In Honor of Women’s History Month, a Look at Nineteenth-Century Women Inventors
The MIT Press is proud to present From the Archive Friday (FTAF). Each Friday, we select an article from the depths of our online Journals archive and make it freely available for one week.
We have celebrated Women’s History Month through our FTAF program since 2014. This year is no exception. For the fifth year in a row, we will bring you a stellar lineup of journal articles about women and feminism, covering everything from 19th-century women inventors to the legacy of Margaret Cavendish, and from the history of feminist biography to the “China Girl” in film.
We’re excited to relaunch our FTAF program here on Medium. We hope this move will encourage more reading and sharing! Check back here each Friday for a new current events-related gem from our journals.
Without further ado, here is the first of five selections from our journal archives for Women’s History Month.
“Not for Ornament”: Patenting Activity by Nineteenth-Century Women Inventors”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 31 | Issue 2 |
Autumn 2000
Author: B. Zorina Khan
“..the role of women as producers and consumers of technology is still not well understood…”
Abstract:
Contrary to claims that nineteenth-century women did not contribute to inventive activity and that their work was insulated from technological progress, women inventors pursued profit opportunities and distributed patents in much the same way as their male counterparts whose patent rates responded to market incentives. Women in rural and frontier regions were especially inventive. A random sample of assignment contracts indicates that the rate at which women commercialized inventions kept pace with patenting. The evidence indicates that nineteenth-century women were active participants in the market for technology and suggests that the diffusion of household articles may have been more pervasive than previously thought.
Excerpt:
“Until recently, economic historians who addressed the relationship between women and technology limited their attention to the impact of technical changes on the labor-market participation of single women during industrialization. However, the role of women as producers and consumers of technology is still not well understood, for at least two reasons. First, scholars tend to pay little systematic attention to contributions that women themselves made to technological progress. Second, some historians use material from diaries, catalogs, and letters to argue that inventions made only a nominal impact on the lives of the vast majority of women who married and exited the labor market to become full-time housewives; ‘woman’s work’ was insulated from the widespread technological progress that increased productivity in the market economy. The proponents of this thesis contend that the diffusion of household inventions was slow or nonexistent, especially in rural areas. Strasser, for one, suggests that ‘American manufacturers offered little to ease the work of most households before 1900’ and that ‘mechanical cooking utensils existed in the second half of the nineteenth century, but few houses had them. Eggbeaters, cherry stoners, apple parers and corers, butter churns, meat choppers — all these and more were patented in large numbers. But mechanical devices rarely appear in lists of necessary equipment for nineteenth-century kitchens.’
Cowan and others argue that women did not benefit from technological change because even when innovations were adopted, they did not change amount of time spent on housework. However, this argument shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economic analysis; the ultimate objective of individuals and households is not necessarily to save time, but to consume more higher-quality commodities. Household innovations led to two separate effects: time reduction and lower prices for household goods at the margin. This lower marginal price serves to induce a substitution effect toward the innovation that may outweigh the importance of labor saving. Even if the duration of housework was unchanged, Cowan’s housewives undoubtedly would reveal preference for the adoption of the innovation, implying higher welfare. More systematic evidence concerning the inºuence of household inventions on the market would contribute greatly to our understanding of the welfare of women who worked at household tasks” (160–161).
“Not for Ornament” (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Autumn 2000) will be freely available from March 2nd to March 8th on the MIT Press website.
