acquired
technical knowledge these inventors brought an outside practical knowledge
which facilitated a fresh and unhampered outlook on the problem (Rossman
Industrial 144). [2;] This theory supports a seeming contradiction of how
women’s increased inventive activity was possible without technical experience
or education. Most women did not have prior technical knowledge or any kind of
career experience which would have integrated them into the work force had it not
been for the War. They were initially ignorant of inside business traditions,
standard theOries of operation and lacked direct practical mechanical experience
and education. Given the widespread variety of women’s inventions during the

Civil War era, being previously outside of the workforce paradoxically proved to

142

be a stimulus for increased industrial creativity. Dr. Joseph Rossmarr, lawyer,
chemical engineer, US. Patent Examiner, author and Doctor of Psychology,
maintains that even in the 20th century about half of all inventors invent outside
of their given occupation because of the absence of prior preconceived knowledge
which limits and stagnates new thought (Industrial 144-147).

The other half "usually conﬁne their inventions to their speciﬁc
occupation” because, “their job is to improve what is already being used and
consumed . . . they are motivated primarily for economic reasons” (146). This
second premise of inventing for economic motivation was a standard motivation
for women even prior to the Civil War. This premise, in addition to the theory
that the other half invent outside of their occupation because of innovative insight,
both support why this ﬁrst signiﬁcant wave of women’s increased inventive
activity occurred during the Civil War era, a period which underwent an alteration
of the division of the labor force, promoting new opportunity and access for
women inventors.

Industrial development and the pursuit of technological advancement was
an acknowledged social ideology in previous generations, one that severely
circumscribed women’s participation as producers. But against the backdrop of
the Civil War, this ideology elicited a direct response from more than 350 women
inventors with increased favorable reception from traditional male sectors.
Women inventors were part of emerging work force patterns which introduced a
“changing set of economic realities intersected with conventional expectations of

women’s roles, sometimes mocking cherished beliefs, other times reinforcing

143

them - - bending here and twisting there” which ultimately produced a fertile bed
of technological creativity among women (Kessler-Harris 109).

Such increased and varied technical creativity was due, in part, to the
bending and twisting of conventionally deﬁned sex roles which catapulted women
into new forms of employment. Nineteenth century historian and author, Helen
Campbell, wrote in her 1893 expanded prize monograph for the American
Economic Association, Women Wage Earners, that ,

Up to the time of the Civil War, aside from factory
employments, the trades open to women were limited, and
the majority of their occupations were still carried on at
home, or with but few in numbers, as in dressmaking-
establishments, rrrillinery, and the like. With the new
conditions brought about at this time, and the vast number
of women thrown upon their own resources, came the
ﬂocking into trades for which there had been no training,
and which had been considered as the exclusive property of
men. A surplus of untrained workers at once appeared, and
this and general ﬁnancial depression brought the wage to its
lowest terms; but when this had in part ended, the trades
still remained open. At the close of the war some hundred
were regarded as practicable. Ten years later the number
had more than doubled, and to-day we ﬁnd over four
hundred occupations; while as new inventions arise, the
number of possibilities in this direction steadily increases
(101-102).

In opposition to Kessler-Harris’ observation about declining employment
opportunities after the war, Campbell suggests that the alteration of the division of
labor and the changing composition of the work force continued to present
expanded employment opportunities afterward. It is of interest to note her
observation here that new technology expanded ﬁuther possibilities for women’s

employment. This idea functioned conversely for women inventors as more

144

overcame gendered assumptions about women’s technological capabilities and
patented their inventions. The more exposure they got to new industries and other
professional secular environments, the more motivation and inspiration they had
to invent. They experienced ﬁrst hand the mechanical and practical needs of
industrializing America. As Rossman substantiated, the psychology of the
inventor leads half to produce innovations which enhance and improve their own
employment. Such increased job opportunities signiﬁcantly expanded the range
of women inventor’s technical creativity into ﬁelds once relegated as exclusively
male, and in some cases, may have secured improved working conditions for
themselves and co-workers by their technological contributions. [9]

Employment accessibility and opportunity expanded traditional forms of
women’s employment and “opened a few unusual opportunities in less traditional
businesses and professions” (Rable 129). For example, traditionally women were
involved in benevolent associations in antebellum years. For the most part, this
work was not wage earning employment, but consisted of volunteer sewing
circles, church societies, and town meetings (Young 68). During the War this
kind of volunteerism increased dramatically for both Southern and Northern
women. They supported aid and relief organizations by organizing,
administering, and producing badly needed supplies such as bandages, articles of
clothing, food packages, and medicine (Young 69-71; Culpepper 245-250). [10]

Before the War, some women had also worked as nurses and teachers, but
the War witnessed an increased number of women entering in these professions

with an expanded range of opportunity and an increased level of social status

145

(Faust 82-88;92-l 13; Clinton 97-113). Others had previously worked in
factories, and likewise, the number of factory operatives increased during the war
years, especially in the sewing and textile factories and in arsenals (Massey 142-
149)

Still other women increasingly entered into those formerly considered
“unusual and less traditional” lines of work. Such lines of work included
actresses, dancers, lecturers, soldiers, spies, traders, dealers, sales clerks,
government workers, and prostitution and other illegal activities (Massey 78-86;
131-133, 150-151, 253-255, 262-263). More women also worked in what might
be termed entrepreneurial ﬁelds due to the absence of the men who formerly
operated such businesses. Accounts include female lumber mill managers,
lumber inspectors, ferry operators and steamboat captains, ship builders,
teamsters, light house keepers, metal manufactures, pawnbrokers, bankers,
brokers, and morticians (Rebel 129; Penny 214-233, 405, 486; Massey 152;
Culpepper 273).

Wage earning women were part of an emerging work force pattern which
included some elements common to all women in varying degrees. Large
numbers of women entered the work force for the ﬁrst time because of new
economic realities. They also began to have less children, consequently shrinking
the size of the average household. [11] In addition, changes in household
technology accompanied the changed family composition and the increased
numbers of women working outside of the home. As these technologies became

more widely available, they caused a decrease in household production. Women

146

began to buy things like soap, candles, clothing, and some food items that they
used to produce in the home (Kessler-Harris 109-111). Commercial workforces
began to produce what was previously home production. Women participated in
the increased production as well as consumption of these products. All of these
realities contributed to re-shaping of conventional standards, making it more and
more acceptable for women to seek employment outside of the home. Prior to the
Civil War,

“. . . women divided themselves into those who did and

those who did not leave their homes to engage in wage

labor. After the war, daughters of impoverished southern

farmers took their places in the urban labor force, as did

black women. And genteel widows, North and South,

broke through barriers that had discouraged well-educated

and afﬂuent women from seeking jobs... A neat pattern of

urban and industrial expansion from east to west shattered

into explosive fragments--showering factories, ofﬁces, and

opportunities over the map” (Kessler-Harris 108).

Industrial and urban expansion also contributed to the rise in the number
of women inventors and in the expanded range of their inventions. As
opportunities opened up for female wage earners, women were exposed to new
factory, ofﬁce, manufacturing and trade environments, many of them in the
earliest stages of mechanization. Along with the male work force, increasing
numbers of women experienced ﬁrst hand the pressing need to improve
production and efﬁciency. In addition, many women personally experienced the
devastation and primitive conditions of war (Culpepper 167-177). An

atmosphere stimulated by accelerated technological development pulsed on both

sides of the Mason-Dixon line. For the ﬁrst time in American history, the

147

demand for greater manufacturing productivity included women inventors as
signiﬁcant and valuable contributors.

Not only do the numbers jump signiﬁcantly after 1850, but also the kinds
of inventions that women are patenting increase signiﬁcantly. According to the
1888 patent ofﬁce census of women inventors prior to 1850, two thirds of the 30
patents could be categorized as domestic, including such items as corsets, stoves,
bellows, a ﬁre place, broom brushes and a sad iron. The remaining third of patents
were industrial and/or manufacturing applications. Most notably, several of these
pertained to the straw hat industry during and after the War of 1812 as discussed
in Chapter 2.

Between 1850 and 1870, the 350 women’s patents still included a
predominance of domestic inventions, but with a tremendous increase in variety.
There were still, of course, numerous corsets, but additionally there were many
different kinds of clothing items, including shoe soles, stocking supporters, ladies
hoods and headdresses, hoop skirts, military caps, clasps for boots, shoes and
belts, and collars to name just a few (LWP).

Beyond clothing, domestic inventions included more than a dozen child
care related items for the ﬁrst time, such as bottles, a baby jumper, toys and
children’s furniture. Food related inventions also included increased innovations
with things like a process for fruit extracts, manufacture of vinegar, a method of
preserving eggs and a process for manufacturing cheese. Numerous medical,
health, and hospital aides appear for the ﬁrst time on the list which include a

variety of medicinal compounds, including one for the cure of cholera and an

148

improved nitrated mercurial ointment. Other examples under this categorization
included a medicine-spoon and bottle-stopper combined, an invalid chair, an
ambulance, a hospital bed and several speciﬁc women’s health aides such as
pessaries and mamrrriform breast-protectors (LWP).

A number of unusual and curious miscellaneous inventions also appeared
on the list in this 20 year span which do not fall clearly into a domestic category
or any other well deﬁned category. A sample of the range of these inventions
offers insight regarding the divergent kinds of things women were inventing.
Such inventions included a corpse preserver, composition fuel, an extension
traveling bag, sunshades for horses, low water indicators, ﬁre alarm
thermometers, and photography innovations (LWP).

Perhaps most signiﬁcant, though, was the increased variety of mechanical
and industrial inventions. These technological innovations fell clearly outside of
any domestic application and suggest a period of social ﬂux in women’s
relationship with technology and an increasingly positive reception toward such
changing perimeters. They exemplify not only an expansion of a pre-existing
category, but many of them denote new ﬁelds of technical creativity altogether for
women inventors. The following represents a sample of some of the more than 65
industrial and mechanical inventions women produced during the Civil War era:
reaping and mowing machines, plows, improved locomotive wheels, a war vessel,
furnace for smelting ores, machine for weaving cords or coverings around cords,
braiding and spinning machines, tattingshuttles, a plastic composition, apparatus

for punching corrugated metals, machines for weaving hair for wigs, & etc.,

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ﬂuting machines, construction method for screw-propellers, porous porcelain,
machine for cutting wax for artiﬁcial ﬂowers, improvement in desulphurizing
ores, improved material for packings and bearings, a paper feeding machine, and
a mode of preventing the heating of axles or journals (LWP).

Women also invented mechanized domestic technologies including nearly
20 improvements to the sewing machine, numerous washing machines and a dish
washing machine. Sewing machine innovations were especially valuable to the
war effort, as clothing was essential equipment for the military. It has been
estimated that the North experienced a real advantage on this front with the
invention and utilization of the sewing machine innovations in the already
extensive ready-made clothing industry. “The output of sewing machines doubled
between 1860 and 1864. With a sewing machine, shirts could be made twelve
times as rapidly as by hand” (Oliver 281; Gies 278).

Beyond the obvious technological value of their contributions, it is
signiﬁcant that women invented more proliﬁcally and with a much wider scope of
application during the Civil War than ever before. It suggests shifting boundaries
in the relationship between women and technology which developed through an
increased knowledge base and more freedom in social choice to pursue
occupations previously restricted to women’s participation. The War encouraged
women’s participation in active and powerful roles because of the need for a
productive work force. Women inventors brought desperately needed new
technology to the front line on more than just the battle ﬁeld. Their inventions

fortiﬁed sagging economic resources. They did not challenge, but integrated and

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supported, the masculine world view wherein economic and political survival was
intrinsically connected to military strategy resulting in favorable reception of their
patriotic and valuable inventions in support of the cause.

Because of this prevailing cultural reception, women’s mechanized and/or
industrial inventions were considered more valuable. As in the case of Martha
Coston, who although faced discriminatory obstacles that male inventors did not
face, she experienced proﬁtable success. If she had invented and marketed an
improved window sash, mincing knife, or dust pan, her story, like the inventors of
those devices, would have perhaps not merited the same notoriety or value. [12]
Even though all inventions require knowledge, whether practically or
professionally acquired, and all inventing activity requires choices about tools,
processes, and marketing, mechanical and industrial inventions have culturally
been deemed more valuable based on a gendered system that reinforces male
values as superior, especially during war-time. Inventions like the pyrotechnic
ﬂare and code system, improved planking for war vessels, screw propeller
construction (used in early submarines), reaping and mowing machines and other
agricultural and industrial types of inventions ﬁt into an established area of
technical activity, in which signiﬁcance was evaluated on gendered criteria.

The economic and technological signiﬁcance of these inventions went
hand-in-hand with the changing cultural signiﬁcance of women’s place in Civil
War society. Campbell, believed that “the United States Census for 1860”
showed the “ﬁrst really deﬁnite statements as to the occupations of women and

children” because in preceding years “no such needs as those of the mother

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country pressed upon us” (96). The “blankrress of this period” persisted because
not many occupations were open to women, generally not enough to merit serious
national occupational censuses. But the demands of the War shaped the needs of
the mother country, and they outweighed the needs of preserving a male
dominated work force.
Dr. Emily Blackwell, one of the ﬁrst women physicians in America,
commented on the dearth of opportunity for higher work for women in the early
national period. She wrote,
Women were hindered at every turn by endless restraint in
endless minor detail of habit, custom tradition, etc... Most
women who have been engaged in any new departure
would testify that the difﬁculties of the undertaking lay far
more in these artiﬁcial hindrances and burdens than in their
own health, or in the nature of the work itself” (Campbell
97).
The cultural barriers women inventors faced in antebellum America were artiﬁcial
in the sense that they had no merit or basis in fact. But they created very real
hindrances and burdens based on gendered assumptions that women were either
inferior or incapable altogether to “work” with machines or in any capacity which
placed one outside of the protective conﬁnes of the home. Particularly on point
is the astute observation of historian Witold Rybczynski. He noted that,

“. . . the relationship between technological innovation and

economics is hardly one of cause and effect. Just as

technology is not governed by an internal imperative,

neither is it ruled by a narrow set of economic conditions.

This is not surprising if one considers that the application

of technology ultimately involves society as a whole, and

that technology is not just a constraint on culture, it is itself
a part of culture” (221).

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In agreement with Rybczynski, women inventors were not ruled or restricted by
economic conditions alone. Their inventions, particularly during the Civil War
era, became a cultural constituency that pressed the existing limits of women’s
narrow relationship with technology.

A suggested corollary surfaces between the expanded employment
opportunity and the increased types of inventions. In 40 years of women’s
inventive history between 1809-1849 compared to the 20 years between 1850 and
1870, we see a dramatic increase in patenting activity which corresponds to a
period of increased employment opportunity. Many women were entering the
work force for the ﬁrst time, and, correspondingly, we see many ﬁrst time
occurrences of speciﬁc kinds of inventions by women. A speculative correlation
is prompted between these employment types and patented inventions from 1850 -

1870 as illustrated in the following brief sample:

Employment Patented Inventions

mortician Mary E. Mott, corpse preserver, May,
1868

hospital, aid societies Clarissa Britain, ambulance, August,

1863; Sarah Hussey, hospital table,
May, 1865; Lucy Broad, improved
disinfectant, Sept, 1866; Hannah
Conway, hospital bed, Feb, 1868

lumber industry Rebecca Sherwood, improvement in
reducing straw and other ﬁbrous
substances for the manufacture of
paper-pulp, Dec, 1864

shipping/railroad transportation Mary J. Montgomery, war-vessel, Jan,
1864 & locomotive wheels, May, 1864;

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steel & Iron manufacture

machine manufacture

printing industry

misc. manufacture

Temperance P. Edson, inﬂator for
raising sunken vessels, 1865; Henrietta
Vansittart, method of screw propeller
construction, May, 1896

Eliza Jane Hall, furnace for smelting
ores, Mar, 1864; Elizabeth Burns,
improvement in desulphurizing ores,
187 0

Mary Carpenter, ironing and ﬂuting
machine, 1862; Catherine Corbet,
ﬂuting machines, Apr, 1869;

Mary J. McColl, machine for cutting wax
for artiﬁcial ﬂowers, Feb, 1870

Margaret Knight, paper feeding
machines, Nov, 1870

Mary Hurley, needles for canning
chairs, July, 1866; Nannie Hunter,
improvement in manufacture of soap,
Oct, 1867;Catherine E. Howard,
manufacture of artiﬁcial ﬂowers, Mar,
1869; Eliza D. Murfey, May, 1870,
material for packing journals and
bearings

This correlation suggests as women expanded their ﬁelds of employment

in expanded range of industrial capacities, increased numbers began participating

as producers (inventors), not just consumers. The socio-economic conditions

surrounding the Civil War marked a period of increased inventive activity through

increased employment opportunities and shifting standards of women’s roles.

This reﬂects a social imprint “that the application of technology ultimately

involves society as a whole, and that technology is not just a constraint on

culture” (Rybczynski 221). What women invented during the Civil War began to

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challenge the gendered assumption that women: (1) could not invent and (2) if
they did, it had to be something in the domestic ﬁeld.

Although the assumption was challenged, it was not dispelled.
Persistently, the general perception remained the men were the most capable,
therefore, important inventors, and the image of the inventor was not altered to
include a female dimension. Even though women were functioning in productive
industrial roles, they continued to be seen and perceived as consumers. For
example, women who participated as producers in the iron and steel industry, such
as inventors Eliza Jane Hull (#41,989, improved fumace for smelting ores, 1864),
Elizabeth Burns,( #100,497, improvement in desulphurizing ores, 1870), and
ironmaster, Rebecca W. Lukens, left evidence of their legacy and involvement in
the burgeoning steel and iron industry. Hull and Burns left patent records and
Lukens left biographical and business records.

In the case of Rebecca W. Lukens, by her death in 1861, she was known
as a successﬁrl ironmaster “whose achievements had mounted with the years,
whose progress had been identiﬁed with the progress of her times” (Stern 248).
[I3] She wrote that “the manufacture of iron is not a mere local or individual
interest, but is of national importance, . . . affording a supply of a chief element of
progress in time of peace, and an important engine of defense in time of war”
(Stern 250). In her life’s work as owner and operator of Brandywine Mill in
Coatesville, Pennsylvania, she acknowledged that application of technology and
her relationship with such was molded by cultural factors, such as a spirit of

national progress and a patriotic duty of defense. What relationship to the iron

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and steel industry inventors Hull and Bum’s experienced is unknown at this time.
Only their patent records provide evidence of their contributions.

But again neither Luken’s life experience, or Hull’s or Burn’s
contributions, signiﬁcantly changed the perception of women’s relationship to the
steel and iron industry. In John Oliver’s standard History of American
Technology (1956), in his discussion “On the Eve of the Civil War” he notes the
following regarding the steel and iron industry:

The improvements and reﬁnements in iron technology

brought the use of steel within the reach of every one, even

the ladies. A new process for tempering a cheaper grade of

steel was invented which provided steel hoops of light

weight, great toughness, and elasticity, in the crinoline age,

enabling the women from families of limited income to be

dressed in the height of fashion. The output of tempered

wire for crinoline skirts amounted to several tons annually

(269).

Oliver seems amazed that “even the ladies” had something to do with new
iron technology. How wonderful, he seems to say, that it served to make it more
easy and economical to conform to fashion dictates, possibly placing women at
the height of fashion! The persistence of women’s perceived narrow relationship
with technology did not abate during the Civil War era with their increased
inventive activity, their expanded employment opportunities or changing social
roles. Rather, the perception that men produce and women consume persisted and
has been consistently reinforced through standard 20th century histories of
technology.

Perhaps what might dispel such persistent misconceptions and remedy the

bias in which most histories of technology are presented is the missing data, the

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elusive biographical data, in the above corollary between women’s employment
types and inventive activity. What circumstances, family connections or business
relationships placed them in their ﬁeld of inventive activity and in their traditional
or non-traditional employment? We have some biography on Lukens from her
own writing and from a good collection of business records. [14] But she was not
an inventor, although she did share some kinship with women inventors in that
she was a woman of signiﬁcant accomplishment in a male dominated
technological progressive industry. We do not know, though, what Clarissa
Britain was engaged in professionally that compelled her to invent an ambulance
for battleﬁeld use? Or did Mary Mott, inventor of a corpse preserver, in fact,
work as a mortician? Was her family engaged in the undertaking business? Did
she “set-up” business as an itinerant mortician at the edge of battleﬁelds? (Bowen
79) Was Temperance Edson working with the military in some ofﬁcial or
unofﬁcial capacity when she invented a system for raising sunken vessels? Did
she have a salvage business or some personal stake in a sunken ship?

Like the biographical recovery of these three women inventors, most
women inventors biographies are in the earliest stages of documentation, if at all.
They have yet to be given serious historical attention or scholarly credibility that
such investigation merits. The value of such an undertaking has been noted by
historian, Judith McGaw, in her review of the only three book length treatments of
women inventors. [15] She encourages scholars to pursue biographical scholarship

of women inventors, because,

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New work on great women could beneﬁt more than these

books have done from the example set by the many ﬁne

studies of technology’s great men. One elementary lesson

of that literature is that creativity is far too complex and

idiosyncratic and, indeed, still too poorly understood for the

superﬁcial study of numerous cases to yield much insight.

There is good reason why biography has predominated in

this area of scholarship (Inventors 225).

McGaw clearly sees the merits that women inventors’ biographies would
have in “challenging the popular conviction that women did not invent,” but, on
the other hand, she does not make the distinction between male and female
inventors biographies when she notes that biographies have “the added advantage
of being a highly accessible form of historical writing” (225). For women
inventors, particularly 19th century women, accessibility to biographical data is
the uncommon exception (i.e. Martha Coston’s autobiography). But the pursuit
of that highly illusive information is due critical scholarly attention by future
historians as it would, no doubt, yield valuable insight into “how the gender
system has inﬂuenced who invents” (225). The potential of such a rich resource
would be immense in placing women inventors into historical context, as in the
subject at hand, the Civil War.

For example, the few biographical details we have in placing Britain’s
ambulance in context of the historical context of the Civil War, pose more
questions than answers at this point. But they do reinforce the potential that such
information would surely lend insight into women inventors relationship with

technology and the gender valued system in which they were evaluated. Britain’s

life holds particular promise of shedding light on how the gender system has

158

inﬂuenced women’s inventive activity as she is one who might be classed as a
professional inventor with seven known patents to her name. [16]

Her ambulance, her second patent dated August 1 1, 1863, holds particular
interest in understanding the social context that promoted its invention, its war-
time application and its manufacturing history. Was she involved in a relief
organization that put her in close proximity to a battleﬁeld, witnessing ﬁrst-hand
the need for such a vehicle? Or was she employed in some vehicle-related
occupation or in the geographic region where such manufacturing was centered?
All of these questions pose valid possibilities based on the available sources.

For example, Clarissa Britain was known to have been head of the Niles
Female Seminary in Michigan in 1843 (History of Berrien and Van Buren
Counties 268). The school was advertised in the Niles Republican in 1843 as
place that “parents wishing to give their daughters an education, can ﬁnd no more
institution more desirable, or place them under a person better qualiﬁed for the
duty.” At some point (date unknown), she left her position at Niles Female
Seminary and moved to South Carolina to teach (Macdonald 19). Was it her
occupation as a teacher that caught her behind Confederate lines when the ﬁghting
broke out? If so, she couldn’t have picked a more volatile state to witness the
erupting of war between the states as South Carolina was the ﬁrst state to secede
on December 20, 1860, and the ﬁrst to experience attack at Fort Sumter on April
12, 1861 (Garraty 249, 253). She may have witnessed the movement of wounded

men from the battleﬁeld, like the following anonymous woman, who described

159

her work at Stoneman’s Station in a letter from the Chicago Historical Society
collection.

I am very tired, as until last night, I have not laid on a bed

or undressed myself for six nights. . . we took possession of

a little old house in the ﬁeld with the ambulances. As the

battle had commenced we wrote a note to the Medical

Director of the 5th Corp, telling him we were there with

supplies. Soon came an “orderly” bringing a note,

requesting to have a supper ready as soon as possible for an

ambulance train containing about eighty wounded men . . .

(Culpepper 254).

Was it her brother’s death in 1862 that prompted her to come back to Michigan
where she handled his affairs as admirristrix of his estate? And possibly enroute,
did she witness such an ambulance train, noting their primitive and inefﬁcient
design as captured in some surviving Civil War photographs? [17] What, when,
and why she was in South Carolina or in what other way geographically or
occupational she was connected to the war, would certainly yield valuable
information in accessing the social context of her inventive activity.

