Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:05:56.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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: [email protected]

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)

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Gage, Matilda Joslyn, Woman as Inventor, Woman Suffrage Tracts, no. 1 (Fayetteville, NY: New York State Woman Suffrage Association, 1870)Google Scholar.

2 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Anthony, Susan B., Gage, Matilda Joslyn, Harper, Ida Husted, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols., (Rochester, NY: Charles Mann Press, 1881–1922; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Brammer, Leila R., Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 7, 1314Google Scholar; Mary E. Paddock Cory, “Matilda Joslyn Gage: Woman Suffrage Historian, 1852–1898,” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1995).

3 U.S. Const., amend. XIII (1865), amend. XIV (1868), amend. XV (1870). See also Free, Laura E., Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 DuBois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978; repr., with new preface, 1999)Google Scholar.

5 For convenience, I use “technology” in its contemporary sense, although Gage and her contemporaries did not employ the term. See Schatzberg, Eric, “‘Technik’ Comes to America: Changing Meanings of ‘Technology’ before 1930,” Technology and Culture 47 (July 2006): 486512CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Call of Convention,” Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention held at Worcester, Oct. 23rd and 24th, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), 5Google Scholar. See also Isenberg, Nancy, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3234Google Scholar.

7 “Call of Convention,” 4; Altschuler, Sari and Silva, Cristobal, “Early American Disability Studies,” Early American Literature 52 (Winter 2017): 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 14–15, 8182Google Scholar; Free, Suffrage Reconstructed, 49–50, 75–76, 99–101.

9 Ralls, J. R., The Negro Problem: An Essay on the Industrial, Political and Moral Aspects of the Negro Race in the Southern States (Atlanta, GA: James P. Harrison & Co., 1877), 16Google Scholar. See also Hinsley, Curtis M. Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 8889Google Scholar.

10 For Black women and men in the women's rights and suffrage movement, see Gordon, Ann D., ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 2499Google Scholar; Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Jones, Martha S., All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jones, Martha S., Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020)Google Scholar. (Because Vanguard was not yet in print when this article went to press, citations to specific portions of the book were not possible.) For the links between white supremacy and many white suffragist leaders, see for example Free, Suffrage Reconstructed, 133–61; Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Marilley, Suzanne M., Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 161–86Google Scholar. On the racial politics of female suffrage, see DuBois, Ellen Carol, Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 151–54, 190–92, 197–99, 252, 270–71Google Scholar.

11 “Resolutions of Business Committee,” Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention held at Worcester, 14, 16.

12 “Grand Demonstration of Petticoatdom at Worcester,” Boston Daily Mail, Oct. 25, 1850. Suhl, Yuri, Ernestine L. Rose and the Battle for Human Rights (New York: Reynal & Co., 1959), 37, 48, 59Google Scholar. For a different version of Rose's speech, reprinted from the New York Tribune, see Rose, Ernestine L., “Woman's Sphere,” in Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women's Rights Leader, ed. Doress-Worters, Paula (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2008), 8082Google Scholar.

13 Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose, 22; Kolmerten, Carol A., The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 7, 9Google Scholar.

14 For example, see Howe, Henry, Memoirs of the Most Eminent American Mechanics (New York: W. F. Peckham, 1840), 101–35, 156–87Google Scholar (reprinted in various editions, 1841–58). See also Cooper, Carolyn, “Myth, Rumor, and History: The Yankee Whittling Boy as Hero and Villain,” Technology and Culture 44 (Jan. 2003): 8286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig & Courier, Oct. 15, 1850.

16 1 Peter 3:1, 7 (King James Version). See Hamlin, Kimberly A., From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2556CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; enlarged ed., 1992), 27Google Scholar; Field, Corinne T., The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 “Women,” in Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, vol. 7 (Philosophical Dictionary Part 5), trans. Fleming, William F. (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901), 259Google Scholar.

19 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871)Google Scholar; Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution, 3, 5, 10–11, 167; and Newman, White Women's Rights, 22–55.

20 Russett, Cynthia E., Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11–12, 3139Google Scholar.

21 Clarke, Edward H., Sex In Education; or A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1873), 48Google Scholar. Some women did obtain training; see More, Ellen S., Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Rossiter, Margaret W., Women Scientists in America, Volume 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. And some addressed such arguments on their own terms; see Jacobi, Mary Putnam, The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1877)Google Scholar. See also the discussion in Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution, 57–93.

