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Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2020

Kara W. Swanson*
Affiliation:
Northeastern University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: k.swanson@northeastern.edu

Abstract

In 1870, the New York State Suffrage Association published a pamphlet titled “Woman as Inventor.” White suffragists distributed this history of female invention to prove women's inventiveness, countering arguments that biological disabilities justified women's legal disabilities. In the United States, inventiveness was linked to the capacity for original thought considered crucial for voters, making female inventiveness relevant to the franchise. As women could and did receive patents, activists used them as government certification of female ability. By publicizing female inventors, counting patents granted to women, and displaying women's inventions, they sought to overturn the common wisdom that women could not invent and prove that they had the ability to vote. Although partially successful, these efforts left undisturbed the equally common assertion that African Americans could not invent. White suffragists kept the contemporary Black woman inventor invisible, relegating the technological creations of women of color to a primitive past. White suffragists created a feminist history of invention, in words and objects, that reinforced white supremacy—another erasure of Black women, whose activism white suffragists were eager to harness, yet whose public presence they sought to minimize in order to keep the woman voter, like the woman inventor, presumptively white.

Type
Special Issue: The Nineteenth Amendment at 100
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

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35 “The Cotton Gin Invented by a Woman,” The Revolution, Apr. 30, 1868; “Woman an Inventor: Article II,” The Revolution, May 21, 1868; “Woman as Inventor: Article III,” The Revolution, Sept. 17, 1868; “Woman as Inventor, No. IV,” The Revolution, Jan. 14, 1869; “Woman as Inventor: Article Fifth,” The Revolution, Oct. 21, 1869.

36 DuBois, Suffrage, 80.

37 “Woman as Inventor,” Woman's Journal (Boston), Feb. 19, 1870.

39 “American Inventions,” Woman's Journal, May 14, 1870.

40 “Notes and News,” Woman's Journal, Oct. 15, 1870. For the Scientific American and its affiliated agency, see Michael Borut, “The Scientific American in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., New York University, 1977).

41 “Woman as Inventor,” The Revolution, Apr. 22, 1869.

42 “About Women,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), Nov. 23, 1872.

43 Georgia Weekly Telegraph and Georgia Journal & Messenger (Macon, GA), Apr. 15, 1873; North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia), Apr. 8, 1873. The paper bag patentee was probably Margaret Knight. See Pilato, The Retrieval of a Legacy, 117–21.

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48 Khan, “‘Not for Ornament,’” 168–69.

49 Pilato, The Retrieval of a Legacy, 82–86 (although she perfected the invention, Coston obtained the patent in her deceased husband's name).

50 Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875); Flexner, Eleanor and Fitzpatrick, Ellen, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1959; enlarged ed., 1996), 161–65Google Scholar; and DuBois, Suffrage, 113–17.

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52 M. J. Gage, Letter to editor, Weekly Recorder (Tenafly, NJ), Nov. 9, 1876; Warner, Deborah, “The Women's Pavilion,” in 1876: A Centennial Exposition, ed. Post, Robert C. (Washington, DC: National Museum of History and Technology, 1976), 165–67Google Scholar.

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57 Pfeffer, Miki, Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women's Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World's Fair (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quoting “World's Exposition: Grand Opening of the Woman's Department,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Mar. 4, 1885). For Howe, see Pfeffer, Southern Ladies and Suffragists, 28.

58 Warner, “Women Inventors at the Centennial,” 108; Pfeffer, Southern Ladies and Suffragists, 135.

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61 Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Apr. 6, 1881. See also “Women as Inventors,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 2, 1886 (fifty patents to women in six months).

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63 “Woman as Inventors,” New York Times, Apr. 22, 1883.

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66 United States Patent Office, Women Inventors to Whom Patents Have Been Granted by the United States Government, 1790 to July 1, 1888 and Appendix no. 1–2, July 1, 1888 to March 1, 1895 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888–95; appendices added in 1892 and 1895). This list was an undercounting. See Merritt, “Hypatia in the Patent Office,” 243n51, 244n54.

