Welcome to part two of my Erased Women in STEM series, in honour of Science Literacy Week! For more details on the lives, achievements, and erasure of any of these women, check out my children’s book THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY.
If you’re just joining me, here’s the first post in this series:
Rosalind Franklin: DNA Decoder (1920-1958)
And now: Margaret E. Knight
You might have noticed the word “about,” up there in front of her birth year. Every biographical source on Margaret E. Knight gives her birth year as 1838, EXCEPT for Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America, by Anne L. MacDonald. In a footnote (always read the footnotes!) MacDonald writes:
Biographical material in Notable American Women states that Knight was born February 14, 1838, which would have made her thirty-two at the time of the [lawsuit] in the fall of 1870, but in her deposition, she gave her age as thirty-three.
Like MacDonald, I’m inclined to believe that Margaret knew how old she was… which means she had to have been born in 1837. But, since I wasn’t able to get my hands on an original copy of this deposition, and had to rely on MacDonald to have reported the data correctly, I wasn’t 100 percent positive. That’s why I covered my bases with “about 1837.”
Now to more important matters – like that lawsuit!
Like Rosalind Franklin, Margaret E. Knight fell victim to the “a man got credit” mechanism of erasure. Well, almost! When Charles F. Annan received a patent for a paper-bag-making machine that Margaret had invented, she refused to go down without a fight. Unusually for a woman in her time, Margaret had enough money to challenge ownership of the patent in court. The judge had a hard time believing that Margaret—a mere woman—could understand how machines work, much less invent one. But Margaret overwhelmed him with evidence. She even let him read her diary, in private so she wouldn’t be embarrassed, which is so relatable I can’t even.
Margaret won back the rights to her paper bag machine, and embarked on a long career as a professional inventor. But success doesn’t always lead to recognition. As Denise E. Pilato wrote in her 1998 PhD thesis about 19th century American woman inventors:
Despite the success of several women inventors, their status was never recognized in the same light as their male counterparts. A professional woman inventor did not fit the mold of the ideal woman. She was generally single and without children or widowed with dependent children. She invented for her livelihood. Her inventions were often mechanical, mostly commercial, and achieved a standard of technical sophistication with manufacturing potential. She rarely received the same kind of public recognition for her accomplishments as did male inventors. She was considered an oddity and made to feel deviant for pursuing unnatural priorities even if her inventions were domestic.
The mismatch between cultural ideals of womanhood and what women were actually getting up to is another major mechanism of erasure. Read all about it in THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY, coming this fall from Kids Can Press!
Tomorrow: Ellen Eglin, a Black inventor working at the same time as Margaret.
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