Surveys the lives and work of such innovative women as Grace Hopper, Fannie Farmer, C. J. Walker, and Stephanie Kwolek.

In American Women Inventors, author Carole Ann Camp explores the lives, challenges, and discoveries of some of the most prominent female inventors in the United States. Biographies include Madam C. J. Walker, Lillian Gilbreth, Beulah Henry, Katherine Burr Blodgett, Gertrude B. Elion, Stephanie Louise Kwolek, Edith Flanigen, Ellen Ochoa, Elizabeth Lee Hazen, and Rachel Fuller Brown. Book jacket.

Each volume presents brief accounts of five women and their inventions, including Sybilla Masters, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Anderson, and Nancy Perkins.

"Written with clarity and a lively eye both for detail and for the progress of feminism in the United States." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In this fascinating study of American women inventors, historian Anne Macdonald shows how creative, resourceful, and entrepreneurial women helped to shatter the ancient stereotypes of mechanically inept womanhood. In presenting their stories, Anne Macdonald's thorough research in patent archives and her engaging use of period magazine, journals, lectures, records from major fairs and expositions, and interviews, have made her book nothing less than an overall history of the women's movement in America.

An illustrated history of the evolution of British women's cycle wear. The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women's liberation. Less noted is another critical technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives—cycle wear. This illustrated account of women's cycle wear from Goldsmiths Press brings together Victorian engineering and radical feminist invention to supply a missing chapter in the history of feminism. Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were unworkable, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling in pedals. Yet wearing “rational” cycle wear could provoke verbal and sometimes physical abuse from those threatened by newly mobile women. Seeking a solution, pioneering women not only imagined, made, and wore radical new forms of cycle wear but also patented their inventive designs. The most remarkable of these were convertible costumes that enabled wearers to transform ordinary clothing into cycle wear. Drawing on in-depth archival research and inventive practice, Kat Jungnickel brings to life in rich detail the little-known stories of six inventors of the 1890s. Alice Bygrave, a dressmaker of Brixton, registered four patents for a skirt with a dual pulley system built into its seams. Julia Gill, a court dressmaker of Haverstock Hill, patented a skirt that drew material up the waist using a mechanism of rings or eyelets. Mary and Sarah Pease, sisters from York, patented a skirt that could be quickly converted into a fashionable high-collar cape. Henrietta Müller, a women's rights activist of Maidenhead, patented a three-part cycling suit with a concealed system of loops and buttons to elevate the skirt. And Mary Ann Ward, a gentlewoman of Bristol, patented the “Hyde Park Safety Skirt,” which gathered fabric at intervals using a series of side buttons on the skirt. Their unique contributions to cycling's past continue to shape urban life for contemporary mobile women.

This book presents ten gifted women from diverse eras and backgrounds whose inventions have had a profound impact on the way we live.

Celebrates the achievements of women inventors from the first patent issued in 1809 to the Nobel Prize Laureate in 1991.