The purpose of her invention is clearly in support of the war effort and
demonstrates that she had some speciﬁc knowledge about the need to get the
wounded quickly and efﬁciently off the battleﬁeld to a place of safe treatment. In
her patent speciﬁcation to the United States Patent Ofﬁce she related, in part, that,

This invention relates to certain new and useﬁrl

improvements in ambulances for the removal of the

wounded ﬁom the ﬁeld of battle to safe quarters, where

they may receive immediate surgical aid.

The invention has for its object the construction of a safe,

cheap, and comfortable ambulance which will admit of
being taken apart and packed in a very small compass for

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convenient transportation, and which may be easily erected

again when occasion requires, the whole arrangement being

adapted to the wants and necessities which arise in the

transportation of the wounded about the ﬁeld, and to

hospitals which may be remote therefrom, all as will be

hereinafter described (No. 39,460 dated August 11, 1863).
After a thorough mechanical description, the ofﬁcial patent speciﬁcation
concludes with the defense by Britain that,

I have obtained a means whereby I am enabled to erect a

ﬂame in a common wagon-body in a few minutes which

will serve as a comfortable support for stretchers; and these

stretchers, with the wounded lying upon them, can be

placed in this frame and conveyed from the battleﬁeld to

the hospital to receive surgical succor. It is not proposed

that the wagons themselves should be brought upon the

ﬁeld, but they should be left in the immediate vicinity in a

secure place... (No. 39460).
Like the woman at Stoneman’s Station, Britain was more than simply aware of
military strategy involving the removal of the wounded from the battleﬁeld.
Some experience, whether as an astute eye-witness, in some capacity as a relief
worker, or something quite unpredictable, motivated her to invent something
clearly outside of a domestic categorization. She was not, perhaps, content to tend
and nurse the wounded as thousands of women did, but she sought a technological
solution to improve their medical care. She was not ruled or restricted by
economic conditions alone, but experienced the war in a cultural context.

What Britain did back in Michigan during the War is equally unclear. We
do know that she was born in 1813 to a rather politically prominent family in St.

Joseph, Michigan. Her father, General Calvin Britain was one of the pioneer

settlers who originally plaited St. Joseph in 1827. He later served as President of

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the village ofﬁces in 1835 and from 1832-1835 he served as a member of the
legislative council of Michigan Territory. He died in 1840. Her brother, Calvin,
was a Representative in Michigan Legislature in 1847, 1850, and 1851 and the
next year served as the Lieutenant-Governor of Michigan in 1852-53 (History of
Berrien and Van Buren Counties 148, 149; 312). He died in 1862. There is no
mention of her mother (Myers 9/16/96). As a single women, it can be assumed
that these family connections afforded her some measure of afﬂuence and
elevated social status in her local community, but it is not clear if they afforded
her any ﬁnancial security.

After 1862, she appears not to have any male relatives who might have
supported her and the need to support herself at the age of 49, may have been
what compelled her to a invent so proliﬁcally in the next two years. Her ﬁrst
patent for a ﬂoor warmer was taken out on March 10, 1863 and her last patent for
lamp burners was granted on September 27 , 1864, totaling seven patents
altogether. If she continued in the teaching profession or went on to some other
occupation during or after this period of inventive activity is unlmown. The
corollary between her employment and inventions remains unsubstantiated.

According to historian Ann Macdonald, “since assignment ﬁles at the
National Archives yield no evidence of transactions for the sale of rights to any of
her seven patents, one can assume that Britain never beneﬁted ﬁnancially from
her ingenuity” (20-21). But to date, it has not been possible to verify this source,
and if Britain’s probate records are recovered, a very different story would be

revealed if she was, in fact, receiving any patent royalties. Suspicion of

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Macdonald’s assumption arises, in other part, because of Britain’s geographic
relocation. Her last listed address in handling her deceased brother’s affairs was
dated January 28, 1867, which stated that she lived in Kenosha County,
Wisconsin (Myers 9/16/96). It raises the question that such a move may not have
been coincidental due to the fact that Kenosha was a transportation manufacturing
center and was the home to such ﬁrms as Bain Wagons, Mitchell Wagons,
American Motors and the Nash Motor Company, who later manufactured the ﬁrst
motorized ambulance. This would be a logical place for an inventor of an
ambulance to do extended business.

It is also of interest that Cordilla Harvey of Kenosha, WI, started the ﬁrst
federal hospitals during the Civil War to transport men off the front lines and care
for them at remote hospitals. Was Britain in any way connected with Harvey or
the transportation manufacturing business in Kenosha? Comprehensive
biographical research would surely bring to light some of these missing pieces.
Such evidence would certainly help to place women inventors like Clarissa
Britain in a larger social context explaining if and how women’s participation in
technology was accepted and rejected based on gendered values. And as McGaw
suggested, accurate biographical data would challenge the persistent conviction
that women did not invent.

Woman inventors such as Britain, Coston and Montgomery, along with
350 other women did, in fact, invent a wide variety of things during the Civil War
era. The Civil War provided a springboard from which many women leaped

beyond the circumscribed woman’s sphere into that heretofore reserved for men

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(Massey 367). Increased employment opportunities expanded women’s social
roles and provided access to technological development. They functioned as
signiﬁcant producers of Civil War technology, not just as consumers. This
proved to be a time of accelerated technological development, especially in the
northern and eastern states, and has been considered by some to have been a
“turning point in many technological advances. It was the ﬁrst struggle in which
science and machinery played a dominant part, and it was the ﬁrst time that
technological innovations and improvements were applied on a large scale in a
major war” (Oliver 276). What and how much women invented during this time
period successfully challenged the assumption that they were incapable of
producing signiﬁcant technological advances across diverse inventive categories.
Women continued to invent predominantly in the domestic ﬁeld, but they
consistently contributed inventions over an increased technological range, far
aﬁeld from their normal conventional domestic activities. Due to the
preponderance of domestic inventions, though, these continued to overshadow
women’s mechanical and industrial inventive capabilities. Increased numbers and
types of invention did not signiﬁcantly change the prototypical image of inventor
as male but rather, the emergence of women inventors in fuller numbers with
expanded capabilities began to change the reception to women as inventors.
Earlier unyielding gendered assumptions about women and technology began to
change, shaping and carving out expanded social roles for women. Women
inventors joined the ranks of women who supported the war effort in ways

previously considered socially unacceptable.

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These subtle social changes, fueled by a heightened sense of patriotism,
marked a time of “beginnings and not fulﬁllment” (Massey 23). Both Northern
and Southern women realized and accepted that they lived in a man’s world and
did not at this time challenge that social order. The women’s movement would
not gain serious support or momentum until almost a generation later. But those
women who lived through the Civil War era “shared their men’s principles and
prejudices” and responded to the battle call with newly forged social tools
(Massey 24). Their unprecedented activity in both traditional and untraditional
roles produced the ﬁrst generation of women inventors, who, like others,
challenged and deﬁed convention to enlarge women’s social, economic and
political roles. Much of this development transpired under the emotional guise of
fervent patriotism which reinforced a masculine viewpoint of economic and
political survival. Military strategy demanded technological innovation with the
clear understanding that technological dominance would be a decisive element in
winning. And it was (Oliver 276). This sentiment is exempliﬁed in the words of
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton when he said, “The reaper is to the North
what slavery is to the South . . . Without McCormick’s invention I fear the North
could not win and the Union would dismembered” (Gies 280). It wasn’t just
advancement in agriculture, though, that turned the technological tides in favor of
the North. Advancements in food preservation and packaging, textile production,
clothing manufacture, transportation, medical and surgical equipment, machine

tools and engine improvements, in addition to the obvious ﬁre arms and other

165

military developments, also played a pivotal part in the victory (Oliver 269-274;
Gies 278-290)

This need for stimulated accelerated technological development went
hand-in-hand with increased manufacturing demands. Such war-time
circumstances forced a re-ordering of the social prescription which insisted that
women join the labor force outside of the home in new capacities. As employment
opportunities slowly expanded, the social landscape took on new shape,
contorting old conventional standards where women were limited by domestic
boundaries.

Their function as inventors and their inventions merited increased
recognition with notable public national recognition for the ﬁrst time in the
Philadelphia Centennial of 187 6 and later in the Chicago Colombian Exposition
of 1893 where women inventors exhibited separately in the Women’s Buildings
(See Chapter 6). What women invented during the Civil War and their increased
number of inventions bears the imprint of social context as all invention and
innovation occur in a social context . Our technology is a symptom of our culture,
not vice versa, and reﬂects the human preoccupations of its time (Rybczynski
222-223). From 1850-1870 our country was preoccupied with the Civil War.
Technological advancement was not only a means to an end, but was then, and
remains now, a complex human activity involving cultural and social precepts as
well as intellectual and mechanical principles. Women inventors responded with
unprecedented inventive activity which set the pace for future women inventors

during the rest of the 19th century.
1 66

This accelerated pace of inventive activity melded with other social
changes which beneﬁted women inventors as women collectively demanded
higher education, participated in forming women’s clubs and professional
organizations, and in the movement for legal entitlement (Culpepper 391-393).
Technological progress after the Civil War continued to witness exciting and
dynamic inventions such as the telephone, electric lightbulb, and automobile, and
women continued to contribute their inventive talents on these new technological
frontiers. The Civil War reshaped the paradigms of the scope of women’s
inventive activity and contributed to their emergence in the national technological
scene. Women inventors during this time forever bear the imprint of that

momentous social drama.

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Chapter 4 - NOTES

[1] For a comprehensive view of Civil War women and their expanding work
opportunities outside of the home, see Jeanie Attie’s article “Warwork and the
Crisis of Domesticity in the North” in Divided Houses, Clinton Silber.

[2] LP. Brockett’s and Mary C. Vaughan Woman ’s Work In the Civil War: A
Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience (1867), George C. Rable’s Civil
Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, Chapter 13, “The J anus-
Faced Women of the New Sout ”, and Marilyn Mayer Culpepper’s, Trials and
Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War , Chapters 7 and 8, “Much to Do -
Part I” and “Much to Do - Part H” provide solid documentation for the conclusion
that women systematically moved out of the home and into formerly male
occupied lines of work in order to support themselves and their families while
their men were away ﬁghting.

[3] According to Civil War historian, Kenneth M. Stampp, “1857 was
probably the year when the North and South reached the political point of no
return-«when it became well nigh impossible to head off a violent resolution of
the difference between them” (viii). It proved to be year of dramatic tension
punctuated by such momentous events as the Panic of 1857, the Dred Scott case,
and the Lecompton Constitution.

[4] According to the LWP from 1850 - 1870, the following medicine/hospital
inventions were patented by women: 2 bandages; 5 abdominal supporters; 1 vapor
bath, 1 disinfectant; 1 corpse preserver; 17 various medical compounds; 1
ambulance; 1 eye water; 1 drinking cup for the sick; 1 hospital table; 4 hospital
beds; 1 medicine spoon and stopper.

[5] See Susan C. Bourque and Kay B. Warren’s article “Technology, Gender,
and Development” for a contextual discussion of the “Feminization of
Technology” and “Appropriate Technology.”

[6] Caroline Eliot Kasson referred to the many social changes produced by the
Civil War in women’s world as “a grand convulsion in society.” Kasson was in
Washington DC. in 1861 and observed and “recorded the innumerable social
changes which took place in the capital throughout the war” in her memoirs, An
Iowa Woman in Washington (Massey 242, 245).

[7] According to historian Mary Elizabeth Massey, the greatest increase of
women workers was a 33.4 per cent increase in “personal services,” which

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included many former slaves or recently arrived immigrants not listed in 1860.
Women employed in industry rose by 16.5 percent, making the 7.3 per cent in
trades and transportation considerably less in overall comparison (Massey 151-
152)

[8] Dr. Joseph Rossman cites the following examples of important 19th
century inventions by men who had very little technical knowledge in the ﬁeld in
which they invented: “Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame, was
a barber; Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom, was a clergyman;
James Watt, the inventor of the improved steam-engine, was a maker of scientiﬁc
instruments; Robert Fulton, famed for his steamboat, was a portrait painter; Eli
Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, was a lawyer; Morse, the inventor of the
telegraph was a landscape painter; Bell, who is identiﬁed with the telephone, was
a teacher of deaf-mutes; J. and W. Hyatt, inventors of celluloid, were printers;
William Armstrong, the inventor of the hydraulic engine, was a lawyer. What
these men did have in common was “an intense urge to contrive...a decided bent
towards mechanics...as well as the capacity for drudgerous detail and prolonged
intense effort (143). While these characteristics are cast in masculine imagery,
when gendered assumptions are set aside, they have distinct application in the
lives of women inventors. ‘

[9] Inventions especially related to industrial safety issues suggests this
precept (i.e. Harriet Tracy, safety elevator; Harriet D. T. Wilson, ﬁre escape;
Augusta M. Rodgers, ﬁre-prevention devices for railroads; Eleanor A. McMann,
safe guards for sleeping-car births; Maria Beasley, life rafts (Stanley 447-449,487-
488,495)

[10] Women began to organize with incredible speed and efﬁciency from the
spring of 1861 and throughout the War. Historian Glenda Riley notes that by the
“end of 1861, there were approximately 20,000 women’s aides societies in the
United States and the Confederacy.” The following examples illustrate their
activity: “Organized in 1862, the Weldon, Pennsylvania, society contributed
$17,000 in goods in one year. In one month in 1863, the Center Ridge, Alabama,
group sent “422 shirts, 551 pairs of drawers, 80 pairs of socks, 3 pairs of gloves, 6
boxes and a bale of hospital stores 128 pounds of tapioca and $18 for hospital
use” (122). Records of other relief societies and sanitary commissions are
characterized by strong community support and industrious productivity. See L.P.
Brockett and Mary Vaughan’s, Woman ’s Work in the Civil War (1867) for details
regarding women’s “contributions, toils and sacriﬁces...to minister relief and
consolation to our wounded and suffering heroes” in which he claims that “two
rrrillion and three hundred thousand volunteers” participated in relief
organizations (56).

[11] “Aggregate ﬁgures reveal both a decline in the birth rate and a startling
reduction in the number of small children for whom women cared toward the

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latter part of the century. Between 1860 and 1890 the number of children under
ﬁve per 1,000 women dropped nearly a thir ” (Kessler—Harris 110).

[12] See Martha Coston’s A Signal Success for detailed accounts of various
awards and medals given to the signal around the world: 1873, Vienna, Austria;
1875, Chili, Santiago de Chili; 1876, US. Centennial at Philadelphia; 1886,
International Exhibition for Navigation, Commerce, and Manufactures, Liverpool,
England.

[13] Rebecca Lukens was the ﬁrst American woman to own and run an iron
plate rolling mill. She began operation of the nearly bankrupt Brandywine Mill
in 1825 at the age of 31 when her husband died (237). Due to litigation problems
and property right issues, the mill was not legally hers until 1853. She turned the
company around ﬁnancially and continually stayed abreast of the latest
technological developments which kept the company going throughout the 19th
and 20th century. Her estate was worth over $100,000 upon her death. She was
proud of her life’s accomplishment that she had “built a very superior mill, though
a plain one and our character for making boiler iron stood ﬁrst in the market”
(Stern 249). Her contributions to the steel and iron industry are proﬁled in
Madeleine Stem’s, We the Women Career First of Nineteenth Century America .

[14] The resources include an unpublished autobiography, personal
correspondence, litigation records and extensive papers of the Lukens Steel Co. at
the Eleutherian Mills Historical. Library in Wilmington, DE (Notable American
Women, 1607-1950, 442-443).

[15] McGraw’s Review Essay in Technology and Culture focuses on Ann
Macdonald’s, Feminine Ingenuity, Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptack’s Mothers of
Invention and Autumn Stanley’s Mothers and Daughters of Invention as the only
three book length texts on women inventors. Only two of the texts, though,
Stanley’s and Macdonald’s, have historical merit and credible scholarship
(“Inventors” 215). Vare’s is riddled with factual errors and lacks credible
scholarly documentation.

[16] Clarissa Britain’s patents:

#37,851 ﬂoor warmer Mar. 10, 1863
#39,460 Improvement in ambulances Aug. 11, 1863
#40,157 Improvement in boilers Oct. 6, 1863
#41,274 Improved lantern dinner pail Jan. 19, 1864
#43,087 Improvement in vegetable boiler June 14, 1864
#43,088 Improved dish drainer June 14, 1864
#43,393 Improvement in lamp burners Sept. 27, 1864

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[17] John Bowen’s Civil War Days, Everyday Life During the War Between the
States (1987) includes good photographic history, including one photograph
depicting “horse-drawn ambulances of the 57th New York Infantry, 1864” (79).

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Chapter 5

NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION VS. GENDER CONSTRUCTION

Following the Civil War, the nation entered into a period of national
reconstruction designated as a time for economic, political, and social healing.
Antebellum life was not to be restored, but a new united nation was to emerge
reﬂecting the hard won ideologies of the victor. The Civil War had touched the
lives of all Americans “with the most intense ﬁre in the nation’s history, sweeping
from battleﬁeld to governmental halls, into communities and homes” (Paludan
376). As the ﬁres of war smoldered and went out during the spring of 1865, new
ﬁres of contention were already kindled. Peoples lives continued to be shaped by
forces the war had unleashed. Four million slaves were ﬁ'eed and slavery was no
longer an issue. But freedom did not eliminate racism. Rather, it remained a
powerful force in the new nation and continually factored into the relationship
between freedom and equality (Paludan 382, 389). Neither did freedom spread
across gender boundaries, but rather the quest for freedom for American women
continued to ignite ﬁres fanned by ﬂames of inequality. This quest profoundly
affected the status, opportunity, and success of women inventors.

With other post-war women, women inventors journeyed into new

territory as the nation tried to unify and rebuild itself into a technologically

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progressive world power. The foundation for economic growth had been laid by
prewar industrialization and improved technological resources which developed
throughout the War. Also tools of ﬁnance, business, and industry were
successﬁrlly mobilized and honed during the war. Afterwards, they continued to
grow and expand, supplying the country with transcontinental railroads, advanced
communication systems, improved agricultural machinery and processes, an
improved factory system, and new banking and educational systems. All of these
efforts at national reconstruction signiﬁcantly affected gender construction. But
unlike national construction with its lofty aims of unifying a divided and weak
country, the construction of gender during post Civil War America was intent on
solidifying division.

The division between the sexes was more rigidly deﬁned than ever. The
ideals of true womanhood continued to focus on wife and mother, but at a level
of elevated status. [1] After the War, many espoused conformity to the ideal
woman as dependent, submissive, fragile, and intellectually inferior but still with
superior spirituality as the source of her strength. These ideas inﬂuenced
conventional standards of behavior and attitude to a great degree despite the
reality that women had expanded their domestic boundaries during the war to
include a broader secular environment. In the midst of this ideological endeavor
to return women to their pre-war social status, others countered with a somewhat
different set of ideals which historian Frances Cogan refers to as “Real

Womanhood” which stressed “physical ﬁtness and health for its models of young

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women with its concomitant belief in the spiritual dimensions of health” (Cogan
26). The ideals included demands for extended or higher education, right reasons
for marriage, women’s duties toward home and family, and attitudes toward
employment: :Cogan asserts that this ideal both emerged and ﬁnally disappeared
because of the dual and sometimes incompatible “emphasis on marriage as the
norm and active duties” (26). Both sets of cultural standards stem ﬁ'om the same
basic prerrrise, that woman was at her best when she took care of home, husband,
and children in an exemplary manner. But for many, conventional standards had

r-

been forever altered due to their war-time experiences. Resistance to reinforcing
pre-war gender construction and instituting new standards which elevated the
roles of wife and mother to new heights met with opposition from a collective
group of women around the country.

For some women, standards had shifted to such a degree during the War
that it was neither desirable nor possible for them to return to pre-war status.
Women from both sides amply demonstrated that they could perform very
capably, even admirably, in jobs, positions, and social contacts outside of the
home without the direction of a male head of household. During the War, women
challenged spatial boundaries in an unprecedented manner by refusing to accept
the idea that war was “no place for women.” Instead, they made the war their
place by creating positions for themselves and “adjusting their prewar patterns of
behavior to ﬁt public, wartime circumstances.” Like men, “women declared

themselves citizens and patriots who had a right to participate actively.” And

they participated during the war in “numbers too large and in ways too

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unconventional” to ever go back to prewar status (Leonard 198). Women
inventors joined the ranks of women who had expanded the private sphere of the
home and moved out into public sectors where previously only men had
functioned or women had functioned under circumscribed circumstances. Women
inventors, like other groups of professional women, were part of the,

Generations of women after the war [who] would grow up

in the context of a revised gender system that reﬂected the

impact of the Civil War by assuming their capacity for and

allowing them broader access to professional labor. . .

(Leonard 1 96- 1 97).
With their increased inventive activity after the War, professional inventors such
as Clarissa Britain, Mary Walton, Margaret Knight, Amanda Theodosia Jones,
Helen Augusta Blanchard, and others, helped to realign social perimeters deﬁning
women’s relationship with technology and challenged the persistent notion that
women did not invent.

The professionalization of women inventors was duly noted by Charlotte
Smith, a 19th century public advocate for women inventors speciﬁcally and
women laborers in general. One of her most important contributions was a short
lived journal, The Woman Inventor. Although only two issues were published
(April & June, 1891), they reveal interesting social context and attitudes about
women inventors as a collective group as well as speciﬁc names and categories
verifying the continued upswing in women’s inventive activity.

Despite the success of several women inventors, their status was never

recognized in the same light as their male counterparts. A professional woman

inventor did not ﬁt the mold of the ideal women. She was generally single and

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without children or widowed with dependent children. She invented for her
livelihood. Her inventions were often mechanical, mostly commercial, and
achieved a standard of technical sophistication with manufacturing potential. She
rarely received the same kind of public recognition for her accomplishrrrents as
did male inventors. She was considered an oddity and made to feel deviant for
pursing unnatural priorities even if her inventions were domestic (Glazer and
Slater 6-7). Regardless of the level of simplicity or the practical application in the
home, the woman inventor was not categorized as even an ethereal domestic
entity. Conventional standards did not elevate a woman in the machine shop, the
business world, or the scientiﬁc community. Social forces worked to idealize a
woman only in the home where her relationship with technology was narrowly
deﬁned within a domestic context. This perception continued to undermine the
emergence of a female dimension to the concept of inventor. Yet in the face of
this seemingly stagrrate social climate, women’s inventive activity continued to
increase and a small number of professional women inventors emerged during the
last quarter of the 19th century.

Neither national reconstruction or new gender construction reinvented the
prototypical inventor as anything but male, but shifting gender boundaries after
the War connected women inventors inextricably to the “woman question” and
more signiﬁcantly, to the answer. Construction of gender patterns which affected
women inventors were signiﬁcantly impacted by developments in the women’s
movement, increased access and higher levels of education, and the emergence of

women’s science clubs and societies.

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As the century progressed, the women’s movement took on new shape and
gathered velocity. The momentum of the movement supported a national social
reconstruction which demanded a new construction of gender, one that
simultaneously resisted and reinforced previously established ideals of
womanhood, but agreed that women’s basic rights were in desperate need of
reform. Women’s rights leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in an undated “Speech
on Reconstruction” eloquently summed up the basis on which women demanded a
new construction of gender:

Our Fathers declared all men equal, then placed the power

in the hands of the few . . . They declared taxation without

representation tyranny then taxed all these disfranchised

classes. . . From the baptism of this second revolution,

with a century of added experience shall we repeat the

blunder of the Fathers & build again on the old foundation

whose comer stone is class & caste[?] (Venet 151).
The inequity and hypocrisy of the old national order based on “class & caste” was
distinctly mediated by sex, and for many women it was no longer tolerable.
When the Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1866 enﬁ'anchising black men, but
not women, the “blunder of the Fathers” darkly foreshadowed the future. Stanton
expressed the foreboding that the Fourteenth Amendment generated among
women when she predicted, “If that word ‘male’ be inserted it will take us a
century at least to get it out” (Riley 126). Outrage accompanied this
overwhelming sense of apprehension as illustrated in the words of reformer
Frances Gage when she wrote,

Can any one tell us why the great advocates of Human

Equality . . . forget that when they were a weak party and
needed all the womanly strength of the nation to help them

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on, they always united the words ‘without regard to sex,

race, or color?’ Who ever hears of sex now from any of the

champions of freedom!” (Riley 126).

Champions of women’s freedom did not surface among the new body of
lawmakers or the newly organized government but from women themselves. But
it would be the second decade of the 20th century until women’s rights would
experience any signiﬁcant victory. 1n the postwar period, demands for new
gender construction emerged in two distinct camps. Many women struggled to
maintain the changed status quo of women’s enlarged sphere while others worked
toward returning to their prewar domestic status. [2] The status of women
inventors beneﬁted from the former and suffered ﬁom the later. During the War,
women’s experiences revealed “the enormous and varied pressures they exerted
on the Victorian gender system . . . , pressures that led to shifts and adjustments at
particular points, and that met with rigid intractability at others” (Leonard 197).
Women inventors joined those who shifted and adjusted boundaries which opened
new doors for women in the professions and in public life. But their
contributions, along with other women who entered into the public work force,
did not bring about the “demise of the gender system’s fundamental structure--its
organization around the basic concept of gender boundaries and limits” (Leonard
201). That basic concept was defended and protected with “rigid intractability.”

