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In September 2019, the toy and game giant Hasbro struck a blow in the battle over women's rights. Although it's not quite clear which side they were on. They published Ms. Monopoly, putting a new spin on their classic board game. The tagline for this new version was "The first game where women make more than men".
They're not kidding. Female players start the game with more Monopoly money than male players. And they get $240 each time they pass Go, rather than the traditional $200 for the boys. Why, exactly, is not clear. Some sort of joke? It wasn't even a consistent joke. Some of the Chance and Community Chest cards paid out more cash to male players. So what is the message? Women have been unfairly treated?
Women need help to win? We don't actually know what feminism means? There is, however, one feature of the game that's hard to criticise. Instead of buying properties from around Atlantic City as in the classic game, players invest in inventions that were developed by women. Such as Marion Donovan, the inventor of the leak-proof diaper. Anna Connolly, the inventor of the external fire escape.
and Hedy Lamarr, the film star who in the 1940s co-invented frequency hopping radio transmissions, a precursor to today's Wi-Fi. In Ms Monopoly, each square represents one of these inventions. For example, instead of buying the prestige property Boardwalk, you could invest in chocolate chip cookies, invented by Ruth Wakefield.
And it's hard to argue with the sentiments expressed in Hasbro's advertisement for Ms Monopoly, which begins with the simple text: "Women hold just 10% of all patented inventions." The Ms Monopoly game was widely derided as a confusing mass of mixed messages. But the Ms Monopoly advert asks a simple, powerful question:
Isn't it time that the inventiveness of women was finally acknowledged and rewarded? Well, isn't it? I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. You may be familiar with the traditional story about the origins of Monopoly.
I remember reading it myself as a child, which isn't surprising since the story itself was, for decades, included in every game box. The story goes as follows. In 1933, the bleakest depths of the Great Depression, an unemployed steam radiator repairman from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow was struck with an idea to create a new board game about property trading.
It was an act of desperation, because Darrow had no money and a family to feed. But it was also an act of inspiration, since the game sprang fully formed from the brow of its creator. Darrow drew out the game board on a sheet of oilcloth. The board featured the familiar street names of Atlantic City, where Darrow once enjoyed taking his wife and children on vacation.
It was a nostalgic decision, aimed at cheering up a family that had fallen on hard times. The Darrows loved the game. Suspecting that he'd created something valuable, Charles Darrow tried to interest the big board game distributors. Milton Bradley turned him down. So did Parker Brothers. However, they later reconsidered when they saw how popular Darrow's homemade sets were. With the backing of Parker Brothers,
Monopoly became a smash hit. Charles Darrow's fortune was assured, as was his reputation as the creator of one of the most successful games in the world. But as the journalist and historian Mary Pilon says in her book, The Monopolists, the story wasn't exactly true. That's putting it kindly. Because as Pilon's book makes perfectly clear, the story I read in my game box
isn't true at all. The game of Monopoly did not come to Charles Darrow in a flash of inspiration. It was taught to him by his friends, Charles and Olive Todd in 1932. The Todds played on a board with Go, Jail, Free Parking and Go to Jail at the Four Corners with Chance and Community Chest with The Electric Company and The Waterworks and street names from around Atlantic City.
When drawing up his Monopoly board, Charles Todd even made a mistake in the spelling of Marvin Gardens, swapping in an "i" to become Marvin Gardens. Charles Darrow's Monopoly board would later use not only the same squares, in the same configuration, with the same deed values, it would even repeat the same spelling error. After several evenings pleasantly whiled away with the game,
"Say, Todd, would you mind lending me a copy of the rules of that game?" "Well, Darrow, I don't know. I've never written them down. Why do you want them?" "I'd love to teach it to others. I want to make sure I get it right." Charles Todd was a little puzzled, but he obliged his friend. Soon after, to Todd's irritation, Darrow started avoiding him. He'd crossed the street when the Todds were coming the other way.
