In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership – this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. ‘Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.’
Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. Taking out a newspaper advertisement, she offered herself as a ‘young woman American slave’ for sale to the highest bidder. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.īorn in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there. As Pilon explains, it was a legal battle over a game called Anti-Monopoly in the 1970s that unearthed her patents and codified her role in the creation of one of the most famous games in the world.‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain. Pilon’s 2015 piece in the Times also chronicles Magie’s newspaper ad satirizing the economic nature of marriage by offering herself up to the highest bidder.ĭespite her news-making antics and her hand in creating a world-famous game, Magie’s story was almost lost to history. Monopoly ad highlights how few patents are held by women. She obtained a patent for her game, notable in part because of how Hasbro’s Ms. Magie was also an early feminist who believed in empowering herself. His ideas were popular with some progressives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and though they were critiqued by contemporaries like Karl Marx, George's work - including a book called Progress and Prosperity - helped draw people into the burgeoning political left of the era. George’s theories were called Georgism, and as explained by the 2011 Encyclopedia of Global Justice, were grounded in the idea that all taxes should be replaced with a single tax on property.
Young Lizzie worked as a stenographer and did comedy while perfecting her board game based on the theories of economist Henry George. According to a 2015 New York Times article adapted from Pilon’s book, Magie's father was a slavery abolitionist and rousing speaker who worked with then-presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in the late 1850s. Challenging the status quo ran in Magie’s family.
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