Patents

How it started

Congress passed the Patent Act in 1790, giving any citizen the right to apply for a patent on an invention. The law never mentioned gender at all. On paper, it was already equal.1

When the law caught up

In 1809, Mary KiesConnecticut inventor, already married to her second husband when she patented a technique of weaving straw with silk thread. became the first woman to receive a U.S. patent in her own name. She was already married at the time,2 which makes it the exception rather than the rule: under covertureThe legal doctrine that a married woman’s property, earnings, and legal identity belonged to her husband, not to her., an invention usually got credited to a husband instead. She wasn’t an exception because the law protected her, the Patent Act’s gender-neutral text didn’t actually override coverture. Kies’s patent is genuinely anomalous; no documented reason explains why coverture didn’t reach her case the way it reached others. That’s exactly what happened to Sybilla MastersColonial-era inventor. Devised a new method for milling corn; her patent was issued to her husband instead of her. nearly a century earlier, in 1715, she’d invented a new method for milling corn, but the patent had to be issued to her husband Thomas instead of her.3

Starting with Mississippi in 1839 and gaining real momentum when New York passed its own version in 1848, states began dismantling coverture piece by piece, restoring married women’s right to hold property, wages, and patents in their own name. West Virginia’s version spelled it out directly: a married woman could “hold a patent for an invention, as if she were unmarried.”4

It didn’t happen everywhere at once. Most states had passed some version of the law by 1920, eight decades after Mississippi’s first one, and that pace wasn’t incidental: researchers who’ve studied the actual patent records found women’s filings jumped specifically in the states that reformed first.5