I start this article with thanks to recent commenter Sonia, who dropped in to voice her (programmed) opinion in response to Harry’s article “Why Men are More Intelligent than Women.”
Says Sonia:
I can’t believe I’m bothering to even indulge your idiocy, but child. It’s hard to invent things when people FORBID YOU FROM GOING TO SCHOOL. good god man woman only got the vote early last century. women could not even file patents because of their gender, so they would have to file them under husband’s names, and many female authors would publish their shit under pseudonyms.
you make me laugh.
First, it does appear from Sonia’s sentence structure, punctuation and diction, as well as her rationale for why women are not accomplished inventors, that she was indeed denied any sort of proper education.
Such a poor, oppressed little girl. I had no idea the evil patriarchy was still at work and so effective.
But perhaps a dose of the truth will help cupcake out of her information deficit. And it is really easy to see why she is afflicted by such a dearth of knowledge. Everyone she has ever believed in has been lying to her for her whole life.
Come, brothers and sisters, let’s lend the wayward Sonia a hand.
First, education has absolutely nothing to do with being inventive. Well, except to the extent that modern feminist education is instrumental in inventing things like a wage gap, dv stats, new kinds of rape, and now, female inventors.
Where it concerns invention, consider the following. Thomas Edison, arguably the greatest inventor in world history, was home schooled in early years by his mother and had very little formal education.
Benjamin Franklin had one year of college. The patriarchal overlord was the son of a poor soap maker and could not afford more than a year of school.
The Wright Brothers never went past high school. And please consider this blurb from an online bio of Henry Ford:
“He attended school until the age of fifteen, at which time he developed a dislike of farm life and a fascination for machinery. He had little interest in school and was a poor student. He never learned to spell or to read well. Ford would write using only the simplest of sentences. He instead preferred to work with mechanical objects, particularly watches. He repaired his first watch when he was thirteen years old, and would continue to repair watches for enjoyment throughout his life. Although he did not like working on the farm, he did learn that there was great value in working hard and being responsible.”
Shall I name some more uneducated men whose inventions revolutionized the world and allowed Sonia to publicly whine on the internet?
O.K…
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was an architectural school drop-out who invented the first viable photography process. Thomas Savery, who among several other things invented the steam engine, had no known education. Elias Howe invented and patented the first sewing machine. No education. George C. Devol, Jr. was an inventor with over 40 patents, including the first industrial robot. No formal education.
I could go on but I would test your attention span, and that is just with uneducated men that invent. If I were to go on with all male inventors, I could not only test your patience, but likely test the bandwidth limits of this website.
And besides, I am here to talk about women inventors, at least where I am able to legitimately do so. It turns out though, that in order to do that we need to clear away a bit of garbage from the discourse. Said garbage always seems to be in abundance when feminists are given the floor – or are even allowed to stand on it.
I went scouring the net for the accomplishments of the great women inventors of history. Low and behold I found a list of magnificent inventions, courtesy of the fairer sex. The list has apparently been passed around the internet like doobies at a Floyd show.
Most of the sites and forums housing the list had cute little accompanying remarks like “All the inventions men have women to thank for.”
But there was a slight problem. Almost none of the information on the list was accurate, and some of it was outright fabricated. To put it more succinctly, the list of female inventions was an invention itself.
Too bad you can’t patent lies. I will spare you the obligatory rich bitch analogy, but not the opportunity to make you consider it.
Experience tells me that debunking each and every feminist lie is a great deal of work with questionable returns, so I did a fact check on the first 15 inventions, just exactly as they appear on the list. Of the first 15 claims, I found 9 of them were affected by one degree or another of bullshit. This ranged from partial, or somewhat bullshit, where perhaps an accomplishment by a woman had been greatly exaggerated or embellished, to total or complete bullshit, where all manner of “WTF were you thinking?” must have been employed to put someone on that list.
I will qualify myself by saying that the research on my part has been somewhat cursory, but I do think I dug far enough into each claim to raise very credible concerns on the 9 of 15.
