Heidi Li's Potpourri

Elizabeth Lizzie Magie-Phillips: co-inventor of Monopoly

In 1903, Elizabet "Lizzie" Magie patented the game that eventually was eventually adapted for mass sales by a man named Charles Darrow. Magie's game, patented under the name "The Landlord's Game" was designed to illustrate economic principles based on what Magie regarded as the iniquitie of landlordship and the economic advisability of a single tax, based on land values. (source: Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money 2008, p. 230) Below, are some versions of the game board patented by Magie (Philips was her married name). The first is from 1904, the second is from 1924. Monopoloy as we know it was not produced and sold until 1934. (Ferguson, 2008, p. 231)

Magie-Phillips' version of the game was meant to be more instructional than recreational. Some university professors even adopted a modified version for classroom use. (Ferguson, p. 231).

Meanwhile, Magie-Philips already had a relationship with Parker Brothers, the game company, which had issued another game she invented called Mock Trial. Although George Parker declined to buy The Landlord's game from Magie-Philips in the 1920s, he did encourage her to seek patent protection for her invention. (source)

When Parker Brothers decided to buy the patents for Monopoly from Clarence Darrow, the company also bought out Magie-Philips' patents recognizing that Darrow had been seen a version of The Landlord's Game (Ferguson, p. 231), which had gained a cult following in the northeastern United States. (source)

"Parker Brothers gave joint credit, in company publicity, to both Darrow and Magie-Phillips until the patents expired in 1953." (source)

Crossposted at Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

Congratulations, Judge Christen, on your appointment to Alaska's Supreme Court

(Left, Judge Morgen Christen.)

Yesterday, Governor Sarah Palin announced the appointment of Anchorage Superior Court Judge Morgan Christen to the high court in Alaska. Judge Christen will be just the second woman named to the high court in the 50 years since statehood. Some will emphasize the Sarah Palin angle of this story, because of differences between Christen's social values and Palin's. But to me, that is not the big part of the story. The big part of the story is that even in a state with a relatively small population, there was a woman jurist about whom any Governor, regardless of her or his own ideology, could say would make an outstanding state Supreme Court judge.

"Alaska's Supreme Court bears the awesome responsibility of ensuring that our court system administers justice in firm accordance with the principles laid down in our state Constitution," Palin said in a written statement. "I have every confidence that Judge Christen has the experience, intellect, wisdom and character to be an outstanding Supreme Court justice." (emphases mine)

Alaska, like most states, has a procedure by which it produces a set of candidates from whom the Governor may select a high court judge - in other words, there are are checks on the Governor's choices. Under the state Constitution, Palin had to select from among the nominees sent to her by the seven-member Alaska Judicial Council. To get on the map of such a  Council a judge has to have demonstrated professional excellence and, usually, shown involvement in the community more generally.

Judge Christen fits that bill based on the public write-ups I could find readily. This one comes from an Alaskan philanthropic foundation whose board she sits, the Rasmuson Foundation:

Judge Morgan Christen was appointed to the superior court in Anchorage in 2001. In 2005, she was appointed Presiding Judge for the Third Judicial District. Judge Christen currently co-chairs both the Child in Need of Aid Committee and the Probate Rules Subcommittee for Involuntary Mental Health Commitments. She serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska Community Foundation.

Prior to being appointed to the bench, Judge Christen was a litigation partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis from 1992-2001. She worked as an associate attorney at Preston from 1987-1992. Judge Christen clerked for the Honorable Brian Shortell after she graduated from the Golden Gate University School of Law and received her undergraduate degree in international studies from the University of Washington.

Judge Christen's previous professional experience includes service as a Lawyer Representative for the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, service on the Alaska Bar Association Disciplinary Committee and as President of the Anchorage Association of Women Lawyers. Judge Christen has been a member of the Anchorage Rotary Club since 1994 and is a former member of the Board of Directors for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska. In 2004, Judge Christen, was awarded the Light of Hope award for work on behalf of Alaska's children, and the Chamber of Commerce Athena Society Award. In 2004, Judge Christen and her husband, Jim Torgerson, received the Outstanding Philanthropist of the Year award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Alaska Chapter. Her special interests include family, hiking, traveling in Alaska, reading and cooking.

