The "Woman Inventor" as a Political Tool of Female Suffragists: Patents, Invention, and Civil Rights in the 19th-Century United States

After the Patent Act of 1790, patents played an important social and political role in the formation of American nationhood and citizenship. Part of a larger book project, this paper demonstrates how nineteenth-century American women mobilized patents granted to women as justification for civil rights claims. It identifies the creation of the “woman inventor” as a cultural trope and political weapon of resistance.

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