After the War, the idealization of woman reached new heights and found
strong entrenchment not only in male consensus but in one of two main branches

of the woman’s movement which reinforced woman’s role as wife and mother. [3]

Lucy Stone and Henry Ward Beecher were imnrinently connected with the

178

American Woman Sufﬁ'age Association (AWSA), which called for women to
fulﬁll the deﬁnition of womanhood with expanded application of piety, purity,
submissiveness and domesticity (Welter 21; Venet 16-17). Stone argued that
women’s unique attributes such as compassion, nurturance, and a better-
developed sense of morality required representation in the political process and
legal structure. She advocated marriage and motherhood like most women, but
demanded reform in the contractual legality of the institution. She boldly deﬁed
convention when she married Henry Blackwell in 185 5 by keeping her family
name and entering into a well-publicized maniage contract with Blackwell. Her
views about marriage reform were revealed in her marriage contract:

“. . . no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to

such of the present laws of maniage, as refuse to recognize

the wife as an independent, rational being, while they

confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural

superiority, inventing him with legal powers which no

honorable man would exercise, and which no man should

possess” (Riley 115; Kessler-Harris 185).
Stone wanted equality between the sexes to be legislated in marriage. The AWSA
differed from its opposition by not advocating the vote as the way to obtaining
legal entitlement. This was a main cause in the split in the women’s movement in
1869 (Kraditor 3-4).

The other faction of the women’s rights movement , the National Woman
Suffrage Association (NW SA), was headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony. They uncomprorrrisingly advocated the vote, reformed divorce laws

and property rights, equal employment and wage standards, and national

legislation to protect sexual equality (Paludan 387; Kessler—Harris 95-97; Riley

179

114-115). They believed that equality lay in political participation which meant
throwing off all the constraints of gender stereotyping. The NWSA believed
women were strong, intelligent, and independent and should have the right to
freely enter into legal contracts, hold any kind and amount of property, and be
able compete for fair and equal wages. Stanton disdained the idea of woman’s
sphere and Anthony believed that the vote was the only way for women to achieve
such participation. She felt that, “suffrage involves every basic principle of
republican government, all our social, civil, religious, educational, and political
rights” (Riley 114).

This split lasted until 1890 when the two factions merged into the National
American Woman Suffrage Association (Kraditor 4). But a far greater chasm lay
between women’s movements as a collective whole and women who did not
organize at all. Women who did not support the women’s movement for equality
premised their life style on pre-war gender conventions wherein women generally
worked in a narrowly deﬁned domestic segment as submissive and dependent
individuals. For women inventors, this social ferment created an atmosphere
where their creativity, especially if it had an industrial application, was still
suspect. But on another level, they beneﬁted from the tumultuous atmosphere as
gradually attitudes about women and technology were positively shaped and
molded by increased opportunities for higher education and the emergence of
women’s scientiﬁc clubs and societies. These developments supported increased

'- r

inventive activity and the emergence of more professional women inventors'with

180

inventions that demonstrated a consistent level of technological sophistication
and economic potential.

For women inventors, access and opportunity to formal higher education
would eventually improve their abilities, intellectual range, and professional
standards. But even before they began to beneﬁt from an enlarged scientiﬁc
educational system, the growing acceptance and status of educated scientiﬁc
women provided a more favorable social climate in which women contributed
technologically signiﬁcant inventions. Through increased and improved higher
education, women gradually gained recognition, credibility, and status in the
larger scientiﬁc community. A summary of the increased opportunities for
higher education beginning in the 18705 suggests that more women were admitted
to higher learning institutions with increased opportunities for a wider range of
degrees (Degler 310-311). For women inventors that meant access to chemistry,
physics, and advanced mathematics. How many women inventors actually
obtained such degrees remains an important research focus for future study. Such
information would help to verify and quantify that the development in women’s
education increasingly supported women entering into the scientiﬁc during the
last quarter of the 19th century. What is clear at this time, though, is that some
women inventors recognized the need for advanced education and often were at a
disadvantage without it.

Change in the educational system slowly evolved. Continually opposition
to women’s advanced education became a mission to many of its opponents who

demonstrated rigorous hostility with their argumentation. Very gradually women

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were accepted into institutions of higher learning and new women’s colleges were
opened. [4] Their presence and their success in such institutions and in previously
restricted programs, such as science and mathematics, challenged the social
malaise which considered women incapable of advanced scientiﬁc comprehension
and accomplishment. Although liberal arts curriculums expanded and some of the
more inﬂuential women’s colleges patterned their science curriculum after male
counterparts, after the Civil War a “curious dialectic of opportunity and
constraint” permeated the missions and philosophical underpinnings of the
leading female educational institutions (Rury 3; Horowitz 28; Eschbach 62). [5]
The increased educational opportunities did not automatically mean increased job
or career opportunities. While women could avail themselves to higher education
(particularly if you were white and middle or upper class), the educational goal for
most women was still to become a better wife and mother. After the War, this
posed an enduring paradox which prevented accelerated social advancement in
education for most women, which especially affected women inventors. The
persistent opposition to women’s education supported by social convention
attempted to keep women exclusively in the domestic reahn, but yet steadily
increasing educational opportunities provided access for more and more women to
enter colleges and universities.

The traditional goal of women’s education solely for the enhancement of
their domestic calling originated in the earliest of women’s educational
institutions and persisted throughout the century. Early female schools were

generally called seminaries rather than academies, colleges or universities. [6] It

182

has been generally summed up that “boys were taught to read and write” at
academies and “girls to read and sew” at serrrinaries (Marks 91). During the
18405 women were considered educated if they acquired a proﬁciency in
“embroidery, tapestry, singing, and versifying” (Marks 96). And although
women’s education expanded throughout the 19th century, domestic curriculums
remained central in women’s education.

For example, the 1854 Catalogue of the Wheeling Female Seminary listed
under “Terms” the tuition for speciﬁc courses. Music (with the use of
instrument) was $18 per session; modern languages, painting or drawing was $10
per session; embroidery, fancy needle work or plain sewing was $5.00 per
session; and vocal music and chemical or philosophical lectures were $2 per
session. If the value of the course was equated with the cost, music was far more
important than lectures in chemistry or philosophy. For women with any
aspirations in scientiﬁc ﬁelds, these early seminaries offered no advanced
education and even less encouragement to pursue a science orientated education.
For women inventors, this meant not only was scientiﬁc or mechanical instruction
unavailable, but standard educational values for women devalued the sciences. It
was clear that music was far more valuable for a woman to master than chemistry
or philosophy. The social acceptance of what was appropriate for women to study
had as much an effect on women inventors as what was actually studied. Even if
she was not able to obtain any scientiﬁc credentials but had a natural afﬁnity for
learning such or had acquired such knowledge in a private and unconventional

way, the fact that she was knowledgeable in the sciences and industrial arts was

183

 

 

 

enough to caste shadowy suspicion on her abilities, accomplishments, and her
very character.

An astute educator, Sarah Emily Davies (1830-1921) who was the
founder of Girton (1 869), the ﬁrst of the Cambridge and Oxford women’s
colleges, wrote in 1866 that, “The educational question depends, as we have seen,
on the larger question of women’s place in the social order” (Davies viii, 30).
Women inventors place in the social order would eventually beneﬁt from
increased educational opportunities, but not for at least another generation. Dual
signiﬁcance gradually surfaced in access to higher education and in expanded
cuniculums during the late 19th century. But generally from female senrinaries to
women’s universities, persistent and dominant domestic goals functioned as
social as well as educational obstacles for scientiﬁcally inclined women.

It is interesting to reﬂect on inventor, Clarissa’s Britain’s seminary
experience. As the head mistress of Niles Female Seminary in the 18405, it would
seem likely that we might ﬁnd evidence of training beyond preparation for
teaching and Republican motherhood. She was engaged in this occupation right
before she started inventing and given the nature of her inventions, she would
have experienced ﬁrst-hand the need for some mechanical vocational education
and/or basic scientiﬁc principles. (See Notes 16, Chapter 4). The value of such
training strikes one as essential as her ﬁrst patent for a ﬂoor warmer was returned
to her (after it was already patented) with the ﬁgures “bottom-upward” which she
lamented making the invention “utterly worthless” (Macdonald 20). But this

seminary was a ﬁnishing school where young women could reﬁne their manners,

184

improve home management skills and preparation for domestic life. She
advertised that “parents wishing to give their daughters an education can ﬁnd no
institution more desirable, or place them under a person better qualiﬁed for the
duty” (Macdonald 19). A person qualiﬁed as an inventor was certainly not the
message she wanted to advertise. But her upstanding family and community
reputation were attributes which would attract parents who wanted their daughters
to receive a proper seminary education.

At this point in women’s education, the option of entering a college for the
purpose of learning a profession other than teacher or motherhood was simply not
an option. As Mary Lyon, founder of Mt. Holyoke in 1837, promised, women
“came to receive “a new direction,” one “to enlist them permanently in the cause
of benevolence” (Horowitz 25). But that new direction was really just a
broadening of the old traditions. For Mt. Holyoke students that benevolence was
centered in evangelicalism, domestic work, or teaching (Horowitz 27). The
unusual woman who wished to enter the sciences was not permitted to enroll in
men’s colleges where such a curriculum might be offered and women’s
seminaries did not yet provide such education.

Even the Vassar Female College which offered an enlightened and
expanded curriculum for women, placed a persistent emphasis on domestic
education. It was strongly supported in the 1865 Vassar Prospectus under the
heading of “Domestic Education” where students were reminded that,

The household is, by common consent, woman’s peculiar

province. In the majority of cases, it is the only one in
which she performs an independent and dominant part.

185

The art of administering its various economies, therefore, is

among the least dispensable of her acquisitions; nor can any

one hope to be recognized as a thoroughly accomplished

woman, who is not an accomplished housekeeper

(Rothman & Rothman 16).
In the same Prospectus, under the heading of “Professional Education,” students
were offered four options: teaching, telegraphing, phonographic reporting and
book-keeping. These were offered as a “few unexpended resources for special
professional training.” They were considered “incidental aids” which “however,
will be cheerfully rendered” (Rothman & Rothman 23). If Vassar and other major
women’s educational institutions were inﬂuenced by deep-seated social
persuasions that considered an educated woman was one who was an
accomplished housekeeper, and professional training was merely incidentally,
than it is not surprising that even as a head mistress of a female seminary and a
woman with inventive potential, Britain did not offer a science curriculum which
might have provided inventors with even the rudimentary training in mechanical
skills or scientiﬁc knowledge.

Formal education in itself did not factor into the equation which produced
a successful 19th century woman inventor. More important was the eventual
social development that awarded credibility and status to an educated women who
mastered ﬁelds outside of domestic education, especially in science. But
persistent concepts of prestige and professionalism were constructed which
reshaped “science” to make it seem even more masculine regardless of a

woman’s intellectual achievements (Rossiter 73). To some degree, those concepts

are still prejudicial barriers to women scientists today. When women in science

186

ﬁnally gained a modicum of credibility, elevated status and respect, education
itself became important to women inventors. But this did not occur during the
19th century and, even for successful professional inventors like Britain who had
educational credentials, mechanical and scientiﬁc education remained self-taught
or facilitated by a male relative or ﬁiend.

Such was the case of Mary Walton of New York who patented locomotive
and other chimneys in 1879 and in 1881 patented a system for deadening the
noise of elevated railroads. She was able to obtain some sort of technical
education as is attested to by her own vague words and the technical nature of her
inventions which is docrunented by several of her contemporaries. Her ﬁrst
invention, a type of smoke-bumer, consumed all smoke from a ﬁre, furnace, or
locomotive, as well as certain kinds of dust and destroyed offensive air born
factory odors (Stanley Mothers 489). Walton also received an English patent for
this invention where British ofﬁcials hailed this invention as “one of the greatest
inventions of the age” (Smith, WI/ 1 4). Her second invention was described by
journalist, Ida Tarbell as consisting of,

. . . certain combinations of the rail, the longitudinal guards,

and the cross-ties with ﬂooring and partitiOns, thus forming

enclosures for bedding the rails in sand or like materials,

which smothers the noise, and when the sand is covered

with asphalt the includes parts are protected from the

weather (3 56).

Further recognition of the invention’s sophistication came ﬁ'om the ﬁrst edition

of The Woman Inventor, April, 1891, where it was explained that,

The most noted machinists and inventors of the country had
given their attention to the subject without being able to

187

furnish a solution, when, but, a woman’s brain did the

work, and her appliance, proving perfectly successﬁrl was

adopted by the elevated roads (4).

Walton sold the rights to the Metropolitan Railroad and in 1891 it was still
reported that she was “reaping the rewards of a happy thought” (Woman’s
Journal, 8/22/1891; Macdonald 150). But how she gained the knowledge,
particularly in engineering and physics, is only hinted at by her own incomplete
statement as recorded in the Lexington, KY, Weekly Transcript, Aug. 28, 1884,
where she noted that: “My father had no sons, and believed in educating his
daughters. He spared no pains or expense to this end” (Stanley Mothers 489).
What those pains and expenses were is unknown at this time, but certainly
suggests that she was permitted some sort of advanced education and that she
proved herself very capable in her ﬁeld. Her inventive activity takes place about
30 years after Britain’s, indicating that some women eventually acquired
educational support for their inventive activity.

Both Britain’s and Walton’s educational experiences are representative of
the trend in women’s education from the 18405 through the 18905. [7] During the
ﬁrst half of the century, most women’s higher education was focused on maternal
duties and homemaking. Other forms of advanced education, especially in the
sciences and mechanical arts, were generally self-taught or done through a private
association with a male relative or ﬁiend. Anything beyond domestic education

was subject to heated debates about the physical and moral dangers women would

encounter if they pursued higher education. The paradox surfaces, despite the

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persistent opposition to women’s education, that after the Civil War woman’s
access to colleges progressed steadily between 1870 and 1900.

The continually barrage of opposition took a variety of forms. Prominent
physicians, such as Dr. Henry Maudsley, a noted English “mental specialist,” and
Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a professor of Harvard Medical School, wrote respectively
on this two-fold danger of mental and physical dangers (Newman 57; Eschbach
83-84). Both were widely read and inﬂuenced popular thinking about the fear
that strenuous study would “unsex” a woman” which Maudsley said “may be a
monstrosity--something which having ceased to be a woman is yet not a man” in
his 1874 article Sex in Mind and Education (Eshbach 84; Newman 77-86).
Clarke wrote a respected treatise entitled Sex in Education; Dr, A Fair Chance for
the Girls (1873) in which he “concluded that a young woman could not exert the
mental effort required to win an equal education and “retain uninjured health and
a future secure ﬁom neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements
of the nervous system” “(Eshbach 83; Hobbs 62-63). Both Maudsley and
Clarke’s professional status and claims of scientiﬁc evidence did much to support
the fear that “woman might forsake their infants for quadratic equations” (Woody
138). For women inventors, this kind of reasoning was particularly damaging as
they were already considered far aﬁeld from their domestic station in life.

It was also argued that because women’s brains were thought to be
smaller than a man’s, that an equal education was “useless, ineffectual, and
stressful” (Eschbach 85-86; Marks 90). [8] These kinds arguments persisted

throughout the remaining years of the 19th century. Added to these arguments

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were also consistent cultural constraints which valued women’s education as less
important than men’s education (Solomon 61):} The “quest for knowledge,
vocation, and identity apart from family” was considered by some as a direct
affront to the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. Rigorous study was another
way which reinforced “the differences between men’s and women’s lives; no
woman could forget that she was in a man’s world” (Solomon xix).

For women inventors, this was a two-fold cultural barrier to their inventive
pursuits and identity as inventor. A women who was well educated, especially in
the sciences, and who worked in a male dominated professional ﬁeld, like
invention, carried a double stigma of being unfemirrine which conveyed negative
character value. In an 1883 North American Review article, “University
Education for Women,” author W. Le Conte Stevens wrote concerning women
who pursued higher education:

In bursting unnatural bonds they were compelled to trample

upon the exacting but unwritten laws embodied in the

etiquette of their time. To be “unfeminine” is to violate a

conception of womanly propriety . . . (25).

Later in the article, he explained what such a conception of womanly propriety
meant:

They are expected to make home attractive, to administer

domestic economy with system and accuracy, to preserve

the health of their children, and train these up with

intelligence, . . . but it is assumed that they will be made

coarse and unﬁt for home life by learning more than the

traditional school-girl’s allowance (31).

Stevens argued, though, that it was “difﬁcult” and “unjust” to mark out a limit of

knowledge beyond which a woman was forbidden to pass based on a “mere

190

arbitrary prescription” (29). For women inventors, that arbitrary prescription
particularly inﬂuenced how people responded to the need for scientiﬁc and
mechanical education, knowledge which clearly went beyond the traditional
school-girl’s allowance. Tarbell commented that one of the reasons why so few
patents were taken out by women was because “all training in handling tools is
withheld ﬁom girls.” As evidence, she recorded a comment by a female manager
in a large paper-mill,

Girls are so entirely and totally ignorant of practical

mechanics that it is about as astonishing a feat for them to

originate any invention as would have been for Noah to

have invented a steam-engine for his ar ” (35 7).
Women inventors had to contend with this double-edged cultural barrier in their
attempts to be successful, particularly in obtaining the necessary education and
training to support their inventive activities. A few exceptional women were born
with gifted talents, such as Margaret Knight. And a few, such as Mary Walton,
were able to acquire adequate education from unconventional sources. But for
most others, like Martha Coston who had to correspond with a chemist for ten
years under a man’s name to get the right color for her signal ﬂare, the lack of
education posed difﬁcult and costly obstacles.

Even for those with seemingly exceptional understanding of scientiﬁc and
mechanical knowledge, their level of expertise was often suspect. Even though
they had the necessary know-how to invent mechanically sophisticated things,

they lacked the formal credentials that placed them in serious professional circles

where talented male inventors found themselves. Unlike their male counterparts,

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after a few successful inventions, those women who considered invention as a
profession, still did not gain entrance into the mainstream scientiﬁc community.
For some male inventors, such as Thomas Edison, even if they lacked formal
education, the nature and success of their inventions allowed entrance into inner
networks where experimentation and invention was the focus and one gained
acceptance by virtue of success (Pretzer118-122). But for women inventors,
cultural perceptions of the inventor as male presented persistent obstacles for
them. Consequently, educational credentials became even more important to
women in the sciences. For 19th century women inventors, both cultural
perceptions and access to advanced science education were slow to change, but
the eventually change worked toward elevated status, improved credibility and
increased recognition.

For Margaret E. Knight (1838-1914), both cultural acceptance and lack of
credible education posed obstacles in her career as an inventor. Despite both of
these formidable obstacles, she remains one of the most famous and success
professional woman inventors during the 19th century and early 20th century.
Because of her numerous inventions, she was called a “woman Edison” in the
Framingham Evening News obituary of October 13, 1914 (Lovett 340). The
exact number of inventions has been widely recorded as anywhere from 22 to 89
(Lovett 340; Macdonald 51; Stanley 524). Current sources estimate that the most
likely ﬁgure is somewhere between 22 and 27. The inﬂated ﬁgures may be
exaggerated based on her unpatented inventions as well as patented ones, patents

in which she had a part but were taken out in another’s name, or patents that she

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may have participated as co-inventor and were listed as such but were not
included in the LWP or any other lists (Stanley Mothers 522). Another factor for
such inﬂated ﬁgures may have been her popular reputation as a female Edison. It
is certain, though, that she patented at least 22 inventions in her own name. Her
inventions fell into three major categories: “ 1) the paper bag industry, 2) the
shoe-manufacturing industry, and 3) rotary engines” (Stanley Mothers 524). [9]

Her accomplishments were particularly remarkable because she lacked any
formal training or advanced education. Her ﬁrst invention at 12 years of age was
a shuttle restraining device. While in a cotton textile mill in Manchester, New
Hampshire (possibly Amoskeag Manufacturing Company) she witnessed an
accident “when a broken thread snagged a moving shuttle and pulled it off the
machine,” injuring a girl with its steel tip. She invented a device that would
automatically stop the machine when a thread broke (Stanley Mothers 522;
Lovett 339; Macdonald 51). There are conﬂicting accounts as to the exact nature
of this mechanism, but there is no doubt as to its usefulness and importance.
What other inventions Knight may have patented after that and until 1870 when
she took out her ﬁrst patent at the age of 32 remains unknown, but she apparently
worked at improving her mechanical skills and inventive abilities during this time.
Her efforts were not supported by any advanced education, but rather by her
special innate talents, personal ambition and motivation, and employment
experience which she later described.

Her lack of education fueled persistent skepticism and doubt about her

abilities to produce complex mechanical inventions. An interview which

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appeared originally in the Woman ’s Journal, entitled “A Lady in a Machine-
Shop,” December 21 , 1872, and later quoted by Phebe A. Hanaford in her .1882
publication, Daughters of America or Women of the Century, provides insight into
the kinds of obstacles that Knight had to contend with when she manufactured

her machine for folding paper bags:

The workmen employed were at ﬁrst skeptical as to her
mechanical ability; but she cured them of this by going
daily, and working among them, -- detecting mistakes, and
improving plans, with a keener eye than any man in the
works (Hanaford 632).

Respect for her mechanical abilities was hard won and something she continually
had to defend. Later in the same interview, Knighted responded to the question
of how a woman could “ever do any thing in machinery” based on her own
personal experience:

It is only following out nature. As a child, I never cared for
things that girls usually do; dolls never possessed any
charms for me. I couldn’t see the sense of coddling bits of
porcelain with senseless faces: the only things I wanted
were a jack-knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood. My
ﬁiends were horriﬁed. I was called a tomboy; but that
made very little impression on me. I sighed sometimes,
because I was not like other girls; but wisely concluded
that I couldn’t help it, and sought further consolation from
my tools. I was always making things for my brothers: did
they want any thing in the line of playthings, they always
said, “Mattie will make them for us.” I was famous for my
kites; and my sleds were the envy and admiration of all the
boys in town. I’m not surprised at what I’ve done. I’m only
sorry I couldn’t have had a good a chance as a boy, and
have been put to my trade regularly (Hanaford 633).

Hanaford, commenting on Knight’s experience, stated that “she knows as

much about machinery as though she had made it a study all her life. It is a

194

genuine gift” (633). The fact was that she had indeed made it a study all of her
life, from childhood until death. But she never had the advantage of studying it
formally, consequently she never acquired the credentials which the public would
acknowledge as a lifetime of study. It was noted by a New York Times writer that
at 70 years of age she was still working 20 hours a day on a new invention
(Stanley Mothers 525). She pursued mechanical knowledge without the beneﬁt
of any advanced education. Her educational background has not been
documented as her biography has yet to be written. It is a logical assumption,
though, that because she went to work early, possibly even before the New
Hampshire cotton mill, her formal education was minimal.

Knight’s comment that she was sorry she didn’t have as good a chance as
a boy and was not put to her trade regularly illustrates that even for gifted
inventors, the lack of education posed frustrating limitations. This was not an
accidental chance or a mere coincidence of some sort, but rather an important
gender constructed component which devalued women’s place in the scientiﬁc
community and stigmatized their abilities as less proﬁcient than men.
Commenting on this “chance” in Woman ’s Journal of August 22, 1891, author
May Wright Sewall wrote in “The Education of Girls” that,

It cannot be properly said that girls have an equal chance

for education with boys especially for the higher education,

until society regards a young women who poses as a mere

family and society ornament with the same contempt with

which it now regards the young man who values himself
solely for his decorative qualities.

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For women inventors, contempt arose from their occupational pursuit as
inventors, which on every level lacked the usual female ornamentation and
cultural propriety expected of women. Particularly the few women inventors, like
Knight, who became public ﬁgures and acquired reputations as professional
inventors had to combat the social barriers which prevented girls and women just
a good a chance as boys and men in obtaining an advanced education. The need
for cultural acceptance of women inventors and increased educational
opportunities was noted by Notre Dame theologian John Augustine Zahm, who
wrote Women in Science under the pseudonym H. J. Mozans in 1913, noted that,

An instructive fact touching woman’s inventive

achievements is that her fullest success is coincident with

her enlarged opportunities for education, and began with

the breaking down of the prejudices which so long existed

against her having anything to do with the development of

the mechanical or industrial arts (349).

Zahm commented speciﬁcally on Knight as a case in point that even after she had
demonstrated he skill as an inventor, she encountered skepticism by workmen in
the manufacturing plant where her machines were produced. “They questioned
her ability to superintend her own work, and it was only her persistency and
remarkable competency that ultimately converted their incredulity into respect
and admiration” (350).