While this bio demonstrates that Judge Christen has been active and involved in both the judiciary and broader Alaskan civic activities, what I, as a lawyer and law professor, find most striking about it is, in some respects, its essential ordinariness in terms of the credentials one would expect a state high court appointee to have. This in no way detracts from Judge Christen, who has clearly worked hard to extend her reach outside the four walls of courtroom, both to influence and to learn about her state and its different demographic sectors. This is exactly what we should want from jurists - people with competence in the courtroom in and interest in goings-on outside of it. So I applaud Judge Christen's decisions to get to know both the Rotary Club AND the Anchorage Association of American Lawyers; to have worked on behalf of children and on behalf of Alaska's business community. She will be deciding cases involving interests related to all kinds of Alaskans and this brief biographical sketch indicates that she's taken the time to get to know a cross-section of the citizenry.

Now it happens that Judge Christen, in the 1990s,  was on the board of Planned Parenthood. And a conservative Christian group, the Alaska Family Council, decided to apply pressure to Governor Palin to get her not to appoint Judge Christen to the Supreme Court. This is what the Alaska Daily News seems to find most noteworthy, or at least most newsworthy, about Judge Christen's appoint. (The paper's headline: Palin bucks pressure in Supreme Court appointment;  Selection went against push from Alaska Family Council.)

But the real news here is that a sitting Governor simply picked an apparently competent jurist with a range of ties to the state's community and that the Governor and the judge are both women, and both women are in the positions they are in by virtue of fairly ordinary career paths, career paths that have, however, led each to some fairly extraordinary positions.

Cross-posted at Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

Women engineers today and yesterday; spotlight on Emily Warren Roebling, engineer, who got the Brooklyn Bridge built

Cross posted from Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

TODAY

Those women that do choose the engineering profession ... find that it's tough being a woman engineer. Fact is, the U.S. engineering workforce is predominantly composed of white males. And ironically, though women make up more than half of the U.S. population, when it comes to the engineering workforce, they comprise only about 8%, according to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Believe it or not, this percentage shows an improvement over the mid-1980s, when the proportion of females in the engineering workforce was less than 6%. [source, 2000

Sherry L. Koucky, the co-author of the article from which the above quote comes wrote, in an accompanying editorial:

Amy Higgins and I wrote the article, and while researching we discovered some inequities ranging from how girls are educated to how women are treated in the workplace. When I expressed opinions about this to some of the men in the office, they accused me of being full of venom on this issue. But I'm not angry. Surprised and enlightened, yes. I could rant and rave about how women will never bust into the Old Boy's Club, but that's beating a dead horse and will not solve the issues Amy and I unearthed.

For those of us who work in in male-dominated fields (and according to domination measured by equal wages that's virtually all women), Ms. Koucky's experience - offering information to men about women's circumstances in a shared field meets with accusations that woman is "full of venom" or shrill or (presumably wrongly) angry will sound familiar. If you read Koucky's and Higgins article you will see how strange it is that she was attacked by male colleagues, especially scientists who are supposedly interested in empirical data, since the article considers a range of hypotheses for why women not only are so underrepresented in engineering, but are underrepresented in the more highly remunerative areas of engineering.

In recent years, according to an SWE survey of 2,000 male and female engineers, women engineers typically have started their first engineering jobs at salaries equal to or greater than those of their male counterparts. After about eight years in the workforce, however, those women still pursuing an engineering career earn less than men. This disparity widens the longer these women stay in the workforce. Some experts believe the salary difference is due to women not advancing into management at the same rate as men. Others believe that family responsibilities have caused women to remove themselves from the workforce for a period of time and that they never make up the difference. The SWE survey produced other interesting findings:
 * Women engineers are more likely than men to work in a manufacturing sector, while men work in consulting.
 * Women engineers tend to work for large engineering employers while men work in smaller firms.
* Men are more likely (40% versus 14%) than women to pursue and obtain registration as professional engineers.
* 51% of male engineers feel that they participate in management decisions while only 32% of female engineers feel this way.

Most experts agree that survey results such as these reflect a glass ceiling a perceived barrier preventing women or minorities from moving into top management positions that they can see, but never reach. In fact, research from the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, as well as testimonials, support that today's American labor force is gender and race segregated, and that white men fill most top management positions in corporations.

YESTERDAY

(Woman engineers in the 19th century)

Elizabeth Bragg received the first engineering degree awarded to a U.S. woman when she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a civil engineering degree in 1876. I have not found much information about Ms. Bragg's career. A more famous woman engineer the period is Emily Warren Roebling. Roebling's name is inscribed on the Brooklyn Bridge as one of its builders. After both her father and husband suffered incapacitating injuries during their work on the bridge, Emily Warren Roebling stepped in to see the job through.

