Women Inventors between 1900-1949: Setting the Stage for Equal Opportunity

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Women Inventors between 1900-1949: Setting the Stage for Equal Opportunity

Overview

New inventions are absolutely vital to a strong nation and a prosperous economy, so it is not surprising that the patent system is one of the oldest parts of the United States government. Anybody can legally patent an invention, even children. However, until very recently, most inventions were patented by men. Where were all the women inventors? The answer has to do with education, beliefs about women, and the nature of the patent itself. Historically, women were usually excluded from scientific and technical education, so they learned fewer technical skills than men. To make matters worse, many people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued that women lacked the ability to solve mechanical problems, and these ideas discouraged women from pursuing patent applications. Perhaps most importantly, women found invention less profitable than men did. The patent system rewards successful inventors with a "patent," or limited monopoly on an invention. An inventor can sometimes make a lot of money from a patent, because he or she has the exclusive right to sell or use the invention for a certain number of years. However, because women faced discrimination in business, they found it hard to turn patents into profit, and they therefore had less motivation to invent. Although women inventors continued to face these obstacles through much of the twentieth century, changing times gradually improved the educational, social, and economic conditions for inventive women and encouraged them to patent more of their ideas.

Background

By 1900, women held only 1% of all U.S. patents. One reason is that throughout the 1800s women faced pervasive discrimination in education. Women therefore had fewer opportunities to gain the technical skills and knowledge that often lead to a successful invention. In the nineteenth century it was rare for girls to learn about chemistry, engineering, metallurgy, or electricity. In fact, during the entire nineteenth century, only about a dozen women earned doctorates in chemistry, and only three earned a Ph.D. in physics. Until the mid-twentieth century, many universities did not admit women at all. At home, boys often had opportunities to learn how to use tools and fix machines, but their sisters learned how to sew and cook. As late as the 1970s many high schools in America still provided separate cooking classes for girls and "shop" classes for boys.

Lack of technical education only partially explains why so few women held patents. There are many kinds of things, after all, that women could invent without technical knowledge. Lena Wilson Sittig, for example, never went to school, but she filed more than five patents for outdoor garments that she sewed herself. Although Harriet Carter had no training in chemistry, she invented a formula made from ground coal, wax, and other common household ingredients, which reduced the cost of fuel in winter. Other women patented feather dusters, toys, fire escapes, and other inventions that required imagination but little education. Why didn't women patent more inventions like these?

One reason is that during the nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth, women experienced constant exposure to ideas about their physical and mental inferiority that, without question, discouraged their creativity and confidence. Since women's bodies were different than men's bodies, in 1900 people assumed that women's brains were physically different from men's brains. Unfortunately, even by 1920 many people still thought that women were not equipped for logical thinking and problem solving, and some people actually believed that women would become ill if they attempted too much intellectual activity. From their earliest girlhood, women were therefore bombarded with the message that they were not as smart or as inventive as men. These notions were completely wrong, of course, but after being taught that they were not mentally capable of invention, it is not surprising that so few women thought of trying to patent their ideas.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, there was another reason why women did not often patent. It takes money and effort to patent, so most inventors hope to earn a profit from their invention. A patent can indeed be valuable, but it is worthless until the inventor can manufacture and sell her invention, or unless she can sell the patent rights to someone else. Patent law allows for both these options, but women inventors could not necessarily use them. Women, particularly married women, have historically faced restrictions on their ability to own property, form partnerships, and sign business contracts. For example, in 1900 there were still states that gave a woman's husband control of everything she owned, and in other states a woman had to register property before it was considered hers. Significantly, one of the largest increases in women's patenting was 1885-1900, a period when this country saw the most dramatic change in women's property rights.

These gains were nonetheless very limited because women inventors often needed loans or business partners in order to manufacture their inventions. Even when women legally owned their patents, many states restricted a woman's ability to sign contracts, and it was perfectly legal for a bank to refuse a woman a business loan simply because she was a woman. Moreover, business was considered "men's work," so few women leaned much about accounting and the other day-to-day skills needed to run a company. Until the 1920s many people argued that business and politics would corrupt women's superior virtue and morality. Ridiculous as it sounds today, this argument is one reason why women had to fight so hard not only for equal opportunity in business, but for the right to vote and participate in politics.

