She Filed in Her Own Name — Mary Dixon Kies
The straw bonnet industry runs on women’s labor. In the farmhouses and kitchen workrooms of Connecticut, women weave straw braid and bonnet crowns on wooden lasts by the light of oil lamps and tallow candles and they sell the finished pieces to merchants who sell them in the cities. It is a real industry and it is invisible. The Jefferson Embargo has cut off the European bonnets that once competed with it, and the demand has never been higher. In a South Killingly workroom in early 1809, a fifty-seven-year-old woman is weaving wheat straw with silk thread instead of straw thread, and the result is finer, tighter, faster, and better, and she knows it is patentable, and she files the application in her own name.
It is 1809.
She does not just invent a technique. She develops a new method of weaving straw with silk or thread into bonnets that is finer and more structurally sound than the existing practice, and she files a patent application under the 1793 Patent Act, which says any person or persons — language that does not exclude women — and she signs her own name to it.
She does not just file a patent. She files it at a moment when most married women could not legally contract, own property, or sue in their own names under the doctrine of coverture, and the patent that comes back from Washington on May 5, 1809, signed by President James Madison, is the first US patent granted to a woman in her own name in the history of the republic.
She does not just receive a patent. She receives, according to accounts that have never been independently confirmed but are consistently reported, a personal letter of congratulation from First Lady Dolley Madison, who praises her work as a service to New England’s economy and to the advancement of American women in industry.
She does not just hold the patent. She holds it for twenty-seven years, never receiving significant income from it as the industry uses her method freely, and the original document is destroyed in the fire that consumes the US Patent Office on December 15, 1836, and she dies in Brooklyn, Connecticut, in 1837, penniless, at eighty-four or eighty-five.
Her Spark of Liberty was the signature on the application — her own name, not her husband’s.
The patent burned in 1836. The fabric samples she submitted with the application survive at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. They are the only physical evidence left of what she did.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born in South Killingly, Connecticut, on March 21, 1752, she developed a method of weaving straw with silk thread into bonnets and filed a patent application in her own name under the 1793 Patent Act. On May 5, 1809, she received US Patent No. 1041 — the first patent granted to a woman in her own name in American history — signed in accordance with standard procedure by President James Madison, Secretary of State, and Attorney General. The patent is sometimes cited as May 15; May 5 is the consensus date. The original patent document was destroyed in the Patent Office fire of December 15, 1836, and is not among the 2,845 patents restored afterward. The patent date and number survive in secondary records. The fabric samples she submitted as physical evidence of the invention survive at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. She died in Brooklyn, Connecticut — not Brooklyn, New York — in 1837.
Her name was Mary Dixon Kies.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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