Then came the blockbuster success of Monopoly. With sparky graphics that Charles Darrow had begged free of charge from another friend, the cartoonist Franklin Alexander, journalists repeated the rags-to-riches yarn that Darrow was spinning. Darrow's former friends, Charles and Olive Todd, were outraged. But not because they felt their idea had been stolen.
They knew all along that Monopoly had never belonged to them in the first place. They had been taught the game by their friends, the brothers Jesse and Eugene Rayford. Jesse and Eugene had been the ones who named squares on the board after areas in Atlantic City. But they hadn't invented Monopoly either. They'd adapted a version they'd been taught by Ruth Hoskins, who was a trainee school teacher. So did Ruth Hoskins invent the game?
No, it was circulating widely in the 1920s. It was even popular in economics departments. One influential player, Scott Nearing, was a socialist economics professor at the Wharton School, who used a version of the game to teach the evils of corporate monopolies. This game was called Monopoly, and the square board had plenty of recognisable elements, with 40 spaces including chance, jail, go to jail and numerous properties.
But there were two ways to play the game. It could be played competitively, as players tried to monopolise groups of property and bankrupt their opponents. Or it could be played cooperatively, with resources paid into the public purse, utilities supplying services for free, and each player's resources growing over time. The cooperative game was, of course, very dull.
But monopoly wasn't invented at the Wharton School. Professor Scott Nearing learned it in the utopian community called Arden, in Delaware. Arden had been founded in 1900 and organised according to the principles of the economist, journalist and social reformer Henry George.
Henry George's most famous idea was that all land and natural resources ultimately belonged to society as a whole, so whoever owned them should be paying a hefty tax. And it was Henry George's idea of this single tax that the Arden version of Monopoly was designed to explore. This game, the Progressive Heaven or Capitalist Hell version of Monopoly, was called the Landlord's Game.
Did the radical folk of Arden invent the landlord's game? No. It was dreamed up by a remarkable woman named Lizzie McGee. And is Lizzie McGee celebrated on the Ms Monopoly board? I think you can guess the answer to that question. Cautionary Tales will return in a moment.
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Unlike Charles Darrow, the man who claimed to have invented Monopoly, Lizzie McGee was a true original. I'm thankful that I was taught how to think and not what to think. When McGee created the original Monopoly-style game, it was the early 1900s. Here's how Mary Plon's History of Monopoly describes McGee.
A distinctive looking woman in her 30s, with curly dark locks and bangs that framed her face, Lizzie had inherited the bushy eyebrows of her father. The descendant of Scottish immigrants, she had pale skin, a strong jawline and a strong work ethic.
Quite. As an unmarried woman, unusual at her age, working as a stenographer, she had little prospect of acquiring material comforts. Yet, she had saved and bought herself a home and a substantial parcel of land near Washington, D.C. Liz's father had been a journalist and campaigner, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper and a devoted supporter of Abraham Lincoln.
She too was politically active. Like the community at Arden, Lizzie McGee was a Georgist, a committed follower of the ideas and ideals of Henry George. She was friends with Henry George Jr., the son of the great man himself, and she was the secretary of the Georgist organisation, the Women's Single Tax Club of Washington.
Henry George had died suddenly in 1897 while running to be the Mayor of New York City. 100,000 people lined up to pay their respects to his funeral casket. His followers, including Lizzie McGee, had felt bereft and determined to carry on the fight for Georgist policies. But what could McGee do?
A progressive in a capitalist world, a woman in a man's world, she was desperate for social change but felt frustrated in what she could achieve. Mary Pilon's description of her conjures a powerhouse of creativity.
McGee wrote poems about unrequited love. She wrote essays on Georgist taxation. She wrote stories too, including one about a young woman whose brilliant idea is plagiarised.
But none of these creative projects really broke through. McGee was frustrated. How to get the message across? How to achieve lasting change? Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system. And when they grow up, the evil will soon be remedied. Yes. How to reach the children? What better method than through a board game?