Her “persistency and remarkable competency” helped her defend her
invention in other circles as well. When Knight learned that a Mr. Charles F.

Arman had patented a machine suspiciously like her paper bag machine before she

did, she hired a Washington attorney and ﬁled an interference suit despite

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Annan’s claim of priority of invention. “Arman insinuated that Knight could not
possibly have designed the machine herself and attributed it to the model maker”
(Macdonald 53). Much to Annan’s dismay, to say the least, her successful
defense ultimately rested in her superior mechanical knowledge and her ability to
prove that she was the one who had reduced the idea to practice.

She submitted abundant testimony in a variety of forms such as
eyewitnesses in the character of Mr. Stanbury, her former employer, and Eliza
McFarland, with whom Knight had boarded in 1867. She also submitted a
number of diary entries which she considered so private that she requested the
magistrate read them in private only. These entries provided careﬁrlly dated
notations and an “impressive array of proof, from genesis to manufacture”
(Macdonald 54). Included as other evidence were numerous design drawings and
patterns, paper bags made from experimental models, four photographs of the
original iron machine, cogs from the wooden model and her own personal
testimony. The Patent Commissioner judged that, “

Miss Knight...had introduced voluminous testimony, and

has stated fully the history of her invention from its ﬁrst

inception down to the present time. From her own

statement, which is abundantly corroborated by other

witnesses, it appears that she conceived the idea of the

invention in February 1867 (Decisions of the Commissioner

of Patents, 1871, 35).

Still, the defense hammered away at what they presumed to be her
weakness, her mechanical inability. After one such assault, she ﬁred back,

I have from my earliest recollection been connected in

some way with machinery. I have worked in
manufacturing departments where both wood and iron

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machinery was used for the purpose of manufacturing

different kinds of articles and goods (Patent Interference

Case #272; Macdonald 53-54).

Her credentials were on-the-job experience and gifted mechanical ability. If she
had had the same chance as a boy, she would have had education, too. Education,
even now, carries not only increased knowledge, but heightened status and
credibility.

At this point in her life, unlike most women inventors, Knight had vital
support in her defense which helped her overcome her lack of education -- money.
Her defense cost her $100 a day, plus expenses, for sixteen days of depositions
(Macdonald 52). For most women, this barrier was the difference not only
between winning and losing, but between ﬁling and not ﬁling a lawsuit. In this
respect Knight may also be categorized as a professional inventor because she was
able to manufacture and make a proﬁt ﬁom her inventions. Unfortunately, she
was not as gifted in business as in invention, as indicated in her personal estate of
less than $300 upon her death. Her proﬁts have not been thoroughly documented
at this time, but what is known suggests that at times during her life her ﬁnancial
success was substantial (Macdonald 55-56; Stanley Mothers 522; Smith WI/ 1,
4).

The ﬁnal decision of the Patent Commissioner sided in Knight’s favor,
giving her the beneﬁt of the doubt in regards to the time lapse between conceiving
the invention in 1867 and not applying for patent until 1870. The decision was

based, in part, on the fact that she was not a man and, therefore, her “inexperience

in business, as well as the embarrassments to which her sex subjected Miss

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Knight” might have arguably delayed her application (Macdonald 55). The
judgment also supported that,

Knight’s diligence at the time when Arman secured his

patent, as well as for two years before, was certainly of the

most notable character; and, considering her little practical

acquaintance with machinery, her success in overcoming

the many difﬁculties encountered is a matter of great

surpass. Her diligence at the period named must be

regarded as sufﬁcient to constitute a defense against

Annan’s patent, and consequently entitles her to the

protection she now seeks, unless she has forfeited her rights

by subsequent laces (Decision of the Commissioner of

Patents, 1871, 38).

Particularly after having given “voluminous testimony” as to her mechanical
expertise, Knight surely must have experienced “a great surprise “ of her own to
have her skills evaluated as having derived ﬁ'om “little practical acquaintance
with machinery.” Her victory was tempered with the deep seated cultural bias
that women possessed inferior abilities, even in the face of overwhehning
evidence. Despite the obstacles, her inventive contributions stand as a tribute to
her legacy as a successful professional inventor. She served as a role model to
other women who aspired to the role of professional inventor.

For Britain, Walton, and Knight, educational credentials remained illusive
in their lifetime. But by the close of the century, women had made a signiﬁcant
cultural inroad into the educational system. In the June 23, 1900, issue of the
Women ’s Journal under the article “Progress in Women’s Education” it was
concluded that, “Women can take the same academic rank as men, and they wish

to do so. They can work with men, and they do equally good work alone. Where

capacity and will are joined, there is no limit to possible advance” (193). Progress

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was in process, but educational opportunities for women remained circumscribed
throughout the 19th century by social dictates that reinforced women’s domestic
position. The social climate which addressed the “larger question of women’s
place in the social order” persistently opposed women in higher education. Yet,
paradoxically between 1870 and 1900, women’s access to colleges progressed
steadily (Davies 30; Glazer and Slater 5; Degler 310-315; Rossiter 1-28).

Women inventors place in the social order was affected not only by the
developments in women’s education and the advancement of women’s rights but
also by their participation in women’s clubs and societies. An emerging
community of women inventors was fortiﬁed by women’s efforts to support one
another in scientiﬁc endeavors through women’s clubs and societies. [10] This
development suggests that women’s own attitudes were instrumental in carving
out new constructions of gender which integrated their contributions and abilities
into larger scientiﬁc communities. Women interested in science and technology
began to network and participate in the socialization of their scientiﬁc professions
thereby challenging the status quo of their former position as incapable and
inferior in anything outside of the domestic realm (Glazer and Slater 124).

American men had been participating in such societies and clubs since the
early republican period, such as Benj arnin Franklin’s Junto club. That club
constructed a social network for intelligent, scientiﬁc, and business minded
community men. Although the original Junto Club was considered a literary club,

its purpose was expanded when Franklin recommended that each member “should

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endeavor to form a subordinate Club.” The purpose of which he outlined in his
Autobiography as,

TheAdvantages propos’d were the Improvement of so

many more young Citizens by the use of our Institutions;

Our better Acquaintance with the general Sentiments of the

Inhabitants on any Occasion, as the J unto-Member might

propose what Queries we should desire, and was to report

to Junto what pass’d in his separate Club; the Promotion of

our particular interests in Business by more extensive

Recommendations; and the increase of our Inﬂuence in

public Affairs & our Power of doing good. . . (Franklin

112)

The Junto Club facilitated business opportunities, stimulated scientiﬁc ideas, and
provided a prestigious community presence for professional men. [11] Women, of
course, were not allowed membership.

It was not until the last half of the 19th century that they were allowed
membership into a select few clubs, and then generally with a limited
membership. Exclusion by males has frequently been cited as the “precipitating
factor in the coalescing of women’s groups” (Blair xiii). And in the case of club
membership, such exclusion eventually led women to form their own clubs
(Kohlstedt, Formation 103; Blair 7-13). The rise and development of such clubs
after the Civil War in the 18605 coincided with the enlarged educational

opportunities and the emergence of women in the professional sciences which
included increased numbers of professional women inventors (Croly 54; Woody
453; Blair 13). [12]

Membership in women’s clubs and societies, like in men’s clubs,

facilitated networking, stimulation of intellectual ideas and a form of socialization
\

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for professional women. Although most early women’s clubs were organized as
study clubs with a literary focus, a few clubs were organized as amateur science
clubs. [13] In the face of pervasive stereotypes about intellectual women, and
especially women in the sciences, women’s organizations that acknowledged a
scientiﬁc focus were few. Arguments from Darwin and Francis Galton
perpetuated the idea that “in evolution woman had been “the loser in the
intellectual race as regards acquisition, origination and judgment” (Romanes 385).
That bias was echoed by an editor when he suggested that,

“If an educated woman was a curiosity, a woman scientist

was nothing less than peculiar; thus, if “an unfortunate

female should happen to possess a lurking fondness for any

special scientiﬁc pursuit she is careful (if of any social

position) to hide it as she would some deformity”

“(Kohlstedt, “Periphery " 90).

Like female scientists, women inventors found themselves a curiosity, peculiar
and a social deforrrrity (Rossiter xv; Glazer and Slater 7; Gage Tract 21). They
were not alone with their scientiﬁc interests, and like women scientists, did not
ﬁnd a wide array of clubs to join which would support their “acquisition,
origination and judgment” concerning scientiﬁc subject matter.

Very little scholarship has been done on 19th century women’s science
clubs, and even less on women inventors organizations. [14] A few societies did
foster an ongoing interest in science, such as the Dana Society of Natural History
of the Albany Female Academy, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientiﬁc Study

Circles, and the Society for the Encouragement of Study at Home, but their

development has yet to be thoroughly documented (Kohlstedt, “Periphery” 91-

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95). These clubs primarily stressed self-development rather than creating
pathways into the larger professional scientiﬁc community. For example, the
Dana Society of Natural History stated that their purpose was “to awaken in
ourselves and in others a growing interest in the study of nature, and increase our
knowledge of the natural sciences in both their practical and scientiﬁc bearings”
(Kohlstedt, “Periphery” 91). Kohlstedt notes that these club members were
educated and active, but dedicated ﬁrst to private study and socializing. Evidence
suggests that members had little contact with practicing research scientists, and it
is unknown whether women interested in research or advanced training beneﬁted
from club membership (Kohlstedt, “Periphery” 92; Rossiter 75).

There would have been an obvious attraction for women inventors if such
clubs did in fact facilitate research and connections to the larger scientiﬁc
community. Future research on membership and professional relationships
among women inventors and the scientiﬁc community will be invaluable in
understanding the social context in which women invented during the second half
of the 19th century. Coupled with the advancements in education and the
emergence of even a few scientiﬁc clubs, a social climate was fermenting in
which women inventors would eventually gain status, credibility, and recognition
(Martin 2).

Like the few science clubs, women’s clubs in general were interested in
self-development. An early club, Friends in Council (1866), organized to
establish ‘Vvithin their circle of acquaintance such a nucleus of thought as would

attract and gather about it those who valued the world of thought and who were

203

zealous for self-improvement” (Croly 54). For women inventors, this kind of club
association and general attitude among women would eventually provide an
important stimulation to their inventive activity. To be able to converse with
other women about invention ideas would not only spawn possible solutions, but
also help to create an established identity as inventor. Although several women
were participating on a professional inventive level, very few called themselves
inventor. Like woman scientist then, woman inventor was a contradiction in
terms (Rossiter xv).

It was not until the late 19th century that women beneﬁted ﬁ'om an
organization dedicated exclusively to women inventors. During the 18905, a brief
and short lived movement to organize women inventors was spearheaded by
Charlotte Smith. In 1882 she became the president of the Women’s National
Labor League (WNLL) which was formed by women clerks in government
departments. Many women found government work as clerks during the War,
which continued afterwards (The Revolution, April 16, 1868) . Notably, women
clerks were hired in the patent ofﬁce affording Smith’s general interest in labor
reform to include women inventors speciﬁcally (Massey 9). A year later the
WNLL joined the larger organization of the Knights of Labor. During the same
time period, Smith was invited as a convention delegate to the American
Federation of Labor where she admonished members to form women’s unions
(F oner 189, 213-214). In 1891 she shifted her general interest and energy in

women’s labor issues to speciﬁc support of women inventors through the

204

publication, The Woman Inventor, and the establishment of a women inventors
organization.

In the ﬁrst of two issues of The Woman Inventor, printed as April, 1890,
but the actual date was 1891, she announced that “under the auspices of the
Women’s National Industrial League of America. . . a new department, whose
object it is to promote and encourage the interest of female inventors of the
world” had been organized (3). ”This department was formed to support those
women who possessed the genius and capability of the best male inventors, but
who lacked the encouragement of an interest. The department would provide this
interest in order “to develop in the women, especially of America, the tact, the
skill, the genius, the capability and the interest in mechanical and other arts, from
which they have been heretofore practically ostracized” (3). Like other women’s
clubs such as the Fortnightly of Chicago whose purpose was “to enlarge the
mental horizon as well as the knowledge of our members,” the purpose of Smith’s
group was to develop their “genius by encouraging one another” (Martin 1; Smith
W7/13)

In the next and last issue of the Woman Inventor, June ,1891, Smith
announced the resolve that a “mutual aid and protective association be formed to
consist of women inventors and all other women, who wish to enter the inventive
ﬁeld” (2). This announcement was made under the article heading “Help!
Practical Help! !” The editor said that this new association was formed in
response to all the many letters received from women inventors who cried for help

to such a degree as never contemplated before. They told of their,

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. . . vicissitudes, their disappointments and especially of the

great lack of the necessary information for their guidance to

reach the successﬁrl termination of their inventions. . . not a

few tell us of men’s inhumanity to woman, by deﬁauding

them of their well earned compensation, namely by the

piracy of their patents! (2).

Under another article in the same issue, “Women Inventors’ Mutual Aid
and Protective Association of the United States of America,” the ofﬁcers and
committees were named, the objections of the group were clearly set out, the
Terms, and the Rights and Advantages to Members were listed (4). The ofﬁcers
were Mrs. Charlotte Smith as President, Martha J. Coston, as Vice-President
(inventor of the pyrotechnic ﬂare), Miss Marion Foster as Treasurer and Mrs.
Caroline Hall as Secretary. The following committees with appointed ofﬁcers
were organized: Committee on Woman’s Inventions; Committee on Woman’s
Industrial Advancement: World’s Fair of the Inventors’ Department; Committee
on Literature; Committee on Arts and Sciences; and Committee on National and
International Copyrights and Trade Marks. Membership was $5 a year or $50 for
life.

The Rights and Advantages to Members were particularly revealing as to
what kind of help inventors most needed and the kind of ambition women
inventors entertained. It was published that,

The object of this Association is to obtain mutual aid and

protection to women inventors. Competent attorneys have

been engaged to look after the legal interests; able draughts,

men and correct model workers have been procured. In the

bureau for foreign correspondence and for the translation

into Spanish, French, German, Russian and Italian
languages competent persons have been engaged (4).

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In addition, patent attorneys in foreign countries were in correspondence with the
organization, efforts were made to secure copyrights in foreign countries, and a
special department for the registration of trademarks was established. The Rights
and Advantages to Members were also carefully spelled out in detail. Among
other things, membership meant free access to information on how to obtain a
patent, drawings, speciﬁcations and models at the lowest possible rates; free legal
advice as to procedures in foreign countries; the Association would negotiate the
sale of patents, make arrangement for the manufacture of patented articles, put
them on the market for a moderate royalty and urge the reduction of patent fees
charged by the Government (4). .

All of this sounded like the beginnings of a well organized club with a
narrow and speciﬁc focus. Unlike other earlier women’s clubs and societies, the
purpose here was not only for self-improvement. Rather, women were seeking
an active network that would assist them in the manufacturing and business side
of patenting, aiding them to integrate into the mainstream community of invention
and commerce. They came together not only for intellectual stimulation, as
indicated by the kinds of committees that were organized, but they also came
together collectively to engage more successﬁrlly in the professional ﬁeld of
invention.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that this group survived or even got off
the ground. It is difﬁcult to speculate what went wrong. Was some outside force
set in opposition to it from the onset? Was there a lack of support by women

themselves? Did Charlotte Smith abandoned the project for other interests or lack

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of ﬁrnding? A biography of Charlotte Smith, now in progress by Autumn
Stanley, will, no doubt, shed some light on these questions.

Although we may never know exactly why the society did not ﬂourish, it
is intriguing to theorize about what might have happened to this group and how it
might have affected the progress of women inventors of the 20th century.
Encouragement and interest in an invention are essential elements for most
successful inventors. The US. Department of Labor acknowledged that it was “a
well recognized fact that the creative spirit ﬂourishes in an atmosphere of friendly
faith and languishes when environed by indifference, unbelief, or hostility.”
(Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, No. 28, 1923, 5). If 19th century women
inventors had had some kind of organizational encouragement and interest, their
inventive contributions would have beneﬁted on several levels. Women inventors,
like their male counterparts, would have stood to beneﬁt immensely from an
organization dedicated to supporting their inventive ambitions. In the same
Bulletin the results of such encouragement were succinctly acknowledge by the
US. Department of Labor:

If a lack of popular interest in achievement along speciﬁc

lines of creative research retards the advancement of men to

whom custom opens all research facilities, it is not to be

expected that women will be uninﬂuenced by the

traditional and prevailing lack of faith in women’s creative

abilities. Such a lack of faith not only discourages and

retards creative effort in women as it does in men but it also

creates in women a timidity about applying at all for

patents on such inventions and discoveries as they do

achieve, and fosters a tendency to the pass the creative

suggestions on to their male relatives, who, with the greater
self-conﬁdence born of freedom ﬁom restricting customs,

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perfect the inventions or complete the discoveries and
secure the patents (5).

The one and only known society for women inventors in the 19th century
did not achieve its vital purpose of creating and maintaining a “popular interest in
achievement” by women inventors as did some male societies such as the
Association of Inventors and Manufactures (Smith WI / 2 l). The club movement
in the United States had the potential to encourage and advance the work of
women inventors. But the record of such achievement remains vague, despite at
least one seemingly solid effort by Charlotte Smith. Something happened which
prevented the organization from functioning for any length of measurable time.
“So far as we know the association ﬂickered brieﬂy and disappeared” (Stanley
“Champion” 26). Likewise, the publication The Woman Inventor published only
two issues and sank into historical oblivion. Nothing of its kind has ever been
published since.

But what [is signiﬁcant about The Woman Inventor and the Women
Inventors’ Mutual Aid and Protective Association is in its conceptualization and
the fact that it existed at all. By virtue of the public nature of both, women
inventors gained recognition and, like other women’s groups, a measure of
autonomy, identity, and competitive encouragement. Unlike male inventors, they
did not gain any measurable advancement by their association. An organization
like the Women Inventors’ Mutual Aid and Protective Association would not have
even been possible druing the early postwar years when women’s clubs were just

beginning to form and when women’s educational opportunities were just

209

beginning to open up. During that time women inventors were also just beginning
to increase in numbers, and there was not even one woman who was yet
considered a professional inventor.

But by the end of the century, several women had made their mark as
[professional inventors. They pursued invention as a career, had multiple patents,
had successfully manufactured their inventions and had made a living by their
inventive activity. They were generally unmarried and by their lifestyles, showed
support of women’s rights. The need for a collective identity had reached a new
plateau, one which was addressed by Smith, but never successfully remedied.
Individual women experienced personal identity as inventor, but the prevailing
public image and identity of inventor as male did not change. A pattern of
segregated employment and under-recognition persisted, as exempliﬁed in the
case of Margaret Knight. Still, the contributions of women inventors slowly
worked toward an increased level of status and credibility.

As already discussed, women such as Margaret Knight, Martha Coston,
Mary Walton, and Clarissa Britain all experienced invention at a professional
level. In addition, other notable woman like Helen Augusta Blanchard (28
patents), Amanda Theodosia Jones (14 patents), Maria Beasly (15 patents), Mary
P. Carpenter (13 patents) and several others, should also be included as 19th
century professional women inventors (LWP). [15] All of these women made
signiﬁcant contributions specializing in machines despite the fact that none have
ever been recognized in the history of American technology. In addition to

having multiple patents, they share similar criteria and suggest a developing

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pattern of a successﬁrl woman inventor during reconstruction and afterwards.
Professional women inventors slowly emerged in the same climate of social
fermentation in which women’s rights were openly challenged, women’s
opportunities for higher education expanded, and women organized clubs and
societies for social, intellectual, and professional support. What women inventors
had in common with these other groups of women was that generally they were all
actively constructing new boundaries for women, be it social status, legal
entitlement, political rights, educational opportunities, or sexual equality.
Speciﬁcally, women inventors actively mediated the relationship between women
and technology. Far reaching consequences which established fair employment
standards, competitive business opportunity, and elevated social status evolved
ﬁ'om their contributions and re-deﬁned the relationship between women and
technology in the late 19th century.

The shifting of such boundaries in the relationship between women and
technology is exempliﬁed by the experiences of Helen Augusta Blanchard (1840-
1,822). Like Knight, Coston, Walton, and Britain, Blanchard was not married. [16]
She patented at least 28 inventions between 1873 and 1915, mostly relating to the
sewing machine. Most of her inventions were mechanical, mostly commercial,
and most of them were actually used in the industries for which she intended them
(Stanley Mothers 517). Her experience, like other women who took up invention
as a profession, arose out of economic need. Her father, Nathaniel Blanchard, one
of Portland, Maine’s best known shipbuilders and owner of packet steamers, lost

his fortune in the panic of 1866. After his death, Blanchard, at the age of 30,

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borrowed money for her ﬁrst patent fee and embarked on a successful career as an
inventor (Smith WI / 1; Macdonald 60; Reynolds 5).

Her inventions and manufacturing efforts proved technologically
innovative and ﬁnancially lucrative, particularly in connection with the sewing
machine. What should rank as one of her most recognized inventions was the
zigzag sewing machine, but credit is generally given to the Singer Company who
mass produced it for industrial purposes after the original patent expired (Stanley
Mothers 516). In 1876 she established the Blanchard Over-Seam Company,
wherein “she applied her powers to the intricacies of machinery” and “by the
results of her inventions” she “achieved a signal success” (Williard and Livennore
97; Logan 889). Several other successful inventions and businesses enabled her
to eventually buy back her family property which had been lost years earlier
(Stanley Mothers 516; Macdonald 60). Her success as an inventor was noted by
Smith in The Woman Inventor, adding public recognition to her personal identify
as a professional inventor (Smith WI / l 1). She was lauded as “a benefactor of
her sex” who never lost her qualities of “gentleness, dignity and modesty”
(Willard and Livennore 97).

Blanchard clearly ﬁt the criteria as a professional inventor. As such, her
drive and ambition would have beneﬁted tremendously from a professional
association or club where women inventors might have networked, engaged in a
stimulating intellectual atmosphere and socialized in a business capacity. In
addition to being an inventor, she was noted as a benefactor of her sex . This

dual identity proﬁles her as a good candidate for club membership. By the nature

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of their associations and the desire to organize, club women organized to prove
“to themselves their intellectual capability and interest and to the public their
continued commitment to women’s “proper” role” (Martin 3). Blanchard’s
accomplishments identify with the club mission. But if she was a member of the
Women Inventors’ Mutual Aid and Protective Association, it remains unknown as
no membership lists have surfaced. What records we do have of her
accomplishments, though, do testify to her categorization as a professional
inventor.

Another woman, Amanda Theodosia Jones, should also be categorized as
a professional inventor. She would certainly have beneﬁted in more than one way
from club membership due to her multiple career paths. Her education from a
normal school qualiﬁed her as a teacher. She received no further higher education
though which would have prepared her for her remarkably diverse multiple
careers. In addition to being a teacher, she was a published poet and writer, an
editor, a Spiritualist, an inventor, factory owner and a manufacturer. She patented
a total of 14 inventions from 1873-1914. One of her most notably inventions was
a vacuum process of preserving food. Although she had no speciﬁc education or
employment experience in this ﬁeld, she did claim a special source of knowledge
for the idea. In her autobiography, A Psychic Autobiography, she explained how
her unseen spiritual mentor, “Dr. Andrews” encouraged her:

Now, I confess this seemed so far from what I most desired,

1 never dreamt [the message] was for me. Since I, in very

truth, was no inventor. No ﬂounce of mine had ever

brushed a Patent Ofﬁce door-j arnb, or caught in court house
palings. Then one night, the voice spoke again: “Friends,

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do you know there is a way of canning fruit without
cooking it?” (297-298).

In 1873, with the help of her cousin, Professor Leroy Cooley, ﬁve patents were
issued in regard to her invention of vacuum food processing: “two to Jones alone,
one to Jones and Cooley jointly, two to Cooley alone with one of these assigned
to Jones” (Stanley Mothers 93). In addition to several other inventions (3 for an
oil burner), she patented two more related vacuum process inventions in 1905 and
established 2 companies utilizing her process. In 1890, Jones established the
Woman’s Canning and Preserving Company in Chicago “to manufacture, sell
and deal in canned, bottled or otherwise preserved foods of all kinds; to acquire,
purchase or control letters-patents. . . relating to methods, processes, machinery,
apparatus and devices for preserving foods of all kinds” (Macdonald 67-68). It
was ahnost entirely a female enterprise including its ofﬁcers, employees and
stockholders (McHenry 214; Wilson 285). She told her employees:

This is a woman’s industry. No man will vote our stock,

transact our business, pronounce on women’s wages,

supervise our power. Give men whatever work is suitable,

but keep the governing power. This is a business training

school for working women. . . .Her is a mission; let it be

fulﬁlled (Macdonald 69).
The company prospered at ﬁrst with its popular lunch tongues and fruit preserves,
which were advertised as products all put up by “competent women.” Jones
subsequently opened plants in Aurora, Illinois and Montello, Wisconsin. But
after three years, she lost the support of her ofﬁcers and left the company in bitter

disillusionment. The company lasted until 1921 when it was involuntarily

dissolved (Wilson 285; Stanley Mothers 93; Macdonald 68-69). After this she

214

once again turned her attention to her earlier patented oil burner, a liquid fuel
burner used in furnaces and boilers in oil ﬁelds (1880). She took out three more
patents consisting of valves and other reﬁnements to the oil burner (1904, 1912,
1914) (McHenry 214).

