10 Revolutionary Inventions Made By Women

5. Monopoly

Monopoly’s origins began decades before when a progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie invented it, who until recently has largely been lost to history, and in some cases deliberately written out of it.

The original version of Monopoly was called The Landlord’s Game and was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie. Elizabeth Magie was born in Macomb, in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Elizabeth filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She first designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time, for people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.