The Brooklyn Bridge might not have been built had it not been for Emily Warren Roebling. Most history books cite her father-in-law John Roebling and her husband Washington Roebling as the bridge's builders. Early into construction in 1872, however, collapsing bridge timbers crushed John Roebling's legs, leaving him incapacitated. Soon after, an illness paralyzed Washington Roebling. With both men out of commission, Emily Warren Roebling took over. Under her husband's guidance, Emily had studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years supervising the bridge's construction.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened to great fanfare in May 1883. The names of John Roebling, Washington Roebling, and Emily Warren Roebling are inscribed on the structure as its builders.

I certainly do not mean to be venomous but if Emily Warren Roebling's name is inscribed in on the bridge itself, how come "most history books" do not list her as one of its builders?

Virginia Apgar - Woman of Interest: surgeon, anesthesiologist, scientist

 "Nobody, but nobody, is going to stop breathing on me!"
--Dr. Virginia Apgar, ca. 1950s, explaining why she kept basic resuscitation equipment with her at all times.

It has been said that every baby born in a modern hospital anywhere in the world is looked at first through the eyes of Dr. Virginia Apgar. Her simple, rapid method for assessing newborn viability, the "Apgar score," has longbeen standard practice. Developed in the early 1950s and quickly adopted by obstetric teams, the method reduced infant mortality and laid the foundations of neonatology. While best known for this achievement, Apgar was also a leader in the emerging field of anesthesiology during the 1940s and in the new field of teratology (the study of birth defects) after 1960. [The Virginia Apgar Papers]

Virginia Apgar at age 20, below

 Virginia Apgar was brilliant surgeon, yet discouraged by her mentor from practicing in that field because of his belief that women did not fare well [source]; so, Dr. Apgar joined the first residency program in anesthesiology, and became an expert in that field; eventually combining her expertises in both surgery and residency to innovate radically and successfully in the field of neonatology. Below, first row, fourth from left, Virginia Apgar pictured with her classmates in the first residency program in anesthesiology in the United State.

Dr. Apgar was the first woman at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons to be named a full professor [source]. After ten years in that post, she completed a master's degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University. Apgar was approached by the National Foundation-March of Dimes in the spring of 1959, and offered the position of chief of its new Division of Congenital Malformations. She accepted and eventually served also  Director of Basic Medical Research (1967-1968) and Vice-President for Medical Affairs (1971-1974) [source].

Virginia Apgar teaching at Columbia obstetric anesthesiology at Columbia.

Virginia Apgar attending a newborn.

Text cross posted at 51 Percent as an installment in an occasional series highlighting exceptional women.

U.S. Department of Labor -- Women's Bureau: Kim Gandy is no Mary Anderson

I have been given to understand that a) Kim Gandy, currently President of N.O.W. (National Organization for Women) wants to become head of the Women's Bureau at the Department of Labor and that b) today, February 8, 2009, a number of bloggers will be discussing whether appointing her to the job is a good idea. That Ms. Gandy wants the job is a total rumor to me; if she does, I can't say that the choice thrills me.

The choice of Gandy does not thrill me because she holds great power at N.O.W. (from the N.O.W. site: "Gandy also is president of the NOW Foundation, chair of NOW's Political Action Committees, and serves as the principal spokesperson for all three entities"; and I think she used that power to have N.O.W. sell women down the river when N.O.W. broke with its usual practice and made a general election presidential endorsement, picking Barack Obama, somebody who used and tolerated sexism and misogyny to gain the Democratic Party's nomination. I use the expression "sold women down the river" with all its metaphorical baggage: the image of humans being treated like chattel sold down to the Delta to be auctioned off. I think N.O.W. had very little evidence of Barack Obama's commitment to women's empowerment, little evidence of even his commitment to women's reproductive rights (the usual excuse used by mainstream women's groups to go out of their way to support his candidacy). And still, under the leadership of Gandy, N.O.W. went out of its way to auction off women's votes, encouraging them to turn out and make sure this man, who never once denounced the nutcrackers and the media comments and the misogynistic rappers singing him into office, became President of the United States of America.