Although Jones did not participate in suffrage activities, her support of
women’s rights, like other Spiritualists, was consistent and often deemed radical.
She wore her hair mannishly short, shared in the view that marriage was a
“perilous adventure,” and was determined to succeed as a women in a man’s
world of both invention and business (Wilson 285; Braude 2-3, 121; Macdonald
68-69). In her unique position as inventor, spiritualist, business owner, and
writer, her life’s work advocated social reform for women, especially for
professional women who attempted to integrate in the business of inventing, a
male domain which continued to be reinforced and structured by gendered
prescription throughout the 19th century. Jones would have shared in Charlotte
Smith’s vision for her “Woman Inventor” which was “to encourage and help by
advice all who enter the ﬁeld of the Inventor . . . to assist women who have the
talent for inventions, but not the means to carry out their labor to a successful
end” (Smith WI /2 3). In Smith’s “co-operative inventors association,” Jones
would surely have found encouragement and support for her inventions and their
industrial application. Like Blanchard, though, there is virtually no evidence
beyond probability that Jones was involved in the brief movement to organize

women inventors.

215

The movement to organize women inventors, although brief, was part of a
patterned trend after the Civil War wherein women began to demand personal
identity and public recognition as inventors. After the War, a small group of
women turned to inventing as a profession for the ﬁrst time. Their efforts were
meet with unabashed inequality in segregated employment practices,
opportunities for higher education, and a reinforced gender construction which
solidiﬁed women’s domesticity and demoralized those who challenged that status
quo by assuming professional masculine roles such as inventor. The majority of
women who chose a professional path remained single and acknowledged that the
goals of marriage and career were mutually exclusive. The stigma had far
reaching social repercussions for women inventors as this was “an era when a
woman who appeared to fail at motherhood was thought to be not only
incompetent, but also immoral.” By pursing a career, especially one in an
exclusively male ﬁeld such as invention, women were “made to feel deviant for
pursing . . . an unnatural set of priorities” (Glazer and Slater 6-7). But in the face
of extreme opposition, amazingly increasing numbers of women pursued
professional goals.

For many women, the War had irrevocably changed their collective and
individual passivity toward outright sexual discrimination which deemed them as
less capable and less intelligent than their male counterparts (Martin 121-122).
After the War, when party leaders informed women that “this is the Negro’s
hour” and that “women must wait for their rights,” a heightened incentive fueled

the women’s movement in their demands for equal rights and opportunities

216

(Kraditor 3). Women’s rights leaders sensed the foreboding implication of the
passing of the Fourteenth Amendment which enfranchised black men but left out
all women. The weight of the insertion of the one word, “male” into the United
States Constitution for the ﬁrst time in this amendment was a dark and oppressive
omen. For the small emerging ntunber of professional women inventors,
inequities surfaced in limited opportunities in education, employment, and
business practice. For the thousands of women inventing at lesser levels, such
inequities often spelled defeat. Despite such formidable obstacles, between
January 1, 1865, and December 31,1900, over 600,000 patents were issued to
women (Merrit 246). By their increased number of patents and the diverse range
of these patents, women inventors supported women’s rights providing solid
evidence that women were capable and intelligent, strong and independent.

Women’s patents also provided evidence that abilities, intellectual range
and professional standards warranted educational support. If they were able to
invent things like a machine for folding paper bags, locomotive chimneys, the
zigzag sewing machine, vacuum food processing, barrel making machines, steam
generators, steam boilers, machine for raising sunken vessels, and thousands of
other sophisticated and useful inventions without education, their potential for
inventing important and valuable inventions in the future with appropriate
education had no limits.

Although documentation is currently unavailable as to how many women
inventors received a higher education, they beneﬁted from the developments that

gradually increased access and opportunity even if they personally did not gain

217

advanced educational credentials. Formal education did not assuage the concepts
of prestige and professionalism which made science, including invention, more
masculine than ever. But as more and more women successﬁrlly challenged the
prevailing negative attitudes about women and higher education by entering
universities and colleges in increased numbers, a more favorable social climate
developed in which educated women gained recognition, credibility and status.
This development, more than obtaining an actual education, positively affected
women inventors.

In the face of volatile opposition which warned that educated women
would become “un-sexed” and that a woman pursuing higher education would
suffer irreparable physical and emotional damage, women refused to be deterred
from seeking higher educational opportunities. Their determination gradually
created career pathways into ﬁelds previously considered male bastions. The
paradox unfurled throughout the remaining years of the 19th century wherein
women made steady advances in education and the professions despite the fact
that most Americans considered educated women a threat rather than an asset to
society (Rossiter 3).

Historian Gerda Lerner observed that because women were shut out of
institutions of higher learning for so long, they developed “their own social
networks in order for their thoughts, ideas and work to ﬁnd audiences and
resonance” (12). The emergence of the women’s club movement was just such a
development. Critics claimed that women’s clubs were one more manifestation of

gender disorder, like the women’s movement and the demand for higher

218

education. And, in truth, it did draw attention to the state of disorderly and
discriminatory construction of gender. Historian Karen Blair asserts that clubs
ﬂourished because they afforded women a more complete, and, therefore, a more
authentic self-expression during a time when such had been effectively thwarted
by prevailing conventions. For many women, joining a club offered a chance to
“escape into larger cultural and intellectual arenas” (xii, xiii). For women
inventors, again, it was not the actual participation as members (like actually
getting an advanced education), but rather the social atmosphere that clubs
created that supported women who wanted to enlarge their “mental horizons”
(Martin 1).

Women were encouraged to be “zealous for self-improvement” and to
cultivate the stinings of “intellectual independence--an awareness of and
conﬁdence in themselves and in their sex which they had not been able to
accomplish alone” (Martin 3). Women inventors attempt to organize at the club
level is evidenced in Charlotte Smith’s short lived Women Inventors’ Mutual Aid
and Protective Association. From all appearances, this club did not make any
signiﬁcant long lasting impact on the position of women inventors. But in its
very conception, it did reveal women inventors desire for autonomy and for
placement into the larger scientiﬁc and technological community. The brief pages
of The Woman Inventor suggests an organized movement which called for legal,
political, educational and social reform on behalf of women inventors. Although
it seemed to come to naught, evidence that it even developed to embryonic

fruition points out the existence of a community of women inventors. This is an

219

afﬁ'ont to the standard histories of technology which continue to treat women
inventors as invisible, non-entities in the development of American technology.
Like members of other clubs in the late 19th century, women inventors reached a
new plateau which demanded both a personal identity and public autonomy. The
atmosphere in which the women’s club movements originated and developed,
helped to create a group consciousness among women inventors which in turned
encouraged a small number to turn to invention as a profession for the ﬁrst time in
American history.

For women inventors, like other post-war women, their accomplishments
during the War provided momentum to propel them into a period of
reconstruction of their own. That momentum was sustained by gradual progress
toward women’s rights, advancements in higher education, and a developing
sense of autonomy in the club movement atmosphere. As the century came to a
close, the activity of women inventors continued on a steady upward swing. The
image of inventor as male still had not changed, but what had changed was the
atmosphere in which women inventors could more freely pursue their ambitions.
An emerging group of professional women inventors were part of the post-war
generation who grew up in a context of a gender system under re-construction
(Leonard 196-197). With more than 600,000 patents to their credit from 1865-
1900, women inventors met the 20th century with increased status, credibility,
and recognition.

Although the image of inventor remained intractably male, women

inventors like Britain, Coston, Walton, Knight, Blanchard, and Jones amply

220

demonstrated that women, in fact, did invent with the same “ﬁre of genius” as
male inventors (Heyn 1-2). Even though the national period of reconstruction was
ofﬁcially concluded, the construction of gender remained in progress. Women
had a long way to go before they even began to approach the platform of equal
rights. Despite the undeniable fact that women did invent useful and valuable
inventions, women’s inventive ability remained limited and circumscribed by
cultural conditions. Charlotte Smith believed that the only thing women
inventors lacked was equal opportunity. She reﬂected that,

Where but a few shinning lights have come to the surface in

the Patent Ofﬁce as inventors a hundred thousand women

could have become successful inventors had they the

opportunities--opportunities to develop their inventive

genius (WI / 2 4).

Women inventor’s opportunities for increased credibility, status and recognition

were just beginning to shine by the end of the 19th century. Equal rights, access
to higher education and a redeﬁned social position would gradually evolve during

the 20th century, and with them a burgeoning community of professional women

inventors.

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Chapter 5 - NOTES

[1] Barbara Welter’s classic Dimity Convictions elaborates on the Cult of True
Womanhood in Chapter Two. The attributes of True Womanhood, she wrote,
“could be divided into four cardinal virtues--piety, purity, submissiveness and
domesticity. Put them together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife--
woman” (2 1).

[2] Historian Ann Macdonald utilizes this theory in her discussion of “After
the War: Inventing within Woman’s Sphere,” pp. 24-47.

[3] See Philip Shaw Paludan’s “Conclusion” in A People ’5 Contest for a
succinct summary of the two opposing groups divided between Elisabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on one side with a more radical platform
demanding the vote, divorce law reform and national legislation to protect sexual
equality and Lucy Stone on the other hand reinforcing more traditional women’s
roles which elevated and protected women’s rights in the home. Also see Aileen
S. Kraditor’s The Ideas of the Woman ’s suﬁ‘rage Movement, Chapter One; Glenda
Riley’s, Inventing the American Woman , pages 112-116;

[4] For a comprehensive discussion of the development of women’s education
in 19th century America see Helen Leﬂtowitz Horowitz’s Alma Mater;

Barbara Miller Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women; Thomas
Woody’s A History of Women ’5 Education in the United States; Louise Michele
Newman’s Men ’5 Ideas/Women ’s Realities: Popular Science 1 870-1915; and
Catherine Hobbs’ Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write.

[5] Women’s early 19th century educational institutions were called
seminaries which replaced the earlier word, academy, used in reference to male
institutions because the word “seminary” was thought to denote a certain
seriousness which supported their two—fold mission of professional preparation:
training women for “teaching and the Republican motherhood” (Horowitz ll).

[6] Elizabeth Seymour Eschbach’s, The Higher Education of Women in
England and America 1865-1920, cites that with the opening of Vassar in 1865
the idea of creating a woman’s college “like a man’s” became attractive. And in
1871 when Smith College was chartered, its founder, Sophia Smith “heartily
endorsed the ideal of equal educational opportunity for women and in her will left
her fortune for the establishment of an institution “with the design to furnish for
my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded
now in our colleges to young men” (62). But although some institutions set their
sites on such ideals, the reality tended to fall considerably short of its mark

222

because not many women had received adequate preparation to meet the demands
of a rigorous course immediately upon entering college.

[7] During the ﬁrst half of the 19th century, especially during the 18305 and
18405, female seminaries advocated “a special program for women to strengthen
their sense of maternal duties and provide them with practical training in
homemaking.” Gradually in the “18405 and 18505, the ﬁrst female institutions to
call themselves colleges appeared with the explicit goal of providing women with
an education similar to that offered by men colleges” (Newman 54-56). After the
Civil War, many higher education institutions began to admit women, especially
state universities. For a comprehensive discussion of women’s educational
Opportunities and lack thereof in the 19th century see Men ’s Ideas/Women ’s
Realities, Popular Science, 1870-1915, by Louise Michele Newman.

[8] Dr. William Hammond, a New York neurologist attempted to prove that
women had smaller brains in a series of articles published in Popular Science
Monthly. A public debate ensued with a counter from feminist Helen Hamilton
Gardner and another neurologist, Dr. Edward Spitzer, who reﬁtted Hammond’s
ideas in the article, “Sex in Brain.” Gardner argued that the size difference was
minimal in most individuals and there was no established connection between size
and intelligence (Eschbach 85).

[9] Some of Knight’s most important mechanical inventions include:

[10]

#109,224 Irnpr. in Paper-feeding Machines 1870
#116,842 Irnpr. in Paper-bag Machines 1871
#306,692 Clasp 1884
#31 1,662 Spit 1885
#436,358 Sole Cutting Machine 1890
#436-359 Machine for Cutting Soles 1890
#521,413 Reel 1894
#524,278 Feeding Attachment for Sole-Cutting Machine 1894
#716,903 Compound Rotary Engine 1902
#717,869 Rotary Engine 1904
#720,81 8 Rotary Engine 1 904
#743,293 Automatic Tool for Boring or Planing Convex 1904
or Cylindrical Surfaces

#1 ,105,761 Resilient Wheel 1912
(Macdonald 390).

See Sally Gregory Kohlstedt “In from the Periphery: American Women in
Science, 830-1880,” in which women who organized and participated in women’s
clubs and societies are discussed in the context of “group coordinators” who
“formed study or research groups which reinforced their conviction that scientiﬁc

223

investigation was appropriate for women” (SIGNS, Autumn 1978, Vol. 4, No. 1,
pp. 81-96).

[1 1] See The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin for a
comprehensive account of how the J unto Club facilitated Franklin’s successful
business ventures, scientiﬁc experiments, and public service.

[12] In the 18405 some women began to create their own scientiﬁc
organizations, which slowly attracted more and more members, but most were
mainly interested in private learning, mutual growth, and contributions to local
education and conservation instead of publishing new ﬁndings and seeking
recognition or prestige (Rossiter 75).

[13] In 1868 the inﬂuential New England Woman’s Club (NEWC) was
founded “to be a centre of rest and social convenience for women in active
philanthropic employments and for sympathetic intercourse” (Croly 38). It was
organized to create opportunities for intellectual stimulation and supported
educational reform for women, especially in the professions. Furthermore, “It
was not to be purely literary, charitable, philanthropic, educational, reforrnatory,
political, religious, not recreative, yet it was to partake of all the qualities in
combination. It was to be a voluntary associating of kindred spirits, drawn
together by no ties of family, neighborhood, or church” (Croly 37).

Another club with similar inﬂuence was simultaneous founded in New
York City, Sorosis. Founder, Jane Cunningham Croly, the single most important
ﬁgure in the woman’s club movement wrote an expansive work, The History of
the Woman ’s Club Movement in America (1898) ). A comprehensive history of
the NEWC and Sorosis is included in her work as well a thorough consideration
of the roots of women’s difﬁculties in society. Her work documents the
tremendous impact and force of women’s clubs during the late 19th century . See
also Karen Blair’s The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined,
1868-1914, Chapter 2..

[14] There are several good historical sources for women’s clubs in general,
such as Karen Blair’s The Clubwoman Feminist , The History of the Woman ’5
Club Movement in America by Jennie June Croly, High Tea At Halekulania by
Margit Misangyi Watts, and The Sound of Our Own Voices: Women '5 Study
Clubs 1860-1 910 by Theodora Penny Martin. But regarding women’s science
clubs speciﬁcally, there has been minimal research and very little published. The
brief work of Sally Gregory Kohlstedt “In from the Periphery: American Women
in Science, 1830-1880” provides several good leads for future scholarship and
some insight into why so little has been written.

[15] Autumn Stanley in Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a

Revised History of Technology provides a chart of “Thirteen 19th-Century U.S.
Professional Women Inventors (Specializing in Machines)” In addition to those

224

listed in this chart, elsewhere in her work she includes: Eliza Alexander, 7 patents;
Ella Gaillard 15 patents; Harriet Hosmer, 7 patents; Mary J. Montgomery, 4
patents; Mary S., 53 patents; Emily Tassey, 5 patents; Harriet Tracy, 17 patents,
and Bertha Lamme “who held no patents in her own name, but worked on a
corporate innovation team (Westinghouse) for 12 years; the numbers of important
motors and generators she helped design could arguably equal the total patents
received (or applied for) by her brother Benjamin Lamme and other teammates
during those years” (501, 40).

[16] Carl Degler in At Odds: Women and the Family in America fi‘om the
Revolution to the Present , comments on the conscious choice women made to
remain single, particularly when they aspired to professional goals. He observed
that the conﬂict between women’s aspirations and marriage was more obvious
“among those women who were graduating from the new women’s colleges and
coeducational universities during the last half of the century” ( 160-165). See also
Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater’s Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of
Women into the Professions, 1890-1 940, (57-64).

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Chapter 6

AMERICAN PROGRESS: CELEBRATED OR RELEGATED?

The Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago of 1893 offer “signiﬁcant social and cultural artifacts that reveal much about the
times and places that produced them” (Segal 125). Although women had exhibited at
previous American fairs, the Philadelphia Centennial was the ﬁrst time “there was a
separate building devoted exclusively to the wide-ranging products of women’s thought
and labor” (Trescott 102). Included in both the Philadelphia and Chicago women’s
buildings was a separate exhibit for women inventors. Unlike other women’s exhibitions
of the past where traditional women’s work was marginally represented, the Philadelphia
Centennial and the Chicago Columbian expositions encouraged women to focus on
industrial interests. What inventions women exhibited, how their presence was
mediated, and how the public responded to their presence and their inventions were
functions of time, place, and resources. In addition, the cultural value assigned to
women’s technological contributions in 1876 and 1893 provide insight into how
women’s relationship with technology had expanded during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. The responses to women inventors and their inventions at both
expositions serve as cultural indexes, reﬂecting a social pulse which measured changing
values and persistent assumptions about women inventors.

Insightful cultural responses were expressed through a variety of mediums,

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including women’s own fair publications, leading scientiﬁc journals, and general media
coverage. The New Century for Women, a weekly newspaper published by women
during the Philadelphia Centennial, was dedicated to the “industrial interests of women”
and to “advancing the prosperity and extending the opportunities of women-workers”
(May 13, 1876). The journal was also published as a defense to “so much sneering upon
the character of some of the work exhibited and so much good advice lavished on the
women in regard to the folly of their trying to make a separate exhibit.” The Women’s
Executive Committee decided that “it would be well to say a few words on the subject” in
order to set the record straight and to distinguish women’s accomplishments with positive
values (May 13, 1876).

The New Century, written by women about women, merits comparison to the

\ highly respected Scientific American edited by Alﬁ'ed Ely Beach and Orson Desaix

Munn. The prospectus that was published with the ﬁrst issue of Scientific American
pledged,

“. . . to furnish the intelligent and liberal working-men, and those

who delight in the development of those beauties of Nature, which

consist in the laws of Mechanics, Chemistry, and other branches of

natural Philosophy--with a paper that will instruct while it diverts

or amuses them” (Shenton 5).

Since the Scientific American ’5 ﬁrst edition in 1845, the editors enthusiastically endorsed
the American penchant for invention and believed it was “the unique aptitude of
Americans for inventions that set them off from other peoples” (Shenton 6). During the
Centennial exposition, the editors published the Scientific American Supplement with the

original express purpose to describe and illustrate interesting exhibits at the exposition. It

continued after the exposition as the technical supplement to Scientific American

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(Shenton 6, 7). In its review of the Women’s Pavilion in the 1876 Philadelphia
Centennial, however, women’s technological contributions were viewed with a distinct
bias, one that barely credited women as sharing in the afore mentioned “scientiﬁc
delights.” It was evident that a domesticated characterization of women inventors
persisted.

This characterization was a point of continual friction between women inventors
and public reception to their inventions. This focus serves as a comparative basis to the
reactions recorded 17 years later at the 1893 Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition
Woman’s Building when a noticeable change in media perception occurred. A
correspondent for the North Dakota newspaper, Fargo Argus reported that women’s
achievements as represented in the Woman’s Building in 1893 “form an object lesson in
the history of woman’s intellectual development, and present an unanswerable argument
to those who have been wont to deny her ability to excel in any line of work outside of
light fancy work or household drudgery” (Shaw 61). In the case of women inventors, this
was especially true. In support, there was a substantial increase in the number of women
inventors who exhibited in Chicago and in the number of awards which recognized their
contributions. In Philadelphia, 79 women exhibited and won 14 awards and in Chicago,
335 women exhibited and won at least 33 awards (Stanley Mothers 760). [1] The 17
year interim between the expositions showed an increased measure of recognition of
women’s inventions and created an embryonic public image of the woman inventor

which continued to develop with the explosive technological advances of the 20th

century.

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The atmosphere in which women’s technological innovations were recognized at
these two world class expositions reﬂected the patriarchal struggle to maintain cultural
control over women’s relationship with technology which was intent on keeping women
restricted to domestic technology. Social convention did not relinquish its constricting
dictates that placed the ideal woman exclusively in the home, but cultural standards did
show evidence of change as the 19th century drew to a close. As American technology
advanced, women’s relationship to it showed movement out the strictly domestic realm
and into selective industrial ﬁelds. Men and women continued to be socialized to view
gender as an ideological construct which dictated the proper relationship each sex should
have with technology, but these constructs, like the fairs themselves, focused on
progressive ideals revolving around technological advancement.

A primary purpose of America’s ﬁrst national expositions was to proclaim
America’s technological superiority which presented a paradoxical culture clash between
men’s and women’s “appropriate” relationship with technology. Both the Centennial and
the Columbian expositions provided a public platform for women inventors which made
it undeniable that they had expanded their relationship with technology. Particularly in
the Philadelphia Exposition, the resistance to expanding such boundaries was overt on
one hand while encouraged on the other hand. Both fair administrations could claim that
even American women participated in America’s quest to achieve and maintain
international technological superiority. By the Chicago Columbian exposition, the
resistance to women’s participation as technological contributors surfaced distinctly as a
subtle undercurrent. For women inventors, this meant that they experienced increased

access to exhibit space, increased respect, and an emerging atmosphere where women

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might participate in technical activity on a new expanded level beyond hearth and homer”?
As Henry Nash Smith pointed out, by 1893 the World’s Columbian Exposition provided
“something like a mark of punctuation in American cultural history” and one might add,
in the history of American women inventors (xvii). By the close of the Columbian
Exposition, women inventors had left an indelible imprint on the history of American
technology.

Prior to the Centennial Exposition in 1876, women inventors remained virtually
invisible in the progressive technological scene. Although they had shown a dramatic
increase in the number of patents during the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, their
contributions were barely recognized by the larger public, and even less celebrated.
Efforts to be included in the 1876 Centennial Exposition demonstrated women’s
determination to prove that the “woman’s sphere is as much of the world as she can move
in” and “that the woman’s kingdom is not only within four walls, but without . . .” (New
Century, May 13, 1876).

Women participated in the 1876 Centennial not just out of “pure patriotism,” but
as “intelligent observers of this country’s record in its centennial year” they sensed that,
“never before had American women such activity and purpose; never before did they feel
such a sense of responsibility, such a knowledge of awakening power” (New Century,
May 13, 1876) Yet, their activity and purpose was continually devalued because,
“custom, society, and the laws of corporations present[ed] each so many obstacles in the
way of self-supporting women” that women’s accomplishments, particularly inventions,
were viewed with lesser credibility and signiﬁcance than their male counterparts (New

Century, May 13, 1876). The power of voice, presence, and representation in an

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international cultural arena was not to be missed, though, by either the Women’s
Executive Committee in Philadelphia in 1876 or by the Board of Lady Managers in
Chicago in 1893. President of the Board of Lady Managers, Bertha Palmer, felt an
ideological kinship with the Women’s Executive Committee regarding the responsibility
to “clear away any misconceptions as to the value of inventions and industries of women.
. . [and to] present a complete picture of the condition of women in every country of the
world. . . particularly of those who are breadwinners” (Greenhalgh 178).

Misconceptions, though, were the rule rather than the exception. And in some
measure, they were not without valid merit, especially in review of the Woman’s Pavilion
in Philadelphia. Misconceptions about women’s abilities, especially regarding
technology, were perpetrated by design. The minimal size of the Woman’s Pavilion, the
lack of time to put the exhibits together, and the complete lack of funding certame
worked toward the misconception that women were less productive in areas outside of the
home. What The New Century acknowledged as a “poverty of exhibits in some branches
of industry” was “due greatly to the fact that women of limited resources make up the
majority of those who have achieved any success in either science or art” (Aug 19, 1876).
The dilemma of limited resources plagued the women organizers from the outset in 1871
when plans for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition began.

Plans included what Congress deemed appropriate and what American powers
wanted the world to see as,

“. . . its progress in those arts which beneﬁt mankind, in

comparison with those of older nations . . . The centennial

anniversary of the Declaration of Independence seemed an

opportune time to celebrate the nation’s achievements and its
contributions to the arts and sciences of the world” (Miller, L 3).

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The Centennial Exhibition was to feature the latest developments in both machinery and
arts in the two dominate buildings, an art gallery, Memorial Hall, and industrial
machinery in the Machinery Building (Miller, L. 3-6). The attempt to exhibit America’s
accomplishments in the ﬁne arts was overshadowed by America’s technological
wonders. The 18705 introduced an array of innovative technology: a workable
typewriter, the sewing machine, developments in reﬁning, mining, civil engineering, the
Bessemer steel-making process, the development of transcontinental railroads, the
telegraph and the telephone to name just a few (Nugent 4; Gies 6-8). And although
women inventors had contributed to many of the major industrial ﬁelds and had actively
participated in the nation’s industrial progress, the inclusion of their contributions and
other women to the Centennial Exhibition was an afterthought (Stanley Mothers 501 ;886-
897). Elizabeth Cady Stanton quipped, that “it was too much like the afterthought that
“theologians claim woman herself to have been” “(Macdonald 77; Weinmann 4).

No women were included on the original Centennial Board, which was organized
to raise money, initiate exhibit plans and supervise the exhibition administration. After a
year’s work in February of 1873, the organizers realized that they had,

. . . failed to arouse all the interest necessary to carry the

undertaking to a successful issue, and they therefore had invited

thirteen ladies, in memory of the thirteen colonial States, to

cooperate with them in the endeavor to create popular enthusiasm

and to add to the subscriptions for Centennial stock (Gillespie

270)
They recognized the fund-raising talents among a host of women who had established

successful ﬁrnd raising reputations during the Civil War and thereafter in their club and

community activities. Consequently, the Women’s Centennial Committee was formed

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with Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, great granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, as head. Her
administrative abilities were well established through her involvement in the Philadelphia
Sanitary Fair of 1874. She accepted the position on one condition, that women be
allowed exhibit space in the Main Exhibition Hall “to give the mass of women, who were
laboring by the needle and obtaining only a scanty subsistence, the opportunity to see
what women were capable of attaining unto in other and higher branches of industry”
(Gillespie 282). At the annual meeting in May of 1873, the Centennial Commission
agreed to this condition and promised “ample space” (Gillespie 282; Weinmann 1-2;
Brown, D. 139).

Gillespie’s experience and enthusiasm earned her the reputation of “imperial
wizard, the arch-tycoon” of the Centennial Exhibition (Brown 139). Women’s
Centennial Committees were formed in ahnost every state. Stock subscriptions for the
exhibition were sold nationally. Centennial teas were held where tea was auctioned at
premium prices and tickets sold for as much as $50. For one such “Centennial Tea” in
Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem for delivery, with all the proceeds going to
the Exhibition. The Women’s Executive obtained permission to have Martha
Washington medals made at the United States mint which were sold with great success
along with other souvenirs (Gillespie 306). By June of 1875, Gillespie’s efforts had
netted over $93,000, which she turned over to the Fair’s Board of Finance. All were
conﬁdent that plans for women’s exhibits were well under way (Weimann 2, Brown D,
140)

But on June 11, 1875, Gillespie wrote that the “cup of hope was dashed from our

lips” by two letters she received. One was from Mr. Goshom, the Director-General of the

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Exhibition, which explained that there was no space, after all, for the women’s exhibit
because of the “demands that have been made by foreign countries for space” and
suggested that they might build a “worthy and attractive” building of their own. The
second letter was from Mr. Cochran, the Chairman of the Committee on Grounds, Plans
and Buildings, who expressed sorrow that there was no money in the coffers to contribute
towards the women’s building. He suggested that if they could come up with “say, thirty
thousand dollars” they could construct a building “two hundred feet by two hundred feet,
covering one acre. . .at a prominent position on the grounds” ( Gillespie 311-313;
Weinmann 2).

Gillespie later wrote that she never forgot “the utter misery of those ﬁrst
moments, for the women of the whole country were working not only from patriotic
motives, but with the hope that through this Exhibition their own abilities would be
recognized and their works carried beyond needle and thread” (Gillespie 313; Weinmann
2). All hope, though, was not lost. Gillespie was “encouraged” by the Centennial
Committee’s advice to, “Get up a side show for yourselves, pay for it yourselves, and be -
- happy” (Weinmann 4).

And while never happy with the arrangement and never acquiescing to women’s
accomplishments as a side show, Gillespie put her anger to productive use and raised the
necessary $30,000. By October construction ﬁnally began, with H. J. Schwarzrnann as
architect, the same individual who designed Memorial Hall (Illustrated History 1877,
656). This experience, Gillespie claimed, was their “ﬁrst great mistake” of not

employing a woman architect, a mistake which was duly noted by the Lady Board of

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Managers of the Columbian Exposition when they commissioned a female architect for
the Women’s Building (Gillespie 315; Weinmann 3).

The structure was the smallest on the grounds, 208 feet by 208 feet (Norton
Charles B, 42). [2] It housed 600 exhibits, a library, art gallery, kindergarten annex, and
the ofﬁces of The New Century for Women (Weinmann 3). The wooden building,
considered to be of modem style, was built in the shape of a cross, with wings extended
outwards on four sides, surmounted by arched roofs. The many windows were lavishly
decorated with gingerbread. A cupola with a high ﬂagstaff at the center, topped the
building. The exterior was painted a light bluish gray color and the interior was in the
“softest shade of light blue.” The building was described as very pretty, attractive,
tasteful, graceful, and one of the handsomest ediﬁces connected with the Exhibition
(Illustrated History 1877, 654-656). By design, the building was embedded with values
which placed women on an ornamental pedestal. By design, the building was not
masculine, bold, nor massive. It was distinctly feminine, domestic and submissive in its
presence to all the other exhibition buildings.

Historian Helen Leﬂcowitz Horowitz makes the following observation regarding
design and experience: “No meanings intrinsically inhere in associational schemes or in
buildings. A culture invests both with signiﬁcance” (xviii). The Woman’s Pavilion was
richly invested as a signiﬁcant cultural and social artifact which reﬂected values
associated with virtuous femininity and traditional womanhood. For example, women
were considered to be spiritual pillars as suggested in the overall building shape of a
cross. They were considered the weaker sex, fragile, pure, and delicate, as evinced in the

lavishly intricate gingerbread and multiple windows. The soft and airy colors of the

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building emitted a sense of peace, harmony, and welcome, not aggressive, demanding, or
confrontational. The design of the Woman’s Pavilion was imbued with the virtues of the
ideal woman: domestic and submissive. Regardless of what was housed therein or what
the declared objective was, the building was invested with cultural signiﬁcance which
placed women in a protected, domestic, and “very pretty” place -- like the ideal home.
This investiture worked toward devaluing anything exhibited in the building which
challenged these cultural standards, which meant inparticularly a portion of women’s
industrial and mechanical inventions.

The ever vigilant patriarchal Centennial Committee had the building erected on
“Belmont Avenue, across from the United States Government building, in ﬁ'ont of which

9’

was a pair of enormous cannon pointed straight at the pavilion. The symbolism cannot
be missed regarding govemment’s attitude toward women’s organized activity (Brown D,
141; Weinmann 3; Illustrated History 1877, 654). The declared object of the women’s
department was “to exhibit the highest types of women’s work, and, if possible, to
enlarge the sphere of her useﬁrlness and proﬁt in the future” (Norton, F. 92). This
mission sent up the red ﬂag to the male vestige of business and industry. Proﬁt margins
were threatened by a formidable portion of the population-- industrial minded women.
The Woman’s Pavilion opened on May 10, 1876, along with all the rest of the
exhibition buildings, despite the continual doubt of the male commissioners who
predicted that the building could not possibly be completed by opening day (Brown, D.
140). More than 186,672 visitors poured in the ﬁrst day to tour the ﬁrst American fair of

real international importance in commemoration of one hundred years of independent

American history (Weinmarm 1; Rydell 10). What they saw reﬂected the strengths,

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weakness and values of American culture. The exhibition was not to be just a holiday,
but “a great school of instruction“ where people viewed the past with the purpose of
future self-improvement. The attitudes and values exempliﬁed in the diverse exhibits
were meant to educate and mold tomorrow’s citizens. It was meant to be “a working
model of an American Mecca,” designed to celebrate material progress, to sound a call
for culture, and to emphasize order and harmony among diverse peoples” (Rydell 11;
Morgan 55).

For women inventors, the Woman’s Pavilion proved to be an American Mecca,
but with a much different agenda than the rest of the exhibition. As a whole, the
Woman’s Pavilion presented a showcase of women’s struggle for equality. From the
planning stages where women struggled for inclusion, a sobering July 4th celebration, a
memorable November 7th election day, and through to the closing addresses in mid-
November, what women exhibited, particularly inventors, and how their presence was
mediated reﬂected the persistent assumption that women’s place was in the home, her
intellect was inferior, and her technological capabilities were limited (Weinmann 4;
Rydell 110). Women’s relationship with technology was shaped and circumscribed by
autocratic social convictions.

The limitations, more than the accomplishments, of the Woman’s Pavilion were
widely and unanimously recognized. The reasons for its shortcomings, though, were not
so unanimously recognized and register the complexity of the cultural indexes prevailing
at the time. The women’s department contended that, “We live in a country and an age of
experiment; the American woman is herself an eXperiment in the face of social laws in

the old world.” And they saw the Woman’s Pavilion as a laboratory where her

237

accomplishments could be studied and evaluated by all, especially “to show woman as a
worker. To separate her work, to admit the distinction of sex, and to do its share in
pointing out to her the avenues of remunerative labor “(New Century, May 13, 1876).
Gillespie pointed out that the women’s exhibits were aimed “ to give to the mass of
women who were laboring by the needle and obtaining only a scanty subsistence, the
opportunity to see what women were capable of attaining unto in other and higher
branches of industry” (Gillespie 282; Warner in Trescott 109).

One of the most promising “higher branches of industry” open to women was
invention (Warner 103). But to the disappointment of many, most of the women’s
inventions at the Centennial were characterized as domestic in nature. Why this factor
constituted a disappointment is a revealing cultural index. The disappointment was not
voiced because the inventions were considered technologically insigniﬁcant, although
such evaluation still persists today. [3] Or was the commentary offered because the
exhibited inventions had little marketability, because many proved to be ﬁnancially
lucrative. But for women, the disappointment lay in not demonstrating the true scope of
their accomplishments beyond “the four walls” and their capabilities in “higher branches
of industry.” For others, disappointment was based on the seemingly paltriness of the
exhibit, which was taken as evidence that women simple were incapable of doing
anything except domestic activity and work.

Even from sources that had traditionally supported women’s inventive activity,
the invention exhibits in the Woman’s Pavilion drew negative reviews. For example,
Scientific American, known for its “profound belief in the beneﬁts and promise of science

and technology” recognized and supported “female inventive talent” well before the

238

Philadelphia Centennial opened (Shenton 11). In an article which discussed “the question
of what women can do and what they cannot do well,” it was concluded from the
publishers experience that “women have as much natural inventive talent as men, and that
the circumstances under which most of them pass their lives only prevent an equal
manifestation of this talent on their part.” To unbelievers, they argued,

. . . in regard to the power of women to achieve, as a class,

anything higher than a pound-cake or a piece of embroidery, that

the inventions made by women, and for which they solicit patents

through our agency, are generally found to be in their practical

character, and in their adaptation and selection of means to effect a

deﬁnite purpose, fully equal to the same number of inventions

selected at random from among those made by men (Sept 17,

1 870).
But six years later, in review of the Woman’s Pavilion, their comments were few and
terse regarding women’s inventions:

Leaving out fancy work, woman’s labor is but poorly represented.

There are a few inventions, where there might be many. We notice

some dish washers and a life-preserving mattress, which, it is said,

is to be ofﬁcially tested, and there is a ﬁne collection of medicines

prepared and put up by fair hands (June 24, 1876).
The rest of the review, though, suggests that they “noticed” far more than a few dish
washers and such. A considerable amount of detail went into describing “Queen
Victoria’s beautiﬁrl napkin” and the “deft persevering ﬁngers, in the innumerable worsted
pictures, hair chains, feather and shell ornaments, the marvelous pieces of knitting” and a
quilt with ﬁfteen hundred rosebuds.

The review opened with the observation that the most interesting “object” found

in the Woman’s Pavilion was the person of Miss Emma Allison, who operated the Baxter

steam engine used to power the printing presses for the New Century for Women.

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Allison surprised visitors by her seemingly incongruous dainty and attractive features
with her master competency over the machinery (Macdonald 83). Although the Scientific
American writer had never “seen a woman manage a steam engine before,” it was noted
that “the lady herself suggests very truly that there is a good ﬁeld for woman’s work in
taking charge of the thousands of small motors in minor manufacturing operations” (June
24, 1876). [4] The idea that the “fair sex is quite competent for the duty” of operating
“small motors in minor manufacturing operations” conveys the prevailing discriminatory
attitude that women and machines had a limited relationship in even the most liberal
minds of American men of science. But for the exception of Miss Allison, the larger
picture of women’s relationship with technology, was dismissed as disappointing. The
reviewer wrote, “We wish we could speak as highly of the rest of the woman’s display in
general; but it must be considered, as a whole, to be disappointing.”

The mention of only 2 inventions and some patented medicines out of 79
inventions, certainly raises suspicion as to what criteria Scientific American adhered to
when writing that there should have been many inventions instead of the noticed few,
particularly in view of its extensive and laudatory reviews of other exhibits such as the
boats, machinery hall, the aquaria and such (June 17 & 24, 1876). Did the 70 or so other
inventions which constituted a quarter of the entire Woman’s Pavilion simply miss their
attention? (Warner 103). Or were they so insigniﬁcant as to be considered invisible
because of their domestic categorization? If they weren’t agricultural, mechanical, or
industrial, did the reviewers ﬁnd them so trivial as not even worth a mention for
description’s sake? Or if they did fall into a masculine category outside of conventional

domestic boundaries, was the oversight inﬂuenced by prejudicial standard which assumed

240

that women could not possible produce signiﬁcant inventions which required chemistry,
engineering, physics, or mechanics? Inventions such as the pyrotechnic ﬂares,
electrotherapeutic appliances, nolanum building material, a ribbon making loom, a self-
inﬂator for raising sunken vessels, and a gauge used in the manufacture of candy lozenges
offered serious challenge to the persistent notions of women as antitechnocrats. Yet, the
above inventions do not even rank a mere mention by Scientiﬁc American. Why? These
inventions were out of cultural context in the Woman’s Pavilion, and, therefore, not part
of the collective ideology the building represented in its very structure and in its
exhibition contents on a whole.

Innovative inventions which were perceived as connected with the home, family,
or women speciﬁcally, were considered less valuable by their very categorization as
domestic. Their lack of signiﬁcance is implicit in their garnering a conspicuous lack of
media attention. It is difﬁcult to imagine that so many exhibits could have been missed
by any professional reporter and writer. Innovative domestic inventions such as the
following were on display:

Several dish washers, a rotary washing machine, various sewing

machines and sewing machine attachments, such as a feeding

mechanism, needle and arm, vertical handle attachment and a

machine for straw braiding, a one eyed sewing machine needle,

scissors with sewing machine tools, parlor cook stove, the

Reliance cook stove, Potts cold-handled sad-iron, gas smoothing

iron, several window related inventions such as ventilating strip

and shutter fastener, bedstead with drawers below, combined

traveling chair and bag, bathing chair for ladies and invalids, Stiles

combination desk, work table, leather table with checker board,

stereoscope, a globe, chemically preserved process for natural

ﬂowers, underclotlring for women and children, baby jumper, dress

cutting system, dress maker’s marking and cutting gauge, models
for ﬁtting ladies dresses by self-measurement, and Demorest’s

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several very successful pattern and dress cutting inventions

(Wamer110-119).[5]

Despite falling mainly into the domestic category of invention, women’s inventions were
well represented with machines, appliances, furniture, child care items, women’s
clothing, cooking devices, cleaning products, and miscellaneous household innovations in
such obvious quantity and diversity that it would have been impossible for an exhibit
reviewer to miss their presence altogether. Rather, by their very preponderance, they
functioned as a cultural index of women’s accomplishments as being exclusively centered
in domestic activities. For those inventions that were not domestic, they appeared as
deviant exceptions in this setting, something which was downplayed and minimized as to
signiﬁcance.

For some, this was viewed as a way to protect feminine virtue from intruding,
corrupt masculine inﬂuences. For others, it was a way of controlling and limiting
women’s relationship with technology so as not to encourage encroachment into male
domains, occupations, and proﬁts. But for still others, mainly women, the quality and
nature of what was exhibited under the roof of the Woman’s Pavilion spurred a factional
opposition lead by “many liberal-minded women” because it did not help, but rather
hindered, the “cause of Woman” (Woman Journal, July 29, 1876). In an article entitled
“Woman and the Centennial” opposition was based, in part, because,

The kind of work which we wish shown is not there. The building

might be called a “huge work-box,” ﬁlled with an immense variety

of needle-work. There are a few patented articles such as a dish-

washer, carpet sweeper, bed-stead with drawers, a new model to

cut dresses by; things which help in the narrow sphere, which has

been called Woman’s -- that of housekeeping (Woman ’s Journal,
July 29, 1876, 243).

242

A strong contingent of women wanted representation in occupational ﬁelds outside of the
home, where “many other employment’s monopolized by men, but eminently suited to
women,” had yet to be opened to them. And speciﬁcally concerning women inventors,
they wished to display evidence to disprove the heresy that women are deﬁcient in
inventive faculty (Woman '3 Journal, March 25, 1876, 97; June 30, 1888, 204) .

The article, “Women and the Centennial” continued by asking the rhetorical
question, “Why did not we women come out in full force, and take our stand beside the
men, as some of our best artists have done?” It is not surprising that the reason remained
unknown or distorted as to why women were not exhibiting among the men. As noted, it
was Gillespie’s ﬁrst choice to do just that and she was initially granted “ample space” for
women’s exhibits in the main building. But even relatively recently, this fact has been
obscurely or incorrectly referenced. For example, in Dee Brown’s 1966 edition of The
Year of the Century: 1876, she included the following erroneous account:

Actually, in the early years of her reign, Elizabeth Gillespie met

with considerable resistance from the directors of the Exhibition.

By 1875 her plans for a display of the abilities and skills of women

were so extensive that she had to be told ﬁrmly that there would

not be space for a tenth of these exhibits (139).

It was true that she was told ﬁrmly that there would be no space for women’s exhibits,
but it was clearly a political control move aimed at minimizing and devaluing women’s
involvement in the exhibition.

Regardless of the misconceptions as to why women didn’t produce a more

expansive and impressive exhibit, the result was fairly unanimous. Even women

supporters of the Centennial agreed that there was “a poverty of exhibit in some branches

243

of industry, or, in certain cases, an entire failure to be represented at all” (New Century,
Aug 19, 1876). As acknowledged by the New Century, the exhibition was “one-sided,
limited” in reference to domestic development (Aug 19, 1876). The Woman ’s Journal
concluded,

As it is, this imperfect show of Woman’s work is given to the

world, and our enemies may well say, “After all your talk you

plainly show your vocation.” Never shall we obtain a just share in

the management of this great Republic, until we are willing to have
all our work compared with that of men . . . (July 29, 1876, 243).

With the exception or a very select few women, their accomplishments were
exhibited in the Woman’s Pavilion or not all. Two, who had their work compared with
that of men, were notable exceptions and inventors, Susan Stuart F rackleton and Susan
Taylor Converse. Frackleton, a respected artist and inventor, invented a portable gas-kiln
for ﬁring her china paintings (2 patents, 1886 & 1888). It was her china paintings,
though, and not her kiln, which were exhibited alongside men’s work (Willard and
Livermore 298; Macdonald 128-130). Converse patented the “Emancipation Suit” in
187 5, which was the ﬁrst “hygienic” undergarrnent approved by the Dress Reform
Committee. She exhibited it among the regular commercial exhibits and not in the
Woman’s Pavilion because she was asked to sell her garment at a reduced price in the
Woman’s Pavilion. Her response was emphatic. She invented because she “intended to
use any invention for proﬁt,” and would not forego the twenty-ﬁve cent royalty she
earned on each garment sold. She asked, “With all your zeal for women’s rights, how
could you even suggest that “one woman like myself should give of her head and hard
labor without fair compensation” “ (Warner in Trescott 108; Stanley Mother 246-247;

Macdonald 113-115). Like other inventors, she invented for money and exhibited at the

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t"

Centennial to promote her invention, ﬁnd backers and established manufacturers. She
was not particularly interested in solidarity for the sake of woman’s rights. This was not
an original agenda by any means, but one followed by the majority of male inventors who
considered the Centennial as a trade fair (Warner/Trescott 103).

The Scientific American summed up its review that “the severest criticism that can
be made on the woman’s Pavilion is that its contents show woman’s amusements, not her
wor ”(June 24, 1876, 401). So along with the New Century and Woman ’3 Journal, the
Scientific American agreed that what women exhibited was disappointing in comparison
to the anticipated potential. But that is where the unanimity of opinion began and ended.
The reasons why each of these three sources had rendered such an opinion varied
considerably. The range of difference as to why the experiment of the Woman’s Building
didn’t work reveals the complexity in reading the cultural indexes which evaluated
women’s inventions (Greenhalgh 177-178).

The Scientific American expressed disappointment in the Woman’s Pavilion, in
part, because it was “too pretty” and couldn’t be taken seriously as a scientiﬁc and
inventive exhibit of professional caliber. Other than “fancy work, woman’s labor was
poorly represented” it intimated because she wasn’t good at anything else. Reviewing the
article, “Female Inventive Talent” only six years earlier, the basis for the evaluation
criteria was suggested with the caveat that the only thing that prevents women from
competing equally with male inventors was “the circumstances under which most of them
pass their lives.” Such circumstances were so culturally ingrained in the whole affair of

the Woman’s Pavilion, that what few exceptions managed inclusion were hastily

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overlooked, submerged, or pardoned and became quite invisible to even the most
favorable of visitors.

In defense of the “poverty of exhibit,” the mouthpiece of the Woman’s Pavilion,
the New Century, stated that there was no claim “to a ﬁrll representative exhibit” because
it was “the ﬁrst attempt of its kind ever made” and reiterated that because of limited
resources, women made slow progress. But for any that claimed the Woman’s
Department was failure, the New Century assured its readers that it was they themselves
who had surely failed to catch its real meaning. The real meaning of the Woman’s
Pavilion was “to show her exact measure of her capacity as well as her points of
deﬁciency” and “to render it impossible ever again to impugn woman’s practical ability.”
It wasn’t that she was incapable of anything but housework. Rather, that she could “carry
forward successfully anything she choose to undertake.” But because of imposed
limitations, which included economic, political, and social resources, her progress was
understandably slowed, ahnost halted in some industries (Aug 19, 1876). Inventive
progress was undeniably present in the Woman’s Pavilion in the form of 79 inventions,
but the cultural devaluation of such, whether because it was “just” domestic or a deviance
thereof, worked toward devaluing of invention itself as something in which women were
incompetent and incapable.

And as for the Woman ’s Journal, disappointment was based on the blatant
inequity surrounding the entire involvement of women in the Centennial. Most all of the
patented inventions on display they claimed helped to glorify that “narrow sphere, which
has been called Woman’s--that of housekeeping.” What was on exhibit was an

“imperfect show of Woman’s wor ”(July 29, 1876, 243). And although women made

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the best of the resources they had, their obstacles were immense. The journal claimed
that women had been “cabined, cribbed, conﬁned, as though they were children, or
lunatics, or wild beasts” because it was feared that if the way were open to them, they
would “rush off into all manner of folly and evil, forsake all natural instincts, select those
paths for which they were least ﬁtted and grow into all manner of monstrosities.” The
sarcastic tone conveyed the ludicrousness of such absurd fears. The article admonished,
“Give women knowledge and they will become wise, give them tools, and they will
invent; cease to look down upon them, and they will rise to the level of men . . .” (July 1,
1976, 209). In the case of the Woman’s Pavilion of 1876, they did not get knowledge,
tools, or equality. In part, the preponderance of displayed domestic inventions were a
measure of such cultural constriction which limited women’s relationship with
technology in the domestic ﬁeld. What they got was “a little pavilion with piles of
needle-work, rich with the golden sands of wasted hours” which would not do much to
teach the world about women’s accomplishments. The Woman ’s Journal believed they
had gotten a “puny show” (July 1, 1976, 209).