22 Lockwood, Mary Smith, Yesterdays in Washington, 2 vols. (Rosslyn, VA: Commonwealth Co., 1915), 2:220Google Scholar.

23 Merritt, Deborah J., “Hypatia in the Patent Office: Women Inventors and the Law, 1865–1900,” American Journal of Legal History 35 (July 1991): 289303CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pilato, Denise E., The Retrieval of a Legacy: Nineteenth-Century American Women Inventors (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 27Google Scholar.

24 “Patent Applications Filed and Patents Issued, by Type and by Patentee: 1790 to 1957” in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,1960), 607–08.

25 Kahn, B. Zorina, “‘Not for Ornament’: Patenting Activity by Nineteenth-Century Women Inventors,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (Autumn 2000): 165–66Google Scholar; Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose, 9.

26 Croly, Jane C., Thrown on Her Own Resources, or What Girls Can Do (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1891), 6768Google Scholar; Rayne, Martha Louise, What Can a Woman Do; or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World (Detroit: F. B. Dickerson & Co., 1885), 115–19Google Scholar. See also Gertrude Bustill Mossell (writing as Mrs. N. F. Mossell), The Work of the Afro-American Woman (Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson Co., 1908; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 25Google Scholar.

27 Khan, B. Zorina, Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53, 5556Google Scholar.

28 Robertson, Charles J., Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark (London: Scala Publishers, 2006), 18, 29–30, 3334Google Scholar; Evelyn, Douglas, “Exhibiting America: The Patent Office as Cultural Artefact,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3 (Summer 1989): 26, 2933CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Senate Report Accompanying Senate Bill No. 239, 24th Cong., 1st sess. (Apr. 28, 1836). For the report's distribution, and a reprint, see “1836 Senate Committee Report,” Journal of the Patent Office Society 18 (Dec. 1936): 853–63.

30 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 5–7, 46–42; Free, Suffrage Reconstructed, 11–32; Welke, Barbara Young, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 610CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood, 53–60.

31 Gage, Woman as Inventor, 6. Although this claim remains unproven, Greene, through her second husband, invested in Whitney's gin. Lakwete, Angela, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 56, 66Google Scholar.

32 Gage, Woman as Inventor, 8, 10–11, 16.

33 MacDonald, Anne L., Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 6Google Scholar (citing 1858 letter to sister-in-law).

34 Gage, Woman as Inventor, 21.

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.

44 Rydell, Robert W., All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10Google Scholar; Virginia Grant Darney, “Women and World's Fairs: American International Expositions, 1876–1904” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1982), 12–64; Mary Francis Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Women's Sphere: Women's Work and Culture at the World's Fairs of 1876, 1893 and 1904” (PhD diss., New York University, 1989), 23–195.

45 Gillespie, Elizabeth D., A Book of Remembrance (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), 282Google Scholar; Darney, “Women and World's Fairs,” 15–16.

46 Warner, Deborah J., “Women Inventors at the Centennial” in Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History, An Anthology, ed. Trescott, Martha (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979), 102, 110–19Google Scholar; Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Women's Sphere,” 447–52, 459–62 (seventy-eight inventions). See also Cordato, Mary Frances, “Toward a New Century: Women and the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (Jan. 1983): 113–35Google Scholar.

47 Warner, “Women Inventors at the Centennial,” 103; Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Women's Sphere,” 463; Gillespie, A Book of Remembrance, 289.

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.

51 Brammer, Excluded from Suffrage History, 10; Darney, “Women and World's Fairs,” 47–50; Declaration and Protest, July 4, 1876, Matilda Joslyn Gage Papers, Published writings, 1867–1886, MC 377, folder 44, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:459715867$51i (accessed July 5, 2020).

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.

53 Hanaford, Phebe A., Daughters of America, or, Women of the Century (Augusta, ME: True and Company, 1882), 641Google Scholar; Tetrault, Lisa M., “A Paper Trail: Piecing Together the Life of Phebe Hanaford,” Historic Nantucket 51 (Fall 2002): 69Google Scholar.

54 “Women Inventors,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 27, 1869.

55 Khan, “‘Not for Ornament,’” 176–77.

56 “Woman's Pavilion,” The New Century for Woman (newspaper published by Woman's Centennial Committee, Philadelphia), Aug. 19, 1876, no. 15, 115.

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.

