Empowering Innovators: Women's Impact on Household

Women inventors of household inventions, however, were not isolated from the market. The data suggests that patentees were motivated by market incentives.

Almost 500 of them patented more than one discovery, and many succeeded in gaining income from their inventions. Women patented in the same regions as general patentees, and, overall, their efforts were greater in regions where markets (as shown by per capita income) were expanding. Inventive activity surged in the second half of the nineteenth century with the efforts of women to devise and promote patented inventions with the objective of obtaining “fair compensation.”

Researchers have argued that “woman’s work” was insulated from the widespread technological progress of the nineteenth century, remaining largely unchanged by innovation. Despite the evidence from such limited sources as diaries, catalogs, and letters, however, the diffusion of household inventions was hardly slow, let alone nonexistent.

Although the existence of a patent does not indicate whether an invention ever became a commercial success, the systematic data in this study indicate that women inventors — like inventors in general — are expected to benefit from their investments in inventive activity. Female patentees who specialized in household inventions were exercising a comparative advantage in responding to market demand, and many of their domestic improvements had commercial success.

Sources such as assignment contracts and the decadal census show the existence of establishments devoted to producing similar articles. Although more research needs to be undertaken, a not unreasonable inference is that the changes in technology that transformed the world outside the home may have also been instrumental in transforming the household during the postbellum period.

The literature is ambivalent about the role of technological change in the lives of frontier and rural women in this arena.

Some have argued that men who were prompt to purchase innovations for the farm were resistant to improvements in the home, and that women did not have sufficient power to counter their wishes. “Pessimists” also assert that technological change led to a “deskilling” of women’s work and the devaluation of women’s contributions to the household.

Other studies, however, point to the importance of women’s innovations in such key industries as dairy farming and food preservation, and to changes in nature (if not the time-consuming aspect) of housework.
Although the evidence at hand cannot directly address this complex issue, the results reported herein imply a more optimistic view about the role of rural women as creators and users of innovations. the distribution of women’s patenting was far more concentrated in rural areas than it was for men, especially in frontier states. Moreover, there appears to have been a ready market for women’s inventions.

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