Customer Reviews

Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America

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This book does explore contributions by women to American engineering and invention, but it seems to focus on women as wives and helpers of inventors and/or on women who invented "feminine" things like gadgets for sewing and cooking. Few of the women profiled seemed to work in the "hard" sciences.

The prose is not terribly exciting or energetic. I would recommend this book to readers interested in feminism or invention, but I would encourage them to find other sources as well.

One of my students needed this book for a research project on Madeline Joslyn Gage and her pamphlet titled "Woman as Inventor." This book is a tremendous resource on that pamphlet but also many women inventors, innovators and engineers who are often overlooked, ignored or completely disregarded in other books and resources. Macdonald's analysis is well written and thorough. A must read for anybody interested in learning more about the real contribution women made to the ingenuity of America.

This book, Feminine Ingenuity, is a real page-turner and extremely hard to put down. In the 1800s, girls were raised to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. Apparently, the fathers and husbands had absolute power over women, especially as women could not own property and even had no claim to her children in the case of divorce. Some received no schooling or very little as it wouldn't be needed. It was considered to be disgraceful and "unfeminine" if a woman found a better way to do something and had the defiant nerve to actually want to patent her idea. In her circle of friends, inventing made a woman 'different' and not to be associated with her. At the top of the food chain, patent attorneys charged high fees and the Patent Office was not friendly to women who happened to be creative and smart. When the Womens Suffrage Movement arrived, even they waffled between helping and hindering women inventors. This book lays out what women did invent despite the hindrance of Victorian men. If you like windshield wipers, Kevlar, brown paper bags, a Snugli for holding your baby, hot air ballooning, your dishwasher, hang gliding, Nystatin powder for fungal infections, your electric hot water heater, well-fitting bras, fire escapes, and alphabet blocks for the kids, thank a woman. This book is a keeper.