Impact

During the first half of the twentieth century, reforms in education, transformation of the workplace, and a gradual change in beliefs about women's abilities encouraged more women to invent. From 1905 to 1922, for example, women received about 500 new patents a year, double the rate in 1895. While still a small percentage of patents over all (about 2%), it is significant that women's application rates increased faster than men's rates.

Part of this improvement in women's inventiveness had to do with changes in education. Increasing educational opportunities made it easier for inventive women to learn the skills that they needed. Although even in the 1950s and 1960s many schools still refused to admit women, during the first 50 years of the century, more women attended public universities or received scientific training at women's colleges than ever before. The number of women Ph.D.s is one measure of women's advance in technical education. This figure quadrupled from about 50 in 1920 to more than 200 in 1949. However, from 1940 to 1949, the increase in women Ph.D.s slowed down, showing that women still had a long way to go. While women made gains in certain sciences like biology, where they accounted for 11% of all biologists, a government study in 1948 revealed that only eight women—about 0.01% of the total—were employed as engineers.

However, one hopeful trend in this period was new opportunities for women in industry and business. When men went off to fight in World War I and World War II, women took their places in factories, where they gained new knowledge of industrial technology. These women not only learned new technical skills, they had a chance to observe mechanical and logistical problems in factories and patent ways to solve them. Women also participated more in the business work place. Women clerks had been rare in the nineteenth century, but growing reliance on the typewriter and telephone in the twentieth century brought more women into the office as typists, secretaries, and telephone operators. Although these women faced unfair discrimination in pay and promotion, they did gain exposure to the business world in greater numbers than ever before. Change in corporate structure unfortunately did create one new problem for inventive women: As technology became more complex, more patent applications came not from individuals but from teams of workers in companies like General Electric. These companies often blatantly excluded women from technical jobs, so women did not have the opportunity to contribute to many exciting new inventions.

During the period 1900-1949, views of women also began to change for the better. Feminists and suffragists confronted social ideas about feminine mental inferiority, and in 1919 the U.S. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Meanwhile, the public became aware of the accomplishments of women such as Nobel laureate Marie Curie (1867-1934), and these achievements challenged the idea that women were not capable of technical and scientific work. Although ideas about women were changing, the pace of change was very slow. One government study of women inventors published in 1923 still identified "lack of faith" in women's abilities as one of the main reason for women's failure to patent.

Although there was no time during the first half of the century when women held more than 4% of all U.S. patents, gradual improvement in conditions for women during this period laid the groundwork for the future. However, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that legal changes truly began to level the playing field for women inventors. It was only in 1974, for example, that the courts amended civil rights laws regulating lending to prohibit discrimination based on sex. During the 1970s and 1980s, amendments to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and other legislation made it illegal to refuse a loan on the basis of sex and made it illegal to consider marital status when assessing a loan application. Discrimination against women in university admissions faced legal challenges, even at all-male educational institutions. Significantly, women's patents, which were 3.5% overall by 1977, surged to nearly 6% by 1988, and to 10.3% in 1998. Women excelled in chemistry patents in the 1980s, a trend that reflected greater acceptance for women in chemistry than in engineering. However, from 1994 to 1998, the employer with the most prolific women inventors was IBM, a computer hardware and software engineering firm.

Why are changes in women's patenting rates important? Invention of new technology is absolutely critical to advances in medicine, production of food, care of the environment, better computers and other electronics, safer cars and buildings, and improvements in everything we use each day. Since women account for about 50% of the population, women have 50% of the world's inventiveness and brainpower. However, social discrimination against women historically has dramatically reduced women's ability to contribute their half of technological improvements. (Similar discrimination against African Americans and ethnic minority groups has further degraded our nation's potential for technical achievement.) As technical education continues to open to women, as women advance in corporate technical roles, and as women entrepreneurs market wonderful new inventions, women's inventive contribution will rise, and advances in our quality of life will rise along with it.

DEVORAH SLAVIN