67 “Women as Inventors,” Boston Daily Globe, Jan. 16, 1889. See also “Women as Inventors,” Harper's Bazaar, Nov. 14, 1891, 866; Frances Stephens, “Women as Inventors,” Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly (New York), Aug. 1891, 2.

68 Ellis Meredith, “Things Done by Women,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Nov. 17, 1895; DuBois, Suffrage, 133–35.

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72 Weimann, The Fair Women, 429 (quoting letter from Palmer to Lockwood), 393–94.

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77 Mary Ogden White, “Has the War Made Women Inventors?,” Woman Citizen (Boston), June 9, 1917 (from 1917 to 1928, Woman's Journal was published as Woman Citizen).

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84 U.S. Patent Office, Women Inventors to Whom Patents Have Been Granted, 34, appendix 1, 3. For racial identification, see Ives, Patricia Carter, “Patent and Trademark Innovations of Black Americans and Women,” Journal of the Patent Office Society 62 (Feb. 1980): 114Google Scholar; Sluby, Inventive Spirit, 126.

85 Ives, “Patent and Trademark Innovations,” 110; Sluby, Inventive Spirit, 128; Baker, Henry E., The Colored Inventor: A Record of Fifty Years (New York: The Crisis Publishing Co., 1913), 4Google Scholar.

86 Baker, The Colored Inventor, 3 (citing a campaign speech of a Maryland politician). See also Richard R. Wright, Sr., “The Negro as an Inventor,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Apr. 1886, 398–99 (using patents to refute Ralls, The Negro Problem).

87 A Partial List of Patents Granted by the United States for Inventions by Afro-Americans, 26 Cong. Rec. 8382–83 (Aug. 10, 1894). For the source of list, see Swanson, Kara W., “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” Columbia Law Review 120, no. 4 (2020): 10771118Google Scholar, https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Swanson-Race_and_Selective_Legal_Memory.pdf (accessed June 25, 2020).

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89 While proving the absence of an argument is difficult, I have found no discussion of inventors in, for example, The Woman's Era, the national newspaper of Black women, edited by suffragist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin from 1894 to 1897, nor in the contributions of Black women to a suffrage symposium published in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons. See “Votes for Women,” The Crisis (New York), Aug. 1915, 178–92. For the rhetoric and tactics of Black suffragists, see sources above in note 10.

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97 Weimann, The Fair Women, 394–402; Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 84–91.

98 Weimann, The Fair Women, 393 (quoting “Preliminary Prospectus”); Lockwood, Yesterdays in Washington, 2:103–04 (describing exhibits as displayed in the National Museum in Washington, DC).

99 Weimann, The Fair Women, 402.

100 Lockwood, Yesterdays in Washington, 2:223–24.

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102 Wright, “The Negro as Inventor,” 398–99.

103 For white supremacy elsewhere at the Chicago fair, see Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 38–71.

104 Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 108–35; Free; Suffrage Reconstructed, 133–61; Kraditor, Aileen S., The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 163218Google Scholar; Sneider, Allison L., Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6168CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, White Women's Rights, 116–31.

105 Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 221–317; Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 219–64; and Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism, 187–216. See also DuBois, Suffrage (generally).

106 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 21, 29, 32–36; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 40.

107 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 105–16.

108 Baker, “The Negro as An Inventor,” 405–13; Bois, W. E. B. Du, “The American Negro at Paris,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 22 (Nov. 1900): 576Google Scholar.

109 Wilson, Negro Buildings, 86, 103, 116–19, 145–67.

110 For example, see Baker, The Colored Inventor. For other examples, see Swanson, “Race and Selective Legal Memory,” 18–27, 27n135.

111 For example, see fran pollner, “caty of the revolution & the cotton gin,” off our backs 3 (Feb./Mar. 1973): 25; Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (1979), Heritage Floor tile, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Cf. Stanley, Autumn, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), 32–33, 544–46Google Scholar.