This goes out to all the ladies who've ever had their ideas mansplained back to them.


The man who invented Monopoly did not invent Monopoly. Charles Darrow made millions off the game that he sold to Parker Brothers ― 30 years after a woman named Elizabeth Magie created it.

It’s a tale as old as time: A man took credit for a woman’s idea.

We’ve seen this theme play out through history, with women’s work being erased from the labor movement, civil rights movements, and over and over again in science.

In the spirit of unearthing the “hidden figures” whose stories often go untold, we’re highlighting remarkable women who, despite their contributions, were sidelined by men.

Happy Women’s History Month!


1. 1868: Margaret Knight invented the paper bag machine.

In 1868, while Margaret Knight was working at the Columbia Paper Bag Company, she began thinking about the possibility of a machine that could create flat-bottomed bags, one that would be much faster than the slow process of manually assembling them.

Within a few months, she created a working model and took it to a local shop to refine her machine. According to ASME, she moved to Boston to work with two machinists on it.

A man named Charles Anan came by her shop to examine Knight’s machine. When she went to file a patent, her application was rejected because one had already been given to Anan.

Knight sued and won.


2. 1900s: Alice Guy was the first female film director and first female studio owner.

Alice Guy made over 100 films in the early 1900s before marrying the manager of the production studio she worked for, a man named Herbert Blaché. She became the first female film studio owner opening Solax Studios in 1910.

According to Broadly, Guy was reversing gender roles on screen decades before the term “gender role” entered the lexicon. In one film, she imagined “a world in which women flourished in traditionally male roles while men writhed under oppression.”

Ironically, her name would eventually be erased and her husband would get the credit for her visionary work in film. He opened a studio after she did, convinced her to merge companies and to let his name be at the forefront.

According to Broadly: "In 1920, author Carolyn Lowrey published The First One Hundred Noted Men and Women of the Screen and dedicated a page to Herbert Blaché's legacy, making no mention of Guy. Lowrey did so kindly mention a few of her films — she just falsely credited them to Blaché."


3.  1903: Elizabeth Magie invented Monopoly.

ccording to the New York Times, secretary and stenographer Elizabeth Magie was outspoken politically and  “lived a highly unusual life” because she supported herself and didn’t get married until she was 44.

In 1903, she designed a game called “Landlord’s Game” to protest “big monopolists” like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

More than three decades later, a man named Charles Darrow claimed a “version of it as his own,” and sold his game to Parker Brothers. Darrow made millions for the game we know today as Monopoly, while Magie’s creation earned her around $500.


4. 1930s: Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was acting director of the Institute for Chemistry. She eventually had to flee, but kept in touch with chemist Otto Hahn. Letters between the two of them show that they discovered nuclear fission together in the 1930s.

According to Dr. Chris Padgett, a history professor at American River College, Meitner was denied proper credit due because she was Jewish and a refugee. “Hahn, who stayed loyal to the Nazis, later won the Nobel Prize for this work, but refused to give Meitner credit,” he said.

The Berkeley Nuclear Research Center calls Meitner’s story “one of the most glaring examples of women's scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee.”

5.  1900s: Nettie M. Stevens discovered that a man's sperm determines the sex of a child.

In the first decade of the 1900s, scientist Nettie M. Stevens found that male sperm carried both X and Y chromosomes, while women only carried X chromosomes in their eggs, which lead her to the conclusion that a baby’s sex is determined by the male sperm.

Another scientist named Edmund Beecher Wilson independently came to the same conclusion at around the same time as Stevens, and submitted his paper to The Journal of Experimental Zoology 10 days before she did. Wilson did include a footnote that he was aware of Stevens’ findings.

According to a journal article by physicist and historian Stephen G. Brush, “The scientific and chronological relation between their contributions has rarely been specified, and the role of Stevens, who died in 1912 before she could attain a reputation comparable to that of Wilson, has sometimes been forgotten.”

10. 1960s: Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to observe radio pulsars.

