None of the games took off, and when Magie died in 1948, her obituary made no mention of her role in the development of Monopoly, according to the book. George Parker, the company’s founder, visited Magie and persuaded her to sell the patent for The Landlord’s Game in exchange for $500 and a promise to publish it and two other games of her design. It secured a patent on Monopoly, and bought up similar board games or sued their makers. The company then set out to neutralize any threats to its new game. Both rejected it at first, but as the game grew in popularity, Parker Brothers had a change of heart and purchased it in 1935. Eventually, Darrow was introduced to the game by a man who attended a Quaker school with his wife.ĭarrow developed Monopoly, making changes and tweaks, and began to market it locally and pitched it to Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. Pilon traced the game’s slow path to a Quaker community in Atlantic City, where homemade copies were created with the property names replaced by local landmarks, such as Pennsylvania Avenue, Virginia Avenue, Ventnor Avenue and Boardwalk. There is evidence of versions played at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, she said.
“It kind of goes viral in the way things did in 1904, which is to say more slowly and kind of all over, but it becomes a favorite game among left-wing intellectuals,” Ms. And as Magie gained fame, so, too, did her game. The stunt landed Magie a meeting with the writer Upton Sinclair and a temporary newspaper job. In 1906, she made headlines around the world when she put herself up for sale as a “young woman American slave” in an effort to raise awareness about gender inequality. In addition to inventing several games, Magie was also an amateur engineer and held a patent on a tool to more easily pass paper through typewriter rollers. By the early 1900s, she owned a home of her own in Washington, D.C., worked as a stenographer and acted and wrote in her spare time. Magie was something of a feminist and progressive pioneer, according to the book. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie wrote in The Single Tax Review, a journal dedicated to the idea. The game was designed to make the case for reform. Magie’s views were shaped by Henry George, a popular progressive who argued for a single land tax to keep the wealthy few from monopolizing resources, according to the book.
The game’s purpose, however, was political. A corner square instructs players to “go to jail,” and a trip around the board earns each $100. They purchase property along the way and there are utilities, railroads and a bank. Like modern Monopoly, players in the game roll dice to advance along a path composed of 40 spaces around a square board, according to the patent. In 1904, Magie, also known as Lizzie, received a patent for an invention, The Landlord’s Game. Pilon and others argue that he and Hasbro owe it all to Magie, who is acknowledged, briefly, inside the box of the new Ms. Monopoly’s invention is often credited to Charles Darrow, who sold the game to Parker Brothers in 1935, but Ms. “I think if Hasbro was serious about women’s empowerment, they could start by admitting that a woman invented the game,” said Mary Pilon, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and the author of “The Monopolists,” a 2015 history of the board game.
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