Monopoly

So we are going to start with a person who is very, very important to this story.

And we're going to talk a little bit about her and her background.

So Elizabeth J. Maggie is born on May 9th, 1866 in Malcolm, Illinois, to Mary Jane and James K. Maggie.

Her father is a newspaper editor and an abolitionist, and I thought this was really interesting.

He actually travels around Illinois with Abraham Lincoln, like, reporting on him during the very, very famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Right.

Which is how Lincoln lost his seat in the Senate to Stephen Douglas.

So I just thought that was a very interesting little tidbit that her father was involved in all of that.

Um, and we're not getting into that much of her childhood and all that kind of stuff, because the episode's not really about her, it's only kind of about her.

Um, so in the early 1880s, she moves, uh, to, like, the DMV, like, the DC, Maryland area.

Yeah.

And she has a lot of different jobs.

She works as a stenographer and a typist at the Dead Letter office.

She is also a short story and poetry writer.

She acts a little bit and writes some comedy.

She does a lot of odd jobs kind of a thing.

Sure.

This also was really interesting to me.

At the age of 26, Lizzie receives a patent for her invention that made the typewriting process easier by allowing the papers to go through the rollers more easily.

So she's also like kind of an engineer.

She tinkers.

That's

cool.

Yeah.

What's interesting about this is that around this time, women are credited with less than 1% of all patents in the United