As a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell Burnell helped Anthony Hewish and Martin Ryle construct a radio telescope to monitor quasars (a massive and extremely remote celestial object). It was Burnell’s job to analyze the data from it.

According to Biography.com: “After spending endless hours poring over the charts, she noticed some anomalies that didn’t fit with the patterns produced by quasars and called them to Hewish’s attention... Over the ensuing months, the team systematically eliminated all possible sources of the radio pulses — which they affectionately labeled Little Green Men, in reference to their potentially artificial origins — until they were able to deduce that they were made by neutron stars, fast-spinning collapsed stars too small to form black holes.”

In 1974, Hewish and Ryle received the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery.


11.  1963: Anna Arnold Hedgeman organized the March on Washington.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the only woman on the organizing committee for the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

But according to Bowdoin College professor Jennifer Scanlon, who authored a biography about Hedgemen, the civil rights leader was “hidden, concealed, out of sight” by the men around her. Not only did Hedgemen galvanize many different groups of people to participate in the march, she organized transportation and made sure attendees had food and water. 

Says Scanlon: “She also demanded that her male colleagues provide women a speaking voice during the march, but as in other things relating to gender, the men proved unrelenting in their sexism.”

A group of leaders who organized the March are often referred to as the “Big Six.” Of course, Hedgemen (or any other woman, for that matter) was not included in that group. 

Hedgeman is shown above with her hands on the map of the mall, posing with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, two of the men among the “Big Six” organizers of the March.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/11-women-who-did-groundbreaking-things-th...

But wait! There's more:


Candace Pert, opioid receptor: When Pert, then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, protested that her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder, had received an award for her discovery of the receptor allows opiates to lock into the brain, Snyder's response was curt: "That's how the game is played." Pert protested in a formal letter to the award committee ("As a graduate student who played a key role in initiating the research and following it up") and then, having thoroughly revolutionized neuroscience, got back to work. She was working toward a more effective treatment of Alzheimer's when she died in September.

Ada Lovelace, computer programming: The daughter of Lord Byron, Lovelace was steered toward math by her mother, who feared her daughter would follow in her father’s "mad, bad, and dangerous" literary footsteps. Luckily, she loved the subject, and remained devoted throughout her brief life—she died in 1852 at age 36, soon after an ambitious, proto-Moneyball attempt to beat the odds at horse racing by developing mathematical models to help place her bets.

When she was barely 20, she started collaborating with the inventor Charles Babbage at the University of London on his "Analytical Engine," an early model of a computer. In 1843, she added extensive notes of her own to a paper on Babbage's machine, detailing how the Engine could be fed step-by-step instructions to do complicated math, and trained to work not only with numbers but also words and symbols "to compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

The notes are considered the first descriptions of what we now call algorithms and computer programming, and for decades, historians have argued over whether Lovelace came up with them herself, or Babbage was somehow the real author. "Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the 'Notes' than trouble," writes one historian, and a "manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents." But Babbage's own memoir suggests she deserved credit for the "the algebraic working out of the different problems," and more recently she's been honored with, among other things, a British medal of honor, a Google Doodle, a tunnel boring machine in London, and her own annual celebration. In 2011, the Ada Initiative was founded to help promote women in computer science and open-source technology.

mothra wrote on Mar 25^th, 2017 at 11:29pm:


Or other men. Not everyone gets the credit for their work, just because some women didn't get credit is not a reason for a whine.

There are many renowned women who got credit for what they did. Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie come to mind.

rhino wrote on Mar 25^th, 2017 at 11:34pm:


That was kinda funny but was it necessary?

mothra wrote on Mar 25^th, 2017 at 11:39pm:


What about the female mathematicians who put man on the moon or the code breakers in WW2?

Many people are overlooked in life and history. Men and women.

Setanta wrote on Mar 25^th, 2017 at 11:41pm:


Who's denying it?

Yet women were systematically overlooked by virtue of being women.