Images of Female Inventors: Women and Patents in Nineteenth-Century France
The study of the social and cultural context of women’s inventiveness reveals an unfamiliar picture that adds a new facet to women’s history. Not only patents, but also surveys (for example by the chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris in 1848 and 1860) carried out in the nineteenth century, se...
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| Publicat a: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/artefact, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
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Artefact
2024
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | The study of the social and cultural context of women’s inventiveness reveals an unfamiliar picture that adds a new facet to women’s history. Not only patents, but also surveys (for example by the chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris in 1848 and 1860) carried out in the nineteenth century, sectoral studies and statistics help to better understand the part played by women in invention and thus to better appreciate their economic role. These sources provide information on female patent holders, their origins, their social and marital status and their attitudes to invention. They also help us to understand how women inventors were viewed by their contemporaries. The quantitative data come from the patents, but the search for these female patentees in the institutional networks of invention, particularly widespread in France in the nineteenth century and already well studied, illustrates the figures. Indeed, the number of patents in itself is of little interest unless it is correlated with the agency of the applicants, while the discourses of the nineteenth century convey a derogatory and inactive image of women. Indeed, it is not so much the presence of women, or even the comparison with men, that needs to be questioned, but rather what they reveal about a little-known activity. |
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