Lizzie McGee's The Landlord's Game would evolve and become more popular than she could ever have imagined. By the 1930s, it existed in several popular versions, all of which took the competitive rather than cooperative approach. There was Finance, sold by the Knapp Company, Inflation, sold by Rudy Copeland of Fort Worth, Texas, and Easy Money, sold by Milton Bradley.
But Lizzie McGee herself had been almost forgotten. And so had the subversively educational version of her game. It turns out that when people play board games, they'd rather try to crush their opponents than all accumulate resources together without obstacle or incident.
No single person created Monopoly, any more than a single person created chess or poker. But if you wanted to pick out the one creative soul who deserved the most credit, there is no question that it would be Lizzie McGee. So how come it was Charles Darrow and not McGee who became known as the lone genius who invented Monopoly?
Remember the advertisement for Ms. Monopoly? Hasbro, the company that absorbed Parker Brothers, began with a lament. Women hold just 10% of all patented inventions. This situation is finally improving. Women made up less than 10% of patent holders born in the 1940s, but more than 15% of patent holders born in the 1970s.
As millennials take over the process of patenting, who knows, we might get as high as 20% before long. In fact, we're on course to achieve gender parity in patents as early as the year 2135. Cheer up. So why has progress been so slow? One of the scholars who's been searching for answers is the economist Lisa Cook of Michigan State University.
Professor Cook studies why certain groups of people seem to be shut out from the innovation economy. In particular, African Americans and women. For many decades, women had less than equal access to high quality education, especially technical education.
For example, in the early 1950s, Eleanor Ostrom wanted to study economics at UCLA, but she was rejected because she didn't have the mathematical skills. She didn't have the mathematical skills because, as a schoolgirl, she had been steered away from the subject because of her gender.
Thankfully, Eleanor Ostrom had the last laugh. In 2009, she was the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. It was astonishingly late for the profession to recognise the first female laureate, but as Lynn Ostrom was quick to say, she wouldn't be the last.
As a result of both overt and subtle discrimination, women have been underrepresented in technical subjects such as mathematics, economics and engineering. That is changing, but slowly. Between 1970 and 2014, the proportion of PhDs in science, technology, engineering and mathematical subjects that were awarded to women more than quadrupled.
And if a lack of educational opportunity is a problem, so too is a lack of mentors. A huge study conducted by a team of economists, led by Raj Chetty of Harvard, found that young people were far more likely to become inventors if they could see other inventors around them, especially if their own parents were inventors. Gender matters here.
For example, female inventors seem to be far more inspiring to girls than male inventors are. And since there are fewer women inventors around to inspire girls, the problem is a self-perpetuating spiral.
Indeed, Chetty and his colleagues estimate that if young girls had the same exposure to female inventors as young boys did to male inventors, they would innovate more than two and a half times as much as now, and the gender innovation gap would be less than half as big. That's why the Ms. Monopoly set and advertising campaign, with its celebration of women inventors, is so important.
But among the female inventors credited on the board, Lizzie McGee is conspicuous by her absence. It is an astonishing missed opportunity. It's also a mystery. How did Lizzie McGee find herself so comprehensively airbrushed out of history? And why don't the publishers of Monopoly want to acknowledge her more than a century later? Could it be, perhaps, that they're a little ashamed? Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.
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Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where
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Lizzie McGee broke the mould in so many ways. It wasn't just her politics. Her defiance of traditional values in refusing to marry when young. Her far-reaching creativity as a poet, actor, novelist and essayist. She actually had the determination to follow through on her dreams despite all the obstacles. It's easy to assume that Charles Darrow and Parker Brothers were able to lay claim to monopoly because Lizzie McGee didn't have a patent.
But she did. In fact, she had two. The earlier one is for an improvement to a typewriter roller. But it's the patent for the landlord's game that deserves to be remembered. Letter's patent, number 748,626, dated January 5th, 1904.
Even today, few patent holders are women.
In McGee's time, less than one in a hundred were. She was a member of a small club of female inventors. So if she had a patent, what went wrong? The economist Lisa Cook knows that the innovation gap runs deeper than educational opportunity, or even the presence of mentors. There's also the question of whose ideas get taken seriously. You can have a good idea, and you can even get it patented.