59 Charlotte Smith, “Why I Became Interested in Woman Inventors,” The Woman Inventor, Apr. 1890; Stanley, Autumn, Raising More Hell and Fewer Dahlias: The Public Life of Charlotte Smith, 1840–1917 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009), 9–11, 48Google Scholar.

60 Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 3:305.

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).

62 Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Woman as an Inventor,” North American Review (Boston), May 1883, 484–86, 488.

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

64 Tarbell, Ida M., “Women as Inventors,” The Chautauquan 7 (Mar. 1887): 355Google Scholar.

65 “Women as Inventors,” Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig & Courier, Apr. 20, 1887. Also see “Invented by Women,” Atchison (Kansas) Daily Champion, June 22, 1888; Wisconsin State Register (Portage, WI), June 30, 1888.

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.

69 Darney, “Women and World's Fairs,” 89.

70 Weimann, Jeanne Madeline, The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981), 393Google Scholar (quoting “Preliminary Prospectus”). For Board members, ibid., 27–28, 39–43, 47–48; and Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Women's Sphere,” 204–24.

71 Letter from Bertha Palmer to Mary Lockwood, Aug. 10, 1891, Board of Lady Managers President's Letterbook, vol. 10, Board of Lady Managers Records, World's Columbian Exposition Collection, MSS lot W, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL. See also Weimann, The Fair Women, 9–10, 13, 17–19, 50, 428–29.

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

73 Nancy Huston Banks, “Women's Inventions at the World's Fair,” Harper's Bazaar, Sept. 2, 1893, 712; Pilato, The Retrieval of a Legacy, 171n75; Pilato, Denise E., “Illumination or Illusion: Women Inventors at the 1893 World's Columbian Fair,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 109 (Winter 2016): 374, 389Google Scholar.

74 “In the Grand Stand: People of All Nations Fraternize with Each Other,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1893.

75 “Career of Boston Woman Inventor,” Boston Daily Globe, Apr. 6, 1913.

76 “Women as Inventors: The American Woman in Action – XVII,” Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Apr. 1900, 13–19; “Rich Women Inventors,” Boston Daily Globe, Nov. 12, 1899; “Clever Women Inventors,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 19, 1899. See also T. Hart Anderson, “Women Inventors,” Godey's Magazine (Philadelphia), Jan. 1896, 55–58.

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).

79 Florence King, “Are Women Inventive?,” Woman Citizen, July 3, 1920; “King, Florence Embrey, 1870–1924,” Women's Legal History Biography Project, https://perma.cc/85E3-U2VU (accessed June 25, 2020).

80 Frye, Brian L., “Invention of a Slave,” Syracuse Law Review 68 (Winter 2018): 181–82Google Scholar.

81 Mossell, Work of the Afro-American Woman, 25. See also Merritt, “Hypatia in the Patent Office,” 303–05; Sluby, Patricia Carter, The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 126–28Google Scholar.

82 Sluby, Inventive Spirit, 128.

83 Mossell, Work of the Afro-American Woman, 25; Joanne Braxton, “Introduction,” Work of the Afro-American Woman, xxvii–xxviii; Sluby, Inventive Spirit, 128.

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).

88 Baker, Henry E., “The Negro as an Inventor” in Twentieth Century Negro Literature, or A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro, ed. Culp, Daniel W. (Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1902), 405Google Scholar; and Baker, The Colored Inventor, 12.

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.

90 Foner, Phillip S., “Black Participation in the Centennial of 1876,” Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 39 (Winter 1978): 283–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Pfeffer, Southern Ladies and Suffragists, 14, 72–73.

92 Wright, “The Negro as Inventor,” 409.

93 Garb, Margaret, Freedom's Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 82116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Massa, Ann, “Black Women in the ‘White City,’Journal of American Studies 8 (Dec. 1974): 319–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darney, “Women and World's Fairs,” 95–99. Cf. Mossell, Work of Afro-American Woman, 21 (noting five African American women on state committees).

94 Wells, Ida B., ed., The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893)Google Scholar; Massa, “Black Women in the ‘White City,’” 336; Wilson, Mabel O., Negro Buildings: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 5051CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 I. Garland Penn, “The Progress of the Afro-American Since Emancipation” in Wells, The Reason Why, 54–57.

96 Sluby, Inventive Spirit, 129; Massa, “Black Women in the ‘White City,’” 335.

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.

101 Domosh, Mona, “A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, Race, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition,” Cultural Geographies 9 (Apr. 2002): 187–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oldenziel, Ruth, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 3839Google Scholar; Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging, 134–36.

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.