WOMEN AS INVENTORS 34*9 



methods and processes many of them of exceeding value 

 and for hundreds of others of a similar nature, have been 

 issued to women during recent years. And the activity 

 of the fair inventors, far from abating, is becoming daily 

 more pronounced, and promises to reward their efforts with 

 far greater triumphs. Indeed, women are becoming so 

 active in the numerous fields of invention even in such 

 unlikely ones as metallurgy and civil, mechanical and elec- 

 trical engineering that they bid fair to rival men in what 

 they have long regarded as their peculiar specialty. 



In 1892 a woman in New York was granted two patents, 

 one for a process of malting beer and the other for hooping 

 malt liquors. These inventions, however, are not so for- 

 eign to the avocation of woman as they at first appear. 

 For, if we may believe the teachings of ethnology and pre- 

 historic archaeology in this matter, women were the first 

 brewers. The one, therefore, who two decades ago secured 

 the two patents just mentioned was but taking up anew 

 an occupation in which her sex furnished the first inven- 

 tion many thousand years ago. 



An instructive fact touching woman's inventive achieve- 

 ments is that her fullest success is coincident with her 

 enlarged opportunities for education, and began with the 

 breaking down of the prejudices which so long existed 

 against her having anything to do with the development of 

 the mechanical or industrial arts. When one recollects 

 that the public schools of Boston, established in 1642, were 

 not open to girls until a century and a half later, and then 

 only for the most elementary branches and for but one- 

 half the year ; and that girls did not have the benefit of a 

 high school education in the center of New England cul- 

 ture until 1852 ; and when one furthermore recalls the atti- 

 tude of the general public toward women and girls ex- 

 tending their activities beyond the nursery and the kitchen, 

 it is easy to understand that there was not much encourage- 