But that does not mean your idea will thrive if your face doesn't fit. For example, Lisa Cook's own cousin, the chemist Percy Julian, was repeatedly turned down for jobs as an academic and as a corporate researcher because he was black. Eventually, Julian became the first African-American to run a large corporate laboratory at Glidden.
He developed techniques for producing hormones such as oestrogen and cortisone, and earned several patents. In 1950, Percy Julian was named "Chicagoan of the Year" by the Chicago Sun-Times. It was the same year that, infuriated that a black man had moved into a nice white part of Chicago, racists tried to burn down his house.
If you're suffering from discrimination, as both women and African American inventors were throughout the 20th century, then Professor Cook's work makes it clear having a patent might not be enough. A patent isn't much good if nobody respects it. Consider the case of Garrett Morgan. He was born in the 1870s. He was a gifted inventor, developing products as varied as a gas mask, a traffic light and hair straightening cream.
but he was also African American, which didn't fit America's idea of what an inventor should look like. In one dramatic incident in 1916, Morgan and his brother led a rescue of several victims of an underground explosion near Lake Erie. The rescuers used Morgan's invention of a firefighter's smoke hood. Officials awarded medals to the white members of the rescue party.
but not to the Morgan brothers themselves. And while the publicity about the daring rescue helped boost sales of the smoke hood, several southern cities cancelled their orders when they discovered that Morgan was black. Morgan often concealed his race, even using surrogates to pretend to be him when he was trying to sell his inventions. You can't blame him. Lizzie McGee didn't have to fear being firebombed like Percy Julian or having her wares boycotted like Garrett Morgan.
But she did have to fear being ignored. Her game wasn't selling, and she wasn't thriving. She was frustrated at having her freedoms and opportunities constrained by her gender. A couple of years after patenting the landlord's game, she took out a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale. Young woman, American slave.
This stunt, shocking then and shocking now, was a way of satirising the idea that marriage was the only option for a woman. We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition. But while it made a splash, this outrageous stunt did not seem to turn the tide either for feminism or for Lizzie McGee herself. A few years later, in her forties, she did marry.
her game continued to languish. Like Garrett Morgan, Lizzie McGee did not fit the stereotype of a creative genius. By the time Monopoly had become a bestseller, more than 30 years after McGee filed the patent for The Landlord's Game, she was an unconventional old woman with unconventional political ideals, still trying to get the world to pay attention to the case for progressive single taxation.
She was no match for Charles Darrow, the smooth-talking family man peddling his version of the American dream. Darrow charmed the Todds into giving him the monopoly rules in every detail, charmed the artist Franklin Alexander into donating the designs that gave monopoly its clean modern look, charmed Parker Brothers into treating him as a creative genius,
and charmed the press into repeating his tale of creativity and adversity, carving this fictional origin story in stone with the help of the publicists at Parker Brothers. In 1935, Charles Darrow put that story in writing to the president of Parker Brothers. It is hard to imagine that the company believed him. They must have understood that he was lying to them.
One internal memo acknowledged that Darrow had appropriated the name Monopoly and added, Nevertheless, Parker Brothers applied for a patent on Monopoly and managed to secure it with remarkable speed. Then came the business of acquiring the rights to rival games. Parker Brothers came to an arrangement with Milton Bradley about their game, Easy Money.
and paid a large sum for the rights to the game, "Finance". They sued the publisher of the game, "Inflation", yet somehow, Parker Brothers ended up paying him at least $10,000 relative to the wages of the day, that's half a million dollars, which does suggest that Parker Brothers didn't really want to put their patent to the test.
Charles Darrow kept telling journalists the story of his moment of inspiration, and people such as Charles and Olive Todd, while irritated, didn't feel able to pursue the matter. After all, while they knew Charles Darrow hadn't invented the game, they knew they hadn't invented it either. So, that just left Lizzie McGee.