More on that in a moment, but first the list itself, rebuttals sourced, of course, except where definitive information could not be found.
- Battery container Nancy Perkins 1986 – Unverified
- Beehive Thiphena Hornbrook 1861 BS
- Canister vacuum Nancy Perkins 1987 Total BS
- Car heater Margaret Wilcox 1893 – Partial BS
- Circular saw Tabitha Babbit 1812 – Verified
- Computer program Augusta Ada Byron 1842 – Partial BS
- Cooking stove Elizabeth Hawk 1867 Total BS
- Dam and reservoir construction Harriet Strong 1887 – Total BS
- Direct and return mailing envelope Beulah Henry 1962 Verified
- Dishwasher Josephine Cochran 1872 – Verified
- Drinking fountain device Laurene O’Donnell 1985 Partially Verified
- Electric hot water heater Ida Forbes 1917 Total BS
- Elevated railway Mary Walton 1881 Total BS also see here.
- Engine muffler El Dorado Jones 1917 Partial BS
- Feedback control for data processing Erna Hoover 1971 Verified
- Fire escape Anna Connelly 1887
- Globes Ellen Fitz 1875
- Grain storage bin Lizzie Dickelman 1920
- Improved locomotive wheels Mary Jane Montgomery 1864
- Improvement in dredging machines Emily Tassey 1876
- Improvement in stone pavements Emily Gross 1877
- Kevlar, a steel-like fiber used in radial tires, crash helmets, and bulletproof vests Stephanie Kwolek 1966
- Life raft Maria Beaseley 1882
- Liquid Paper correction fluid Bette Nesmith Graham 1956
- Locomotive chimney Mary Walton 1879
- Medical syringe Letitia Geer 1899
- Mop-wringer pail Eliza Wood 1889
- Oil burner Amanda Jones 1880
- Permanent wave for the hair Marjorie Joyner 1928
- Portable screen summer house Nettie Rood 1882
- Refrigerator Florence Parpart 1914
- Rolling pin Catherine Deiner 1891
- Rotary engine Margaret Knight 1902
- Safety device for elevators Harriet Tracy 1892
- Street cleaning machine Florence Parpart 1900
- Submarine lamp and telescope Sara Mather 1845
- Suspenders Laura Cooney 1896
- Washing machine Margaret Colvin 1871
- Windshield wiper Mary Anderson 1903
- Zigzag sewing machine Helen Blanchard 1873
Now, as I said, where I was able I linked you back to the source that refutes the item in question. For those that don’t want to do a lot of click through reading let me give you a few examples of the problems.
I searched quite a bit for support for the claim that a Battery container was invented by Nancy Perkins 1986. I found references to it aplenty, ALL of them were versions of the original list and none of them were sourced or cited.
So while I can’t say that Nancy didn’t invent a battery container for certain (Kafkatrap), still the only source I ever saw for it was on the list. I don’t even know what kind of container she invented. Did she “invent” a box for a battery?
It is hard to know without more info. So until I see verification…
But where we do have info it gets more clearly incredulous. According to the list Harriet Strong invented dam and reservoir construction in 1867.
Oh my, invented dam and reservoir construction?
Call me crazy but I don’t think so. Strong developed a specific irrigation system (no, she didn’t invent irrigation itself) for her grove of walnut trees. Later in life she presented a plan to congress to dam the Colorado River, which they did not use. I am sure that her irrigation system was really cool – and for sure getting an audience with congress, at the time, was like the 19th century equivalent of getting on Oprah.
But as far as inventing dam and reservoir construction, or even making a significant contribution to it?
Bullshit.
The same for the 1893 car heater “invented” by Margaret Wilcox. Margaret Wilcox invented a car heater – that didn’t work. So, after that a man invented one that did.
As far as I know, most people would not be too impressed with Thomas Edison building a light bulb that left you in the dark. I don’t think he would make it on to anyone’s list.
