Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the gender politics of historic design patenting as a form of counting and of being counted.

Paper long abstract:

"It is one of those numerous generalisations about feminine capacity which are accepted without much consideration - that women are not inventors" (The Queen: the Lady's Newspaper, 18 Jan, 1896, p104). Women have always had ideas worthy of being patented. Their ideas were counted but often by others; their husbands, brothers and fathers. This paper explores the gender politics of patenting as a form of counting and of being counted. It focuses on a shift that occurred in the late nineteenth century when women began to be socially and politically encouraged to leverage the patenting system to claim ideas and along with them, their rights to citizenship in an industrial age. In the 1870s the US Patent Act enabled anyone, male or female, to legally register inventions and in 1883 new British legislation with lower fees and reduction in red tape saw a significant increase in patents by women, predominantly for improvements to clothing related to cycling. This emerging design culture represented a feminist desire for a more engaged public life and cycling became viewed not only as a means of physically getting somewhere but of forging new paths into economic and political worlds. As such female patentees and their inventive new forms of mobility dress provide an insightful lens into the metrics of what and who counts at different times.