In one corner, an elderly left-wing feminist, desperate to teach the children of the world the merits of the single tax system through her obscure board game. In the other corner, a smooth-talking Charles Darrow with a tail to tug at heartstrings and a host of sharp suits from Parker Brothers. It was no contest.
One November day in 1935, travelling from Salem, Massachusetts, all the way to Arlington, Virginia, George Parker himself, the 70-year-old founder of Parker Brothers, paid a call to the house of Lizzie McGee Phillips. Mr Parker, do come in. If we may move to matters of business, Mrs Phillips, my colleagues at Parker Brothers have become aware of your landlord's games.
And we would like to publish it. But this is wonderful news, Mr. Parker. At last, the ideas this game espouses will reach the widest possible audience. That is our hope. Although at Parker Brothers, we talk less about ideas and more about the joy of play. And so Lizzie McGee and George Parker agreed a deal. $500 for all rights.
Or compared to today's wages, Parker bought the rights to Lizzie McGee's creation for just $25,000. No royalties. But she thought she was getting what she'd dreamed about for 30 years, a mass audience for the landlord's game, which would teach them a more cooperative, ethical way of running an economy.
She sold the game cheaply, even though she valued it dearly. Two days after the agreement, she even wrote a letter addressed to her creation. It was not until the great game king, George S. Parker, did us the honour of seeking you out and offered you a broader opportunity than I could ever do, that I would part with you. Farewell, my beloved brainchild. Remember, the world expects much from you.
The great game king George Parker quietly published McGee's board game in 1939, just as he promised, but it didn't catch on, partly because he didn't promote it. After all, that wasn't what George Parker was buying from Lizzie McGee, was it? He was buying a monopoly on Monopoly.
Charles Darrow became a millionaire, even though his only original contribution to Monopoly appears to have been the bold concept of claiming that the game was his idea. Still, I have some sympathy for Darrow. He had been in a difficult place. His son Dickie had been disabled by scarlet fever and had severe learning difficulties. Few schools would take Dickie and the ones that would were expensive.
Charles had no job and no income. He really was desperate for money. As a plausible charmer with a good story and somebody else's idea, he managed to make his name and his fortune. Lizzie McGee was desperate too. She was desperate for social and political change. She was desperate for the freedoms and opportunities that would have been hers without question had she been a man. And she was desperate for her game to reach the audience it deserved.
As her father once said of her: "She wants to fly, but hasn't got the wings." The journalist Mary Plon found Lizzie McGee's entry in the 1940 census. The first census after selling her patent to George Parker, and the last census before she died. She could have given her occupation as teacher, or stenographer, or writer, or housewife. But she didn't. She wrote instead:
It was, after all, just one year after Parker Brothers had published The Landlord's Game. She also listed her income. Just like the makers of Ms Monopoly, I'm all in favour of celebrating female inventors. Maybe it will make a difference. Or maybe it will achieve no more social change than Lizzie McGee did with her cooperative version of The Landlord's Game. But it seems worth a try.
So, when there's a new edition of Ms. Monopoly, I have a great idea for someone they might want to include. Be it known that I, Lizzie J. McGee, have invented certain new and useful improvements in game boards.
Although this is the last in the current season of Cautionary Tales, don't worry, we're already working on the next series. After all, when you get to work with the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, it's too much fun not to. I'll do one more. Letters patent number 400... No, I don't have a good thing for numbers. OK. Letters patent number... No, sorry. LAUGHTER
It's a Friday. Oh, ding dong. Okay, you do the special effects. That was my knee, not the door. Come on, Parker. Come inside. Okay, I'll just do it. I'll just get on with it. Mr. Parker, do come in. I like that. She really is expecting him. She's been expecting him for her whole life.
Do come in. It's my worst. Too much? The indispensable source for this episode is Mary Pilon's book, The Monopolists, supplemented by Christopher Ketchum's article in Harper's titled Monopoly is Theft. For links to academic work by Lisa Cook, Raj Chetty and others, see timharford.com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazi, Ed Gochan,
The show would not have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fahm, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honour.
It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft. And not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you.
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