Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents

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.