Unless, I suppose, he was Tina Edison.
All this brings to mind a few observations and questions on my part, especially for the intellectually challenged folks we know as feminists.
One, can any of you explain to me all the crap I have heard about men having “fragile egos” over the past forty years? And if that is true, then why is it we have to live so many lies about women just to make them feel good about themselves?
Isn’t demanding (and creating) phony slaps on the back, and getting psycho over it when called out, pretty much a sign of a toddler level ego in need of some maturity, or perhaps some real accomplishment?
If you see the wisdom in that, you might want to shoot for the maturity and not the accomplishments. Popular mechanics did an evaluation of the 50 greatest inventions of the past 50 years. That would be the same 50 years where women have demanded and been granted inclusion into every aspect of western life where they could actually produce; academe, workplace, you name it.
Now please find me a woman inventor on that list.
Unless I missed something, there were some women named, but they were not inventors. They were women that were placed on an advisory board to select the most important inventions.
And the board’s selections were all invented by men.
Admittedly, there were some corporations given credit for some of those inventions, where individuals were not named. I am not thinking though, that when The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers launched new network standards that may eventually eliminate the need for wired telecommunications infrastructure, that they were hiding female researchers.
My guess (read certainty) is that they were not there in any significant capacity.
But the other, more overarching concern here is one, as it always is, of what the lies do to the people they are purported told to “help.”
I personally don’t care if the blue pill public wants to believe that women invented air and water. And it seems in some ways they are trying to.
But what about El Dorado Jones?
You see, despite the fact that she didn’t exactly invent the muffler; she was a very remarkable person. An anti-conventional chain smoking maverick in her day, she “borrowed” most her design start-ups from inventor William Deal, but she actually did bring improvements and innovations to a lot of designs and has earned some recognition for her brilliance and tenacity.
I wonder how she would feel now, put on a list by ideologues who didn’t really know or care about her work, in the middle of a bunch of fabricated nonsense like the Margaret Wilcox story?
I also have to wonder if whoever made that list read Jones’s story, saw the word muffler, which was as much as her mind could comprehend technically, and then just slapped her on the list, not knowing the difference between her and the other “inventors” she named.
Either way, what we ended up with was standard feminist fare. A story suitable for Grimm’s; 90% pipe dream, about a world they wished existed that does not, and counting on a blue pill public to say, “Duh, O.K.” without ever checking a single fact.
And this is how we end up with the Sonia’s of the world, all piss and vinegar, blaming the man, for all the things that women can’t do.
And that is precisely what you get when you start making lists of “women” inventors, instead of just listing inventors. When you do that, you set things up as a competition. And when you push women to compete with men, they are always going to get completely waxed, and I don’t mean at the spa.
Unless we have a pregnancy competition.
This, if western women were prone to learning lessons, would be a good one. Women in general will never be able to compete with men if men are inclined to actually compete with them.
As we witness the results of all these feminist set ups for women and men to compete with each other, we see the bitter, neurotic examples, like Sonia, that it creates; angry women lying to themselves about why they are failing to keep up, looking pathetic and desperate in their attempt to find scapegoats, and demonstrating exactly why we tag them as more emotional than intellectual.
Hint, you frustrated daughters of bullshit, I have the same problem you do, I just handle it differently. And I figured out a long time ago that I if was feeling, say, not as smart as some other people, screaming “I am as smart as Einstein,” at the world, and expecting them to do anything but laugh, is a piss poor plan for dealing with it.
Just saying.
I have never invented anything. I couldn’t compete with Edison or the Wright Brothers or even El Dorado Jones. In fact, there are, I am sure, lots of women that can do a lot of things better than I can.
So, dealing with that I don’t try to compete where I am out gunned, or whine about it.
I accept reality and find it is not so bad, and certainly not a conspiracy.
If trying to compete with men is not working out, deal with it. Coming here and getting pwned for your whining isn’t going to make things any better.