On the other side of the ledger, Kim Gandy has clearly spent the better part of her life working on issues important to women; she's probably quite knowledgeable about working conditions for women and in a position to hire high quality staff. So Gandy is not a bad person and she's not anti-woman. But she made a Faustian bargain at high profile moment. The dynamics of the general election were such that women's votes really mattered. And lots of women were and still are furious at the Democratic Party for depriving Hillary Rodham Clinton of an equal opportunity to win the nomination at the Denver Convention by abiding by the Party's own rules and traditions. Under these circumstances, N.O.W. should have remained agnostic. As an organization that does not usually trade in presidential endorsements, refraining from making one would not have made news. Going out of its way to endorse Obama is what made news, and Gandy made that decision. In a year when every poll showed any generic Democrat beating John McCain and almost every poll consistently predicted Obama beating McCain, there really was no reason - even for those who believed that McCain would be a worse president for women than Obama - for women's organizations to line up behind Obama. The only reason to do so would be fear of reprisal if they did not; or if their leaders hoped for a seat within the administration after the election. N.O.W. and, if rumor is correct, Ms. Gandy acted for the latter reasons.

I believe that once a person shows a capacity for major betrayal - in public or private life - that person cannot be safely relied upon to act in a reasonably trustworthy way again. So I was not surprised that it turned out that Bill Richardson had apparently not been totally forthcoming with the Obama administration about the corruption charges against him back in New Mexico. If Richardson would deceive the Clintons to further his aims, why would he not do the same to Obama?

If Kim Gandy was willing to sell out women who expected really very little of her - just that she stick with usual practice and show organizational restraint in an election that was wracking many women with distress - I can easily predict that she will sell out women who expect harder things of her, such as real fighting for women's interests in an economy that is bad for everybody but worst for women.

That said, making a deal with the devil does not make Kim Gandy the devil. Of course neither does it make her another Mary Anderson, the first director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor.

Mary Anderson (served 1920 - 1944)

The first "up from the ranks" labor woman to head an executive department of the Federal Government, Mary Anderson directed the Women's Bureau for nearly 25 years, leading efforts to win better wages, hours and working condition for women. She served for five presidents and, during her tenure, saw the ranks of women workers more than double.

- Women's Bureau, Director's Gallery

 

"As the world evolves, so too does the growing role of women who are proving their infinite capabilities in today's complex workplace, and exhibiting a new usefulness now and for the future."

from the Labor Hall of Fame citation inducting Mary Anderson

Also from that citation:

From a domestic worker to factory employee to trade union leader, Swedish-born Mary Anderson was a tireless champion of women in the workplace. Director of the Women's Bureau for a quarter century, she was the most influential of all women in Federal service. Her leadership in fact-finding and standards-setting established her as the Nation's foremost authority in the struggle for women's rights and the improvement of their lives and working conditions.

At the start of the 20th century the Women's Bureau was headed by a woman whose commitment to women's equal opportunity in the workplace transcended party politics. Why should we expect anything less from the Director appointed at the start of the 21st century?

(Excerpted at 51 Percent)

Women of Interest: An occasional series, entry 3: Helen Suzman

I hate bullies and like simple justice
--Helen Suzman

From the BBC:

Anti-apartheid icon Suzman buried

Top politicians and close friends attended Helen Suzman's close friends

Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of South Africa's celebrated anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman, who died on New Year's Day aged 91.

Mrs Suzman, who for years was the only lawmaker to openly condemn the whites-only regime, was buried in a private Jewish ceremony in Johannesburg.

The mourners included President Kgalema Motlanther and the last leader of apartheid regime, F W de Klerk.

Mr de Klerk described Mrs Suzman as "one of South Africa's great icons".

"Suzman was my mentor, she was opposed to the abuse of power by the old apartheid regime," South Africa's opposition leader Helen Zille - who also attended the funeral - said.

"She was also opposed to the current abuses of power by the current ANC [African National Congress] government," Ms Zille added.

For 13 years, Mrs Suzman, the daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, was the only MP to openly condemn South Africa's whites-only apartheid regime.

She was made an honorary dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1989. She was also twice-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

'Corageous woman'

Mrs Suzman, who had been in a frail condition recently, died at her home in Johannesburg early on Thursday.

Mrs Suzman stepped down from parliament in 1989

She first entered the South African parliament in 1953, soon becoming a thorn in the side of the apartheid regime, says the BBC's Peter Biles, in Johannesburg.

She was a frequent visitor of jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela when he was held in Robben Island prison for 18 years.

Mr Mandela - who was elected South Africa's first black president in 1994 - wrote of her in his biography: "It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells."

After stepping down from parliament in 1989, Mrs Suzman continued to speak out against what she saw as the failings of the post-apartheid ANC administration.

Mrs Suzman was born in Germiston, Gauteng, on 7 November 1917.

In 1937 she married doctor Moses Meyer Suzman. The couple later had two daughters.

See also: BBC obituary, coverage of Suzman's life from the (South Africa) Mail and Guardian, and the Helen Suzman Foundation.