Born: 1840, United States
Died: 1917
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Charlotte Odlum
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In the 1880s, activist Charlotte Smith convinced the U.S. Patent Office to compile an official, comprehensive list of women who had been granted patents. The list, collected by four Patent Office clerks and published in 1888, was deeply flawed—the clerks had spent 10 days compiling data from patentees whose names sounded female, which likely left many out and resulted in under-counting the total number, in addition to simply missing unmistakably feminine names and not listing all patents for women who had more than one. It’s also worth noting that the ones that did make the list were often for domestic use, while women’s inventions for military and industrial use were more likely to be overlooked. As recounted by the Smithsonian Institution, scholar Autumn Stanley “suspects that the clerk-compilers, upon finding a woman’s name associated with an industrial invention, simply assumed that it could not be true, and omitted these patents from the list. Through their incomplete compilation, the clerk-compilers of the LWP both reflected and reinforced the stereotype that women only invented in so-called domestic areas.” Almost 100 years later, Stanley did her own audit for the year 1876, finding 33 patents awarded to people with female names who were not included in the 1888 list. Because the list only included 124 women’s patents for that year, the ratio came out to at least one in five women being overlooked. If that ratio is consistent across the entire date range of 1790 to 1888, this means that the list of 5,535 women should actually exceed 7,000.