Inventive Women

Here is Kies' patent record.

Nineteenth-century America experienced an explosion of industrial energy. Women eagerly engaged.

State laws governed women's property rights. Married women could own real property, like a house or farm. But they had no legal identities separate from their husbands. This meant that married women had no legal ability to manage their own property.

They couldn't sign contracts or bring civil suits in court. So, they could not open a bank account, buy or sell anything, sign a lease, control their own wages, or be a legal guardian to their own children. Without property rights, married women could patent an invention, but they could not manage the rights or manufacture.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is best remembered for its call for voting rights. Equally important was the demand for women's property rights.

During the nineteenth century, women's rights advocates diverged on priorities. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony focused on woman suffrage. An equally determined group said that voting should be a secondary goal to women's property rights. Charlotte Smith became an insistent voice advocating for working women and promoting women inventors.

Smith became concerned with the plight of women inventors in 1875. She moved to Washington, DC in 1879 where she spent years pressuring the Patent Office to publish a list of women inventors to inspire more women's inventive activity. She was rewarded in 1888 when 500 copies of the list of "Women Inventors to Whom Patents Have Been Granted" was published. It took four clerks ten days to compile the list.

The Patent Office was a temple to invention. Partially modeled on the ancient Greek Parthenon, poet Walt Whitman rhapsodized that it as “noblest of the Washington buildings.” It was the opposite of a staid Washington office building. The main exhibit halls displayed thousands of models of patented devices, submitted by both men and women. Perusing American innovation became a favorite afternoon past time.

Smith continued her crusade through the following decades. She lobbied for working women's accomplishments to be celebrated at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1892-93 in a Woman's Building.

"Many persons do not give wage women any credit for their honor and integrity, in fact do not admit that they are in possession of such qualities. [T]he mission of the Working Woman [newspaper]. . . [is] to elevate wage women socially, and to dignify labor."

The Columbian Exposition launched several women inventors.

Harriet R. Tracy had 16 patents in her own name. Tracy's gravity elevator was installed in the Woman's Building at the Columbian Exhibition. She was among a number of women whose inventions were displayed. And sold.

Nineteenth-century advocates of women's rights celebrated women like Harriet Tracy who patented technically advanced industrial machines. They discounted female invention and innovation in traditionally feminine spheres, even though women's inventive activity was heavily directed toward such household products as kitchen tools and apparel.

Ida Tarbell—an inventor herself—mused, "What does the record show? Three things worth knowing and believing: that women have invented a large number of useful articles: that these patents are not confined to 'clothes and kitchen' devices as the skeptical masculine mind avers; that invention is a field in which woman has large possibilities."

Between 1865 and 1900, more than forty women patented inventions related to the railroad. Mary E. Walton invented a chimney used for locomotives, while both Augusta M. Rodgers and Mary J. Wyatt devised smoke-and-cinder conveyors for those chimneys. Sarah Harmon devised a novel window for locomotive cabs; this window employed a projecting cone to "protect the glass from rain, snow, and steam;" shelter "the engineer from hail, sparks, wind, snow and rain;" and "aid the vision of the engineer."

However, less than one-quarter of women's patented inventions were in nontraditional fields likes tools, industrial and agricultural machinery, transportation, construction, and chemicals. Inventors tend to invent in their areas of expertise. The patterns of invention when separated by industrial category show that women's patents predominantly related to the role of women in the home and family.

Luckily for all, American women inventors achieved in many fields.

Her lasting impact is in the invention of a machine that folded and glued flat bottom paper bags, found in every grocery store. A 1913 New York Times feature referred to her as the "woman Edison" and lauded her for working 20 hours per day on her 89th invention at age 70.

Her national network of agent dressmakers reproduced her designs for local clients, using her patterns. By 1876, the Demorests were selling three million patterns to eager buyers.

While Demorest patented other inventions, including an automatic floor for elevator shafts, she never patented standardized paper dressmaking patterns. Three years after Demorests first issue, competitor Ebenezer Butterick patented the paper pattern in 1863. The Demorests sued unsuccessfully. Buttericks persisted to become the nation’s most profitable paper pattern company into the 20th century.

Her standardized construction approach along with the burgeoning use of paper patterns laid a foundation for mass production of women’s clothing. Factory-produced and store-bought, women’s shirtwaists became ubiquitous on everyone from factory girls to office clerks to college women.

Cochrane exhibited her dish-washer at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition where she won first place "best mechanical construction, durability and adaptation to its line of work." Hotels and high-end restaurants were among her first customers, surely attracted by a machine that “wash[es] in an hour the entire service for 400 guests.” Cochrane iterated on her design, patenting her innovations.