Because the Woman ’s Journal was more closely aligned with the women’s
movement than the New Century, the inequity of the entire Centennial hit nerve after
nerve. Besides the puny show in the Woman’s Pavilion, women felt the sting of inequity
when they were not allowed a place on July 4th program to read their “Declaration of
Rights for Women.” They were given 6 tickets to the program instead of the 50 tickets
they requested so that at least one women from each of the states could attend. On July
4th, Susan B. Anthony and ﬁve other women presented their “Declaration” to the master

of ceremonies and several others and then withdrew from the assembly. Anthony

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publicly read the Declaration outside in Independence Square atop a music platform to a

supportive crowd:

While the nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are

attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one

discordant note,” she began, and went on to explain that women in

1876 had “greater cause for discontent, rebellion, and revolution

than had the men of 1776 (Weinmann 4).

The extent to which women inventors experienced discontent and inequity is only now
just beginning to be recognized and understood. The democratic ideology upon which
the US. Patent Ofﬁce was founded was ﬂawed from the beginning in extending equal
opportunity to women inventors (See Dissertation Chapter 1).

Another memorable sting was delivered ironically on what was designated at the
Centennial as “Women’s Day,” November 7th, election day. The choice behind the
designated date was that “while men were doing their duty at the polls the women would
have the day all to themselves” (Greenhalgh 177-178). For those women who were
aligned with the suffragettes or those merely sympathetic to women’s rights, the politics
of the exhibition made a mockery of the entire concept of progress, the principals of
independence, and the democratic process. No speciﬁc responses by women inventors to
either the July 4th or the November 7th incidents are known. But given many of their
experiences, women inventors often indicated sympathy, afﬁliation, or in the least,
personal understanding, of the issues surrounding women’s rights.

A casein point of someone who exhibited at the Centennial and won an award for
her pyrotechnic ﬂare was Martha Coston. With a degree of certainty, her reaction to such

inequity can be imagined based on the echoes of her feminist voice throughout her

autobiography, A Signal Success. In her experience as an inventor she considered “it a

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1

most bitter thing to ﬁnd in the lofty institution of our country, the Navy, men so small-
minded that they begrudged a woman her success” (Coston 272). The assumption may
conﬁdently be made that she was not alone in her discovery of small-minded men when it
came to women’s inventions.

Matilda Gage, noted 19th feminist, author and advocate for women inventors, was
duly aware of how women inventors were begrudged of their success at the Centennial
Exhibition. She was one of the writers of the “Declaration of Rights of Women” and
accompanied Anthony when it was delivered and read. She experienced ﬁrst hand the
limited resources with which women inventors contended at the ﬁrst national exhibit of
their work. With her characteristic straightforward style, her lengthy and indepth
comments delineate why success was begrudged and lend valuable insight into why there
was such a poor representation of women’s work at the Centennial:

Let the Woman’s Pavilion gather all it can of woman’s work, it
will still fall very far short of an accurate representation of
women’s industries and inventions, because most of the large
manufacturing establishments are owned by men; and, although
largely employing women, the work done in these establishments
owned by men will be entered in men’s names. For instance,
Lynn, the great shoe-mart of the country, employs more women
than men in the manufacture of shoes: yet, as no woman owns such
an establishment, all such work exhibited at the Exposition will
come in under men’s names. . . .

Many of woman’s inventions have been patented under men’s
names. The largest foundry in the city of Troy is run to
manufacture horseshoes, one of which is turned out every three
seconds. The machine which does this work was invented by a
woman; but the manufacture is carried on

under a man’s name, and will be exhibited as man’s work. . .

. . . Elevators, lubricating felt for car-wheels (a most important

invention), volcanic fumaces for smelting ores, steamer screws,
machinery for cotton-factories, wood-sawing machines, musical

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instruments, syllable type, submarine telescopes, looms capable of

doing three times the work of the ordinary looms, are among the

various inventions of women of this country, that will, to a great

extent, be exhibited as man’s.

. . . Women need to become something more than laborers,

something more than mere hands in order to secure just recognition

of their industry: they need to themselves become heads of

establishments, to own the manufactories, as well as to have

designed the work done in them. So, at the best, the Woman’s

Pavilion will but poorly represent the industries of the women of

this country and of the world (Hanaford 621-624).

Until women inventors were recognized as more than houseworkers who simply tinkered
at invention to make their workload lighter, their inventions would continue to be
relegated rather than celebrated. Until women assumed ownership and leadership
positions in American industry, their technological contributions remained consigned and
obscured behind a multi-featured false identity. Gage believed that until women assumed
ownership and leadership positions in industry, their technological contributions would
remain devalued and unrecognized.

In the ﬁnal analysis, the Woman’s Pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876
was an experiment with mixed results. It wasn’t a complete failure simply because of the
poor representation of women’s industries. But neither was it a resounding success
simply because it was the ﬁrst. Historian Deborah Warner of the Smithsonian Institute
comments that what it did do was signal ” the entrance of skilled crafts-women into the
world of industrial fairs of nineteenth century America.” But even though it was the ﬁrst

time women had a separate building devoted exclusively to women’s “thought and

labor,” none of the women’s inventions, she thought, were “important in any large social

250

or technological sense, but many were successful on their own terms” (Warner in Trescott
1 02-104).

Other current historians, such as Jeanne Madeline Weimann, author of Fair
Women, tend to agree with Warner’s conclusions. In concurrence, Weimann believed
that the exhibition had “no great symbolic signiﬁcance” because, in part, “its birth pangs
had been made too agonising” (Weinmarm 4). Both historians agree that while the
Philadelphia Centennial did not prove to be especially signiﬁcant in and of itself, it was
the beginning of women’s presence at national fairs. As such, the Philadelphia
Centennial Exhibition served as a public platform indicating an expanding social place
for women in the context of American progress. Although that presence was mediated
with resistance and prejudicial values, the Exhibition functioned as a social and cultural
artifact which rendered a positive answer to the persistent question, “Can a woman
invent?” (Hanaford 621). The technological, social, and cultural value of such
inventions, though, remained undermined.

The signiﬁcance of the Philadelphia Centennial to women inventors speciﬁcally
should not be overlooked in the general appraisal of its overall mediocre importance to
women. Women inventors were nationally recognized for the ﬁrst time as a collective
group and individual merit was given to at least 15 women in the form of Centennial
awards, including the highest award of the Centennial (Warner in Trescott 103). [6] The
cultural value assigned to women’s technological contributions, regardless of their
categorization, remained, however, domestic. And although the recognition of woman’s
inventive capabilities was a measure of social progress, the persistent domestic

characterization solidiﬁed women’s place in a narrowly deﬁned work place -- the home.

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Women’s inventions were valued primarily in the context of their proscribed social roles
as wife, mother, and homemaker. The cultural index registered a positive change in the
acceptance of women inventors, but persistently characterized their activity within a
narrow domestic scope.

As the 19th century drew to a close, feminist activity grew in scope. The
Philadelphia Centennial had laid the ground work for exhibitions to increasingly become
centers for women’s activity (Greenhalgh 174). By 1893 the cultural indexes were
primed for change as the women organizers of the World’s Columbian Exposition joined
forces in planning their presence in the greatest international fair of its time (Badger xiii).
They had learned and beneﬁted ﬁ'om women’s ﬁrst attempt to exhibit separately in the
187 6 Centennial and were well aware of some of the challenges ahead of them. The
Board of Lady Managers, like their predecessors in 1876, the Women’s Executive
Committee, felt a sense of responsibility to show the world what women had
accomplished. But unlike the 1876 committee, the women administrators of 1893 made a
clear alliance with the woman’s movement and publicly advocated their support of
women’s rights. In the early planning stages, ﬁ'om 1891-1892, they attempted to get
support from American and foreign women by billing the exposition as “an agent for
reforming current attitudes about woman’s work and woman’s place in the progress of
the century” (Badger 79).

American progress was the overwhehning theme of the World’s Columbian
Exposition for both men and women, individually and nationally. It resounded from the
beginning in 1890 with the Congressional approval through to the closing addresses late

in October, 1893. Beyond that date, the Exposition became a historical cultural icon

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’..

epitomizing and celebrating the idea of progress (Burg xi-xiv) It presented a colossal
image of cultural unity and national self-conﬁdence (Badger 123). The exhibition,
despite its quick physical demise after the closing, was considered as “an imperishable
part of the progress of mankind” (Burg 283). [7]

When Congress passed approval of the “World’s Columbian Exposition” on April
25, 1890, it was with the express purpose that, “the four-hundredth anniversary of the
discovery of America be commemorated by an exhibition of the resources of the United
States of America, their development and the progress of civilization in the New World”
(Kirkland 418). [8] Like the ﬁrst American international fair, the Philadelphia
Centennial, national progress was the kernel cause of celebration. But America’s second
international fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, celebrated progress on a
scale never before seen in any world’s fair.

In comparison, it was simply bigger than any other. Encompassing the area
known as Jackson Park in Chicago, “it covered a total of 1,037 acres, nearly three times
the space of any previous exposition.” The number of square feet under roof was over
5,000,000, square, twice the amount of any other fair, constructed with the aid of 12,000
to 14,000 workers. The landscaping was claimed to be “one of the most superhuman
efforts in the history of landscape architecture.” Eighty-six foreign nations, states,
principalities, and colonies exhibited on what was termed “neutral ground.” To put that
ﬁgure into perspective, “the space allotted to foreign exhibits exceeded the total space of
any previous world fair” (Burg 83, 85, 89, 95, 112). The bigness of it all became one of
the fair’s identifying trademarks. One visitor wrote, “Everywhere talk of the fair is big . .

. In fact, the unit of measure in this enterprise has been set so large that one is in danger

253

of forgetting that the Yankee nation was established for any other purpose” (112). In
addition to being big, it claimed the world’s ﬁrst ferris wheel with cars the size of busses,
the ﬁrst amusement park in a world’s fair, the ﬁrst electric transit system in the United
States, and the ﬁrst use of electric lighting for purely decorative purposes (Bolotin and
Laing 156).

It was unlike the Philadelphia Centennial in another important way. While both
had a women’s building, women’s participation and presence in the Columbian
Exposition made a signiﬁcant impact in recognizing women’s accomplishments outside
of the home and became a reckoning force concerning the advancement of women’s
rights. From the very beginning, women’s presence was stronger, their voice louder, and
their purpose more clearly deﬁned. The results were impressive, revealing much about
the changing status of women inventors and the social climate in which change
fermented. What they exhibited, how their presence was mediated, and the ensuing
media response served as important cultural indicators.

Cultural historian, Reid Badger, observed that international fairs, like the
Columbian Exposition, ﬁmctioned as a “symbolic cultural expression . . . that testify to
the self-consciousness of the age.” They provided industrialized America with a medium
for cultural synthesis (Rydell, All 39). And in the broadest sense, this self-
consciousness represented an “attempt to both acknowledge the reality of rapid change
and to understand and control its direction” ( Badger xvi). For women inventors
exhibiting at the Columbian Exposition, this concept had particular application. Changes
were evident in their stronger representation in quantity and quality of inventions. A

sense of self-consciousness prevailed in the projection of a collective and individual

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identity as inventor. Directional control of this identity no longer rested passively out of
their reach, but by their inventions which afforded economic leverage, they placed
themselves within the progressive context of the Exposition as valuable, credible, and
signiﬁcant in other than domestic categories. Many of the women exhibiting were
professional inventors with successful inventions. Most exhibited in the Woman’s
Building, with a few more exceptions than at the Philadelphia Centennial exhibiting
elsewhere, and their awards were from a wider range of committees outside of the
Woman’s Building. The categories showed increased diversity with a serious intent on
economic gain. The newly emerging professional public image projected by women
inventors at the Columbian Exposition had far reaching 20th century implications in
expanding the relationship between women and technology to include industrial interests.
Seventeen years after their “puny” ﬁrst public debut as a working class of women at the
Philadelphia Centennial, the Columbian Exposition “showed inventive women in a good
light” (Macdonald 185).

From the beginning, women’s participation in the Columbian Exposition, or as it
was popularly called, the White City, was fraught with less hostility and more
empowered organizational authority than at the Centennial. [9] Although there were no
women appointed to the exposition’s original National Commission, the Springer
amendment to the Fair bill authorized an appointment of a “Board of Lady Managers”
(W eirnann 35; Badger 78-79). Many women found the name offensive, calling it a
“ridiculous title” because,

It conveys the impression that we are a useless ornament --; idle

women of fashion; whereas our board comprises as many workers,
as much representation of the active industries of the country, as if

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it were composed of men. There are doctors, lawyers, real-estate
agents, journalist, editors, merchants . . . (36).

But regardless of the insulting name, the Board ﬁmctioned with exceeding administrative
effectiveness. The formation of the Board was initially considered a complimentary
concession to women. They were “not expected to take an active part and no particular
responsibilities or rules for their selection were stipulated” (Badger 79). Frances Willard
of the Women’s Christian Temperance Association, later wrote,

The framers of the World’s Fair bill probably builded better than

they knew when incorporating the section which created the Board

of Lady Managers. They can scarcely have anticipated the

importance this unprecedented body was destined to assume.

Nothing like it had ever existed before; its creation was entirely

experimental . . . (Weimann 36).

Bertha Palmer, wife of a wealthy Chicago businessman and inﬂuential community
leader, was voted President. She utilized the Congressional provision as a unique
opportunity for women recognizing that,

The provision of the act of Congress, that the Board of Lady

Managers appoint a jury of woman’s peers to pass judgment upon

her work, adds to the signiﬁcance of the innovation, for never

before was it thought necessary to apply this fundamental principle

of justice to our sex (Burg 105).

Palmer believed that women’s enlarged participation in the exposition was more
representative of progress than the fair itself. She considered it a milestone of huge
proportion as she later remarked that “even more important than the discovery of
Columbus was the fact that the general government has discovered woman” (Book of the
Fair 267). Palmer and her fellow board members petitioned Congress for a deﬁnition of

their responsibilities, which included the request they be allowed to do some “useﬁrl

work” (Badger 79). There was a collective sense of responsibility to gather together the

256

best examples of women’s wide ranging accomplishments. The judgment upon their
efforts, she felt, would carry an important weight in determining the future of women’s
rights, social status, and employment opportunities. At a Board meeting held in
September of 1891, after a trip abroad to drum up international support, she spoke
prophetically:

I must say again to our members, as women of America we have

been given an opportunity such as has never before occurred. . . If

we do not realize the ahnost solemn nature of the trust placed in

our hands, we shall set back the clock of time half a century for

women. If we live up to the possibilities, we shall open a new era

for them (Kirkland 431).

An international community of women embraced the opportunity “to dispel the
prejudices and misconceptions, to remove the vexatious restrictions and limitations which
for centuries have held enthralled the sex” (Book of the Fair 267).

For women inventors, a new era of increased recognition and identity opened up.
Although their work did not meet with universal support, a majority responded with
approval which ranged between tacit recognition to high recommendation. Several
underlying social and cultural developments supported a more favorable reception which
were absent during the Philadelphia Centennial.

To begin with, the building in which most women exhibited their inventions
presented a decidedly different cultural perspective of women’s place in American
society. For women inventors, the building was a cultural signiﬁer which delineated an
expanded relationship with technology, one which moved beyond the constricting

domestic scope. This time, unlike at the Philadelphia Centennial, the building was

designed by a female architect from Boston. Sophia Hayden, a 21 year old graduate from

257

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won an architectural competition and became the
ﬁrst woman to design an international exposition building (Book of the Fair 257; Burg
78). The building was once again one of the smallest structures on the grounds, covering
1.836 acres. The only one smaller was the Administration Building, covering 1.274 acres.
It was also one of the least costly of all of the buildings, at the cost of $138,000
(Weimann 152; Bolotin and Laing 44). Because the size necessitated a reduction in the
scale of detail and a heightening of proﬁle of its classic and Italian Renaissance style,
some critics said it revealed the sex of its author because of “a smaller limit of dimension,
a ﬁner scale of detail, and a certain quality of sentiment, which might be designated in no

”

derogatory sense as graceﬁrl timidity or gentleness. The derogatory sense was plainly
intended as the critique further pointed out, of course, that such design ﬂaws “at once
differentiate it from its colossal neighbors” (Book of the Fair 257-259; Greenhalgh 180).
A few others joined in the attack on the structure based on the gender of the architect,
rather than any legitimate design defects (Greenhalg 181).

By cultural standards and more favorable design critiques, the Women’s Building
reﬂected an air of studied classical elegance, with an imposing formality some considered
to be palatial and a ﬁtting monument to the emancipation of women (Shaw 61). Hayden,
the architect, said regarding the design that the “exterior expression had,

evolved quite naturally from the interior conditions. It is not

modeled after any precedent. In style it may be called Classic or

Italian Renaissance, although it follows, strictly speaking, neither

style . . . It is the result of careful training in classical design and

the expression of what I liked and felt (Weimann 150).

Congruous with the classical design, the building was fronted by a lagoon, expanding into

a bay about 400 feet wide and 10 feet above the water. The landing was a stone stairway

258

l .

which led up to a 100 foot wide terrace landscaped with blooming shubbery and “beds of

9’

ﬂaming color. The main entrance was a triple arched colonnade with Corinthian style
columns “supporting an entablature and ﬁieze decorated with wreaths in relief” (Shaw
61; Buel n.p.). The building boasted a popular roof garden adjoined to a cafe with a
balcony running the length of the building on the upper story. The interior of the building
included a host of foreign exhibit rooms, state rooms, sales rooms, record rooms, an
educational room, the Smithsonian Indian and African exhibit, an assembly room,
parlors, committee rooms, library, scientiﬁc rooms, and a room for inventions.
(Weinmann 267, 152; Scientific American Sept 9, 1893, 171; Book of the Fair 25 7).

The stateliness of the building was ﬁrrther enhanced with original art by Mary
MacMonnies, Mary Cassatt, Dora Wheeler Keith, Lucia Fairchild, Amanda Brewster
Sewell, Rosina Emmet Sherwood, and Lydia Emmet. Throughout the building a series
sculptures by San Francisco sculptor, Alice Rideout, depicted women’s roles, attributes,
and the parts they played in world history (Burg 144, 166; Book of the Fair 260). Some
have argued that exhibits, such as Rideout’s, which celebrated many of women’s
traditional and Victorian stereotypes of ideal womanhood, created paradoxical images of
women, which sent confusing cultural signals (Badger 121). [10] But despite the
integrated focus of conventional womanhood with feminist secular ambition, the master
level of art maintained the culturally sophisticated image of the building. It supported
the representation of women’s accomplishments as signiﬁcant and world class.
Unfortunately, very little of these works survived after the exposition ended, but their
record left a lasting impression of communal effort, high artistic achievement, and

intellectual accomplishment (Burg 1 67-168).

259

Both the exterior and interior of the building projected a cultural image of worldly
reﬁnement, classical intelligence, and respected knowledge of many disciplines far aﬁeld
of home and hearth. It joined the other architectural styles and interior designs at the fair
which conveyed a cultural sense of elevated civilization. Although there is much debate
over the image verses the reality of the cultural signiﬁcance of the architecture, art, and
the entire visual facade of the fair itself, the cultural status of the Women’s Building was
in harmony with the rest of the fair’s mission (Badger 119-128; Burg xi- xv, 114-119). It,
like the other structures, participated in the illusion of representing progress and
advancement. And like the other buildings, what was exhibited inside registered
contradictory cultural values which continue to perplex historians. By looking closely at
what women inventors exhibited and the kind of criteria which determined standards,
evidence suggests that women inventors were viewed as part of the progressive cultural
element which celebrated progress unlike any other preceding time.

A Preliminary Prospectus was issued as a circular after the second Board meeting
in September, 1891, outlining the purpose of women’s exhibits. A focus on showcasing
women’s inventive abilities was central:

It is our intention to make in the Woman’s Building an exhibit

which will clear away existing misconceptions as to the originality

and inventiveness of women . . . The footsteps of women will be

traced from prehistoric times to the present and their intimate

connection shown with all that has tended to promote the

development of the race, even though they have worked under the

most disadvantageous conditions. . . It will be shown that women,

among all the primitive peoples, were the originators of most of the

industrial arts, and that it was not until these became lucrative that

they were appropriated by men, and women pushed aside. . .

Irnpelled by the necessity for its use, she invented the needle, and

twisted the ﬁbers of plants into thread. She invented the shuttle. .
.She was the ﬁrst potter. . . She originated basket-making, and

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. r

invented such an inﬁnite variety of beautiﬁrl forms and decorations

as to put to shame modem products (Weimann 392; Book of the

Fair 268-269). -

At a later meeting of the State Boards on December 11, 1891, Palmer expressed
her sincere desire that, “No sentimental sympathy for women will cause the admission of
second-rate objects; for the highest standard of excellence is to be strictly maintained.”
She then outlined a nine-point agenda of what the Commissioners c00perating with the
Lady Board of Managers would be asked to do, which detailed the kinds and caliber of
exhibit selections they would solicit (Kirkland 431). In line with that agenda, Mary
Lockwood, a widow, owner of the Strathmore Arms Hotel in Washington, DC. and
feminist interested in women’s historical accomplishments, especially invention, was
appointed to the Patents Committee by Palmer who hoped to ﬁnd the unusual by seeking
out women inventors (Weimann 428).

Lockwood was advised to speak with F. T. Bickford of the Smithsonian Institute,
who was the Secretary of the Government Exhibits at the Exposition. After an hour’s
discussion, Bickford made it plain that the institution had no plans for showing women’s
inventions. It was possible, he said, that if “some woman had invented a needle or
sewing machine superior to a man’s similar invention, then the government might well
include that woman in their exhibit, but that was far as they would go.” He then pointed
out the pages of bonnets, trimmings, dresses and other wearing apparel in the Fair’s book
of classiﬁcation and “suggested the Ladies content themselves with exhibits like that,
instead of trying to mount exhibits of inventions” (Weimann 429). The incident
concluded with a “few ﬁtting remarks” by Lockwood who left in agitated frustration.

Palmer followed up in writing to Bickford that the Board desired “to ascertain what

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proportion of patents have been issued to women” which resulted in a response from Mr.
Simmons, a Patent Commissioner. The Cormnissioner said that there were over 3,000
women’s patents and it would be best if the Board made its own selections.

Palmer passed the information onto Lockwood and advised her:

Will you not send me a list of those patents that it would be worth

while for us to “crow over”. I felt rather discouraged about having

a collective exhibit when I saw you last in Washington, and would

much prefer to make no note of the inventions of women unless it

is something quite distinguished and brilliant. We must not call

attention to anything that will cause us to lose ground and if their

inventions are merely conﬁned to simple processes, it would be

better for us to show only the few remarkable things than a mass of

uninteresting ones. Please let me hear, consequently, what you

consider important enough to call attention to. Perhaps your plan

of sending the one hundred best with drawings and speciﬁcations

would be the best (Weinmann 429).
Lockwood wrote to inventors, but was disappointed to ﬁnd that “many inventors were
unwilling to ship [their models] at their own expense, and their own risk.”

Consequently, the Inventions Room was ﬁlled with “an odd assortment of smaller
items, and in many cases, simply drawings” Lockwood later published in an 1893
pamphlet entitled “The Woman ’s Building and What is to Be Seen in It Another
disappointed response was written in Cosmopolitan, September, 1893, by Ellen
Henrotin, a board member, club woman, and personal friend of Palmer. She commented
that “none of the most valuable and scientiﬁc inventions are shown . . . and it seems such
a pity

. . . when the patent books of the US. show such hundreds of women’s names . . .”

(Weimann 430).

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But these kinds of reviews proved to be exceptions to the overall positive
response elicited by the volume and variety of women’s inventions at the Exposition. [11]
The Woman ’s Journal of September 9, 1893, reported that in the Transportation Building
a woman’s invention attracted a great deal of attention. It was Annie Chilton’s Horse-
Detacher and Brake. This was demonstrated by a women sitting in cart attached to a
model horse in the Transportation Building. A miniature model was on display in the
Women’s Building. This invention helped to prevent the dangers of vehicles turning over
or of shafts being broken after a horse was released from the carriage. It represented an
important safety invention because of the persistent danger of runaway horses (Stanley
Mothers 482; Macdonald 184; Weinmann 428, 431).

The same issue of the Woman 'Journal, also praised Josephine Cockran’s dish-
washing machine as a “great labor-saving machine.” It was manufactured by the Cockran
Crescent Washing Machine Company in three sizes, the largest operated on steam and the
smaller ones by either gas or gasoline.” It was generally too expensive for home use as
the smallest one cost $250, but several Chicago hotels and restaurants reportedly used
them because they could “wash, scald, rinse, and dry ﬁve to 20 dozen dishes of all shapes
and sizes in just two minutes” (Macdonald 182; Stanley Mothers 438-439; Weimann
431)

The Woman’s Journal also lauded Margaret Wilcox’s combination stove and
house heater. They considered it “so perfect in its arrangement that a house of 10 rooms
can be heated by it 24 hours and the cooking for the family done besides, with only four
scuttlefuls of coal” (July 29, 1893, 236). The Board of Lady Managers Patents

Committee found this invention among those most interesting. Wilcox had nine patents

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to her name, most were stoves or related inventions. One, though, was quite unique, a
combination dish and clothes washer (1890) (Stanley Mothers 85-86, 439; Macdonald
1 82).

