Oh No He Didn't! Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for Their Work

"Historically women are taught that it is unladylike to call attention to themselves and one should always defer to men, and this book offers evidence-based rebuttals to that nonsensical notion."

It's called "The Matilda Effect," a phrase coined by the suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1870.

Most women know that men have a habit of talking over and often taking credit for women's ideas, inventions, and creativity. Wendy Murphy's new book, Oh No He Didn't! Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for Their Work, provides the most recent source of examples of this behavior for a 21st century audience.

Let's look at some of the women highlighted in Murphy's book. Anna Hedgeman was a force in working for civil rights for Black people in the United States. Yet even she was sidelined by many in that movement because she was a woman. As the only woman on the Martin Luther King's March on Washington committee, she raised the fact that women were excluded from the speaker's list. She recommended two women, one of whom, Daisy Bates, was allowed to say a few words but not permitted to make a speech. Hedgeman opposed the organizing committee's plan to have women stand behind King during his speech. Most revealing is that her name is excluded from the written history of those who worked on the March. Only the men are named.

One of the most popular board games in history is Monopoly. Charles Darrow has long been claimed to be the inventor of the game, but it was the brainchild of Elizabeth Magie who invented it as a way to inspire people to be less greedy. Parker Brothers bought the game in 1935 from Darrow and persisted in denying Magie's claim to ownership until it was forced to do so in the early ’70s when sued by the inventor of the game called Anti-Monopoly. That case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and today there is no mention of Charles Darrow on Monopoly boxes. As Murphy writes, "[T]he company that bastardized a game she invented to teach people that greed is bad lost millions because of its own greed."

Frank Lloyd Wright was not above claiming as his own the architectural drawings and paintings of Marion Mahony Griffin who worked for him for many years. Wright's drawings were "more geometric" while Marion's were "usually of buildings with clean lines, surrounded by the pastoral softness of nature." Wright claimed credit for all the work done by his firm's architects. But Marion Mahony Griffin created the style that Wright claimed as his own. Griffin was the lead architect on the Amberg House and Henry Ford's Michigan mansion on Fair Lane. A compilation of her work is included in her memoir, The Magic of America (1949).

Some other overlooked women that Murphy highlights include Lise Meitner who designed and conducted experiments that led to Otto Hahn being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944. Hahn acknowledged Meitner but downplayed her significance, when in fact she explained the "significance and scientific logic of his findings when he failed to comprehend them on his own." Hahn did give Meitner part of his Nobel cash award, which she donated to Albert Einstein's Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists.

One might think it's only women who were scientists or architects whose work was not credited to them. Going back to the 16th century was the artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, who has been excluded from art history books because men write the books. Murphy writes, Gentileschi "was excluded because art is a patriarchal institution and the men in charge did not want women to enjoy the influence or financial rewards art had to offer." It's also known that several of Gentileschi's paintings have been attributed to men. Still, Gentileschi faded from view after her death. She painted women "as heroic, rebellious and capable of beheading men with cool indifference" and that may have "been too much for the men who controlled . . . art history." Her work is being rediscovered as recently as 2018.

Then there was Alice Augusta Ball who discovered a treatment for leprosy while working at the University of Hawai‘i. But she died in 1919 before she could publish a paper about her work. So, her graduate advisor, Arthur Dean, took credit for it. He published articles and papers detailing his findings and called it the "Dean method." He never acknowledged or credited Alice Augusta Ball as the inventor nor credit her work. Ball's work in the area was ignored until the early 2000s when a plaque and chaulmoogra tree were installed in her honor. Currently students at the University of Hawai