And despite innovations like the typewriter and telephone giving women new career opportunities, society still saw them as having little to contribute to the world of ideas. After all, it would be 17 more years before women got the right to vote. In 1903, a single woman marching herself into the Patent Office was a pretty brazen act. She was in her 30s when she applied for and was granted a patent ( #748,626) for The Landlord’s Game, becoming one of the fewer than 1% of female patent applicants at the time.
Magie called her game The Landlord’s Game. At the turn of the 20th century, the increasing popularity of board games provided that outlet. But most of her off time was spent drawing, rethinking and tweaking a board game she invented to teach and promote George’s economic theory to a wider audience.
She wrote poetry, and wrote and performed comedy routines in Washington’s budding theater scene. While it was a respectable position for a woman, Magie struggled to find an outlet for her creativity. She put her strong work ethic to work as a stenographer and typist in Washington’s Dead Letter Office, researching and locating intended recipients and redirecting America’s undeliverable mail and packages. She didn’t marry until what was then considered the advanced age of 44, when she wed businessman Albert Phillips, 10 years her senior. Head of her own household, she had saved enough to buy her own home on several acres in Washington, DC - a home she shared with a male actor who paid rent and a Black female servant. She was a spinster who supported herself as a stenographer and, later, a newspaper reporter. If there’s one thing to be said about Elizabeth Magie, it’s that she was “not a woman of her time.” She had pale skin and striking brows, a strong jawline and an even stronger work ethic.
0 kommentar(er)