Other media sources also offered support of women’s inventive capabilities
exhibited at the Exposition. Chicago newspapers generously praised Harriet Tracy’s
lock-stitch and chain-stitch sewing machine. The lower bobbin carried more than a
thousand yards of thread and was said to “have bafﬂed a generation of masculine
inventors” (Weimann 431). The Herald praised the bobbin, saying that she “triumphed in
what a generation of skilled inventors have failed” Her inventions, they said, were
marked with “great originality, ingenuity and utility.” After seeing all of her inventions,
they claimed that no one could “truly say that woman has never invented anything
valuable (Macdonald 183). Chicago’s Mail reported that her sewing machine’s rotating
shuttle was “one of the most novel, simple, efﬁcient and ingenious devices in the World’s
Fair. . . A11 ladies who see the machine are delighted with it and her other meritorious
inventions, and proud that a woman has accomplished what man failed to do”
(Macdonald 183). The Lady Board of Managers found this invention to be in the
“distinguished and brilliant” category.

Among Tracy’s 16 patents, another meritorious invention exhibited and used in
the Exposition was the Tracy Gravity Safety Elevator. It competed against other bids but
won the contract for installation in the Woman’s Building because of its safety advantage
of “automatic platforms that keep the shaft constantly closed, and prevent any person
falling through it, or ﬂames ascending it.” Tracy had two other elevator related

inventions and as early as 1881 Tracy’s safety automatic accident- and ﬁre-proof ﬂoors

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for elevators shafts” was installed in “the large new building” at No. 80 E. 14th Street in
New York City. By 1893, Tracy’s reputation as a professional inventor was well
established and respected (Weimann 431; Stanley Mothers 436; 504-506; Macdonald 61-
63; 182-184).

Another well respected inventor who exhibited at the fair was Harriet Russell
Strong of Oakland, CA. She had ﬁve patents, two (1887 and 1894) pertaining to dam and
reservoir construction which she exhibited in the Science Room in the Women’s
Building. Her systems were used to irrigate and hold back water and proved particularly
successﬁrl on her California walnut ranch. Her 1894 invention was grossly rrrisclassiﬁed
in the LWP under “Culinary Utensils”: #528,823, Method of and means for impounding
debris and storing water. It was apparently assumed to be some kind of kitchen device!
But her invention was not misrepresented at the Exposition. It won awards in both mining
and agriculture, deﬁnitely constituting her contributions as “something to crow over.”

Her presence at the Exposition was also marked by the “Pampas Palace” which
was built completely from pampas grass grown on the Strong ranch. The grass was
primarily used for decorative purposes and was grown mostly in Germany, but found a
lucrative US. market. As elected President of the feminist Business League of America,
Strong spoke at the fair on the importance of business training for women. Her success in
business was hard won and she said that she would “train every girl so that instead of
prefacing some innovation by saying, ‘A man suggested this,’ she would rely upon her
own judgment.” The judgment of her inventive and business accomplishments proved to

be of the highest degree. Not only could she claim success as an inventor, but also in the

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business of inventing (Weinmann 436; Stanley Mothers 444, 463; Macdonald 232, 393,
Logan 887).

The woman who claimed to have the most inventions at the Exposition was
Caroline Westcott Romney of Colorado, with at least 14 inventions on exhibit. Romney
also edited The Journal of Industrial Education during the time of the Fair and was the
editor of a journal for the porous earthenware industry. [12] She had several inventions
relating to that line of industry in which she conducted experiments with cellular
brickware made of a mixture of clay, sawdust and asbestos. Although unpatented, her
iceless milk cooler and reﬁigerator displayed in the Agriculture Building showed
economic promise as did her foot-warming stone for use in railway cars exhibited in the
Transportation Building. She also exhibited oven ﬁxtures for conservation of heat in the
Manufactures Building. Romney was understandably proud of her inventions and did not
in any way make excuses for their domestic categorization. She claimed to have “more
articles of domestic utility on exhibition, all inventions of her own brain, than any other
man or woman at the Fair” (Weimann 430-432; Stanley Mothers 67; Macdonald 184).

Women inventors, both individually and collectively, had made a distinct impact
on women’s accomplishments at the Columbian Exposition. Their success was apparent
in the number of inventions exhibited, the diversity of the inventions and in the favorable
response from the media and the Fair administration. Another standard of success was
measured by the economic remuneration women realized from the exhibited inventions.
Among such notable successes, consider the following orders: 600 Harris reﬁigerators,

900 Eberhard bread pans, 300 Bay pressing boards, and 60,000 Harnbell egg and cake

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beaters (Weimann 432). Women’s inventive capabilities had reached a new plateau of
public respect, technological recognition, and economic success.

The prevailing change in attitudes about women inventors and their inventions
were not just by the inventors themselves and the media, Fair visitors and administrators
reﬂected a changing cultural index. Women’s relationship with technology had
signiﬁcantly expanded to include industrial and mechanical application outside of the
domestic realm. By the close of the century Success magazine stated in “Women to the
Front” :

The rapid stride which women have made in nearly all the

professions and occupations during the last thirty years are

remarkable. . . Not so many years ago, it was thought that, with

very rare exceptions, the ferrrinine mind had no inventive genius;

but now scarcely a week passes that does not record in the patent

ofﬁce at Washington some patents by women. . . Indeed, women

have proved their natural qualiﬁcations for work in science . . .

they certainly possess a great deal of creative force, and a natural

capacity for scientiﬁc investigation, and excel in most of the ﬁelds

which they enter (May 27, 1899, 442).

Women inventors who exhibited in the Columbian Exposition did much to remove the
persistent assumption that women did not invent. Women such as Harriet Tracy,
Margaret Wilcox, Caroline Romney and the others, presented outstanding examples of
women’s inventive genius and progressive capacity for scientiﬁc investigation.

The social pulse of the Exposition vibrated with a heightened excitement for all
that was progressive, technologically advanced, and distinctly innovative. For the ﬁrst
time, women’s inventive contributions were integrated in the mainstream image of

American progress. The values assigned to American technology as exceptional and

superior, were in a some measure shared by men’s and women’s accomplishments. Of

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the women’s exhibits it was said, “they form of themselves a unique and distinctive
feature of the Exposition, such as never before was presented to the world, such as never
before was attempted” (Book of the Fair 266).

Women inventors participated publicly on a national scale in what was considered
“typically American.” This, of course, did not mean that gender lines were erased, but it
did mean that there was a progressive fusing of the boundaries of women’s relationship
with technology, one which expanded the previously culturally imposed limitations. The
Illustrated World ’s Fair, a publication issued in 1890 before the opening of the Fair,
anticipated that the Exposition would present “such a display of the world’s products as
will pale all preceding exhibitions.” America was to be the “prime mover” because of its
spirit of enterprise. The world, it claimed, recognized America as the most wide awake
and progressive of all people (3). This ideological rhetoric had been touted since the Age
of Jackson, but for the ﬁrst time in the history of technology, women’s inventions were
recognized and included as an important part of the American spirit of enterprise (See
Dissertation Chapter 3).

The American spirit of enterprise was uniquely featured in the formation of the
World’s Congress Auxiliary, held from May 15 to October 28. “The congresses were a
series of meetings attended by people who represented virtually every conceivable
spectrum and activity of humanity” (Burg 23 5). [13] They were designed to “bring about
a real ﬁ’atemity of nations” by establishing personal acquaintances and ﬁiendships among
the “leaders of the intellectual world” (Badger 77). As in other aspects of the Exposition,
women played a conspicuous and responsible role in the World’s Congress Auxiliary as a

whole, and speciﬁcally in the Congress of Women where such notably women as Susan

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B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, May Wright Sewall and inventor, Caroline
Westcott Romney gave presentations. Women’s inventive capability was endorsed,
supported and enhanced within this progressive intellectual atmosphere. With
retrospective insight, Lucy Stone in her address, “The Progress of Fifty Years”, noted that
a “half a century ago women were at an inﬁnite disadvantage in regard to their
occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band
of steel on society” (Eagle 59). Part of her life’s work was to create a “wholesome
discontent” in women that would “compel them to reach out after far better things” (59).
There was plenty of work still ahead for women, but Stone believed that “the last half
century ha[d] gained for women the right to the highest education and entrance to all
professions and occupations, or nearly all” (60). Like other women who participated in
the Women’s Congress and other Congresses, Stone recognized a measurable degree of
progress had transpired over the last 50 years because of the efforts of countless women
to push the limits of social convention and expand the circumference of their restricted
freedoms. Particularly in the case of women inventors, the circumference of their
inventive activity had taken on enlarged proportions, both culturally and technologically.
Entrance into the business and industrial world of commerce as professional
inventors was just beginning to open up for women. Within the cultural context spawned
by the Colmnbian Exposition and cultivated through such cooperative intellectual
endeavors as the Women’s Congress, women inventors participation and technological
contributions were held in a newly elevated esteem as signiﬁcant and important

components of America’s progress.

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What inventions women exhibited, how their presence was mediated, and how the
public responded to them at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 signiﬁed that
they were reluctant concessions. Their validity as signiﬁcant technological contributors
was dubious at best, deniable and invisible at worst. Women inventors resources were
impinged in 1876 at the Exhibition by restrictive limitations in allotted space, planning
time, and ﬁrnding. They were also culturally restricted by social conventions which

persistently characterized woman’s place in the home. Her work, occupation, and talents

 

were narrowly best suited for domestic pursuits. Invention, even with a domestic
application, was seen as masculine. The poverty of the women’s exhibit seemed to some,
all that could be expected from women. They had a limited range of capabilities which
simply did not spread out very extensively in industrial development. A manipulative
control of women’s participation in the Exhibition resulted in a pinched projection of
women’s relationship with technology. As a “custodian of culture,” the Philadelphia
Centennial had done little to change the cultural index of women’s inventors progress.
But what it did do, was signal future world fair endeavors that women would be a
contending cultural force in international exhibitions. Women inventors marginalized
presence at the Centennial was a function of Victorian time, a place saturated with
conventional values, and limited resources. Like the pulse of the fair, symbolized by the
“silent and irresistible” Corliss engine, mechanized control exerted power, but left the
question of control to the next generation of American technological progress (Rydell, All
the World, 35). For women inventors, the issue of power and control over their
relationship with technology, remained relatively unchanged. The prototypical inventor

was as before, still absolutely male.

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Seventeen years later, the tides of progress blew in change which signiﬁed that
women inventors had secured a measure of success in deﬁrsing the persistent assumption
that women did not invent. It wasn’t a culmination of absolute conﬁdence, but rather a
long overdue beginning. A new era opened for women inventors as the world viewed,
evaluated, and then applauded their inventive efforts. Their diverse, sophisticated, and
economically successful inventions became integrated into the American cultural
landscape of progress like never before. They carried cultural authority which was
validated by an international acceptance of their place in pursuit of progress. The
authority evolved over a century of struggle for equality in legal rights, educational
access, employment opportunity, an economic independence. A social miasma strictly
characterized women’s place as domestic and, consequently, her inventive abilities were
circumscribed and limited. But with the Chicago Columbian Exposition, a deﬁnite and
distinct lifting of the weighty conventional standards began. Women’s inventions were
exhibited within a cultural context which validated technological progress. Gender bias
did not completely evaporate, but it did lessen based on the strength of the evidence and
the contextual placement of it in the Fair. In an article in the Forum, “Some Lasting
Results of the World’s Fair” it was concluded that “women found an opportunity to prove
their ability as a banded sex. . . After what has been achieved, the self-consciousness of
women will be lessened, and their sensitiveness about their own position, capacity, and
rights will be naturally outgrown” (Weimann 599). In retrospect, the Columbian
Exposition marked the end of an era, just as it ushered in a new beginning for women
inventors. The image of the inventor had not shifted in gender, but it had changed its

cultural shape.

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' .

World fairs function as indicators of important cultural trends. They projected the
self-consciousness of the age (Badger ix, xvi, 122). The last quarter of the 19th century
was an age which persistently subjected American women in a struggle for technological
recognition for their inventive ability. A struggle for cultural synthesis was evident in
both the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the World Columbian Exposition, which
attempted to adapt technological progress with social progress regarding women’s
relationship with technology. By the close of the Columbian Exposition, control of that
relationship had been signiﬁcantly altered by the undeniable evidence of women’s
inventive genius.

Bertha Pahner’s dream and purpose that a new era would open up for women by
clearing away “existing misconceptions as to the originality and inventiveness of women”
was realized. Along with the hundreds of women who participated in both world fairs,
women inventors took a “few forward steps” into the what the 19th century boasted as the
“so-called ‘Age of Invention’” (Woman’s Journal, May 13, 1893, 150). The progress of
19th century women inventors paved the way for 20th century advancement far beyond

the illusions of the great White City’s vision of progress.

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Chapter 6 - NOTES

[1] This ﬁgure varies according to different sources. The Philadelphia sources claim
anywhere ﬁ'om 74 to 85 women inventors exhibited (Trescott/Wamer 105; Macdonald

81; Gillespie 18; Ingrahm, 103-105; Stanley Mothers 760; Greenhalgh 176) The ofﬁcial
Columbian exposition catalog lists less than 335 inventions on exhibit (Macdonald 181).

[2] In comparison, the other buildings were as follows: Main building, 870,464
square feet; Machinery hall, 504,720 square feet; Art Building, 76,650 square feet;
Horticultural Hall, 350 feet by 160 feet; Agricultural Building, 117, 760 (Norton Charles
B, 42). Other sources cite the size of the Woman’s Pavilion at 30,000 square feet and
40,000 square feet, both in disagreement with the 43,264 square feet cited by Benjamin
Charles Norton (Weinmann 3; Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition, 1877).
Regardless of the conﬂict over the actual size of the Woman’s Pavilion, it was clearly the
smallest building at the exhibition.

[3] Because of the preponderance of domestic inventions by women at the
Philadelphia Centennial, many of women’s signiﬁcant contributions were undermined.
More than 100 years later, Deborah Warner in “Women Inventors at the Centennial”
claims that “none of the women’s inventions was important in any large social or
technological sense,” but then goes on to cite more than 15 non-domestic inventions
which included sewing machines, lubricated plaster molds, machine for sewing straw
braid, ﬂuting machine, washing machine, pyrotechnic signal ﬂares, a self-inﬂating lift
preserve and others (Trescott 104; 110-119). The value of such inventions remains
stagnated within the existing theoretical male bias of the history of technology.

[4] Miss Emma Allison has been cited as one of the most popular attractions of the
Woman’s Pavilion. People were “surprised to ﬁnd “no low, vulgar woman, but an
educated and accomplished lady” “ ( Brown, D. 142). There had been some concern that
she might blow the Pavilion to “smitherines by reading novels instead of monitoring the
steam gauge” (Macdonald 83). She calmly replied to such misgivings that operating a
steam engine was “far easier than nursemaiding and less fatiguing than bending over a
kitchen stove” and that it was “cleaner, safer, and much easier than ﬁring up a wood cook
stove every day.” She also though that it was harder to teach school and that it paid
better too. (Weinmann 3).

[5] For a comprehensive list of women inventors and the inventions exhibited at the
Centennial see Deborah J. Warner’s Appendix in “Women Inventors at the Centennial
Hall the Philadelphia International Exhibition 1 87 6 Catalogue of the Women ’s
Department with supporting information in New Century for Woman no 3 p. 1, pp. 34,
51, 58, 69, 74, 84-85;91,114,115, 117,135-136,147, 164, 204, 212.

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[6] The highest award of the Centennial went to a woman inventor, Betsey Ann
Stems, for her dress cutting invention tailor method for cutting clothes (Logan 889;
Willard and Livermore 678). Some other award winners included Martha Coston, for her
pyrotechnic ﬂare, Harriet Strong for her dam and reservoir system, Olivia F lynt for her
Flynt Waist, and many others both exhibiting in the Women’s Building and elsewhere in
the Exposition.

[7] On January 4, 1894, ﬁre destroyed the Casino, the Peristyle, and the Music Hall.
Fires continued to destroy many of the buildings on the fair grounds. The clash between
federal troops and striking railroad workers on July 5, 1894, resulted in major ﬁres which
within two hours reduced many of the great buildings “to a wilderness of ashes and gaunt
and twisted girders” (Badger 130). A few buildings were removed and salvaged, as
discussed in detail in the “Epilogue” of Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing’s, The
Chicago World’s Fair of1893, The World ’s Columbian Exposition. By 1896 Scientific
American recorded, “The World’s Columbian Exposition Salvage Company have
completed their task of removing the building. . . A few buildings have been permitted to
remain, but they stand only to serve special purposes, and are only faintly suggestive of
the architectural glories which once graced Jackson Par ” (Burg 287-288).

[8] Congress adopted the name “World’s Columbian Exposition,” but it was also
known as the “Chicago’s World Fair of 1893”, and the most popular reference was “The
White City” (Kirkland 418; Burg xi)

[9] The powers and duties of the Ladies Board of Managers, which numbered 115
women representing various states and territories, were: “’To appoint one or more
members of all committees authorized to award prizes for exhibits which may be
produced in whole or in part by female labor: To manage and control the “Women’s
Building” on the Fair grounds: To have general charge and management of all the
interests of women in connection with the Exposition; so that its management, so far as it
relates to women’s work, exhibits and interests in general, shall be under the direction of
the Board of Lady Managers, through its Presence, shall be necessary before ﬁnal and
conclusive action is taken” (Kirkland 428-429; Badger 79).

[10] Cultural historian Reid Badger may have been referring to a variety of exhibits
which celebrated women’s traditional roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper and which
were proudly integrated with women’s accomplishments in the arts and industry. For
Ried, this projected a paradoxical image of the women’s roles as represented by the fair
(120-123). Domestic exhibits such as the Corn Exhibit Model Kitchen, received a great
deal of attention. It was billed as a model of domestic efﬁciency equipped with
inventions by women and the latest in gas appliances. It was used for demonstrating
cooking techniques and recipes. A few exhibits on child care and the glories of
motherhood were also to be found in the Women’s Building. Elsewhere on the fair
grounds was the Children’s Building and Ellen Richards Rumsford Kitchen near the
Liberal Arts Building, which involved women almost exclusively. In addition, the high
proﬁle of the Columbian Housekeepers, an offshoot of the Household committee of the

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World’s Fair Congress, represented traditional work and roles for women (Weimann
325-352; 459-464).

[11] One visitor claimed to have seen 335 inventions exhibited in the Invention Room
of the Women’s Building, but the ofﬁcial catalogue lists less. Some women exhibited in
other buildings, such as Harriet Tracy who exhibited her “Tracy Lock-Stitch and Chain-
Stitch Sewing Machine” in the Liberal Arts Building. No consistent total number of
women’s inventions at the Columbian Exposition surfaced in a wide variety of consulted
sources. The range does appear to be somewhere between 250 and 300 based on a
sample of 19th journals, magazines, fair books and 20th century secondary sources.

[12] Autumn Stanley notes that Romney wrote a two-part article on women’s
inventions at the Columbian Exposition in The Journal of Industrial Education.
“Unfortunately, the magazine evidently died before Part 2 appeared (inventors sumarned
after H), which might have listed her own inventions” (68).

[13] The World’s Congress Auxiliary included 20 departments and 225 general
divisions. “These Congresses embraced Woman’s Progress, The Public Press, Medicine
and Surgery, Temperance, Moral and Social Reform, Commerce and Finance, Music,
Literature, Education, Engineering, Art, Government, Science and Philosophy, Social and
Economic Science, Labor, Religion, Sunday Rest, Public health, And Agriculture”
(Charles Carroll Bonney, World ’s Congress Addresses (Chicago: Open Court Publishing
Company, 1900, p. iii) in Burg 235).

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CONCLUSION

Women continued to patent their inventions in growing numbers with
increased diversity as the 20th century unfolded (US Patent Records). They had a
strong historical 19th century legacy to build on, but even today as we approach
the 215t century, that legacy remains unrecognized. It has only been in this last
decade, the 19905, that the ﬁrst scholarly books have been published about
women inventors. To date, the number of such scholarly works is two: Anne
Macdonald’s, Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America, and Autumn
Stanley’s, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of
Technology. Upon the publication of this dissertation, the number will be three.

The retrieval process has begun and calls to arms able minded historians
and educators of the 215t century to bring to fruition the placement of women
inventors’ contributions in the development of American technology. Without the
inclusion of women’s inventions, the history of technology remains signiﬁcantly
incomplete and seriously ﬂawed. It continues to reﬂect the persistent gendered
assumption that women don’t invent and those few who do, do so with little
impact on the development of American technological progress.

It will be necessary to continue not merely cataloguing women’s
inventions, but to place their contributions within the cultural context in which

they invented. Gender analysis will continue to inform not only the way we look

276

at the social and economic impact of technological development, but will
enlighten our perception as to the nature of inventive activity and the
characterization of the inventor. It has not been an activity which excludes male
or female innovation, yet the persistent recognition of it as an exclusive male
activity reinforced the assumption that men produced and women consumed.
Evidence reveals that such assumptions were based on ideological constructs
founded on socially contrived ideals, not the reality. The reality of women’s
inventive accomplishments in the 19th century stand uncontroverted by nearly
5,000 patent records. Their experiences prove that they shared wholeheartedly in
the pursuit for technological advancement and were nurtured by the ﬁre of genius
to produce signiﬁcant inventions throughout the 19th century. Like their male
counterparts, they were inspired, motivated, and skilled , but unlike men, their
presence and progress was tempered by complex cultural barriers.

If women inventors like Margaret Knight, Martha Coston, or Clarissa
Britain had shared the same relationship with technology as Cyrus McCormick,
Samuel Colt, or Richard Gatlin ,what they accomplished would be recorded as
part of the history of the development of American technology. But their
relationship with technology was deﬁned by male experiential values and
mediated by male criteria which “ﬁrmly secured “inventor” as a masculine
occupation” (Amrarn, Morgan 161).

This relationship is poignantly illustrated by Margaret Knight’s experience
who found herself throughout her life conﬁned to a limited and narrow

relationship with technology. She recalled later in life that as a child she “never

277

 

cared for the things that girls usually do. . . [T]he only things wanted were a
jackkrrife, a gimlet and pieces of wood . . . I was famous for my kites, and my
sleds were the envy and admiration of all the boys in town.” But her ﬁiends were
“horriﬁed.” She remembered, I “sighed sometimes because I was not like the
other girls, but wisely concluded that I couldn’t help it, and sought further
consolation from my tools” (Mozans 35). She could no more help having the gift
of invention than she could change the reception to that gift in a world which
viewed invention as male activity and inventor as a masculine entity.

Concepts and deﬁnitions of masculinity and femininity affected the way
professions were circumscribed , technology was developed and implemented,
and skills deﬁned (Wright, et a1 61). With 27 known patents to her credit,
mostly in machines, it is hard to deﬁne Margaret Knight as anything other than
inventor. Yet her mention in the standard histories of technology remains
minimal at best and generally non-existent despite that fact that her
accomplishments successfully challenged the gendered assumption that women
didn’t invent, and those conspicuous few who did, did so in the domestic ﬁeld.
Even Knight viewed herself in masculine terms because she worked in a
masculine profession, one which involved tools, machines, and industry.

By retrieving the legacy of 19th century American women inventors,
Knight’s experience surfaces as representative of other women inventor’s
experience. Knight was, in fact, like “other girls.” The propensity to invent and
the ability to produce technological solutions was not inherently masculine or

feminine, but rather a product of human activity. The social construction of

278

gender created such circumscription for both the causal inventor who invented to
meet an actual need and the professional inventor who invented as a business.
Regardless of gender, all showed remarkable perseverance, originality and
imagination (Rossman 41).

The body of knowledge respecting the history of American technology is
incomplete and inaccurate without the inclusion of women’s inventions and
contributions to technological progress. The legacy must bring to light women’s
accomplishments in the same celebrated light as men’s inventions. The historical
record must explore and analyze the different co-existing relationships which
either promoted or prohibited technical creativity for men and women because
how one’s relationship to technology was deﬁned and mediated affected how an
inventor was received and how their invention was diffused. And of
consequential importance, it still affects how women’s relationship to technology
is deﬁned today.

Biased gendered assumptions about invention still affect our perception of
the inventor. When we think of inventor, we still do not think of Martha Coston,
Clarissa Britain, or Margaret Knight. Their names and contributions are not cited
right inbetween those of Cyrus McCormick, Samuel Colt, and Richard Gatlin.

The legacy of women inventors is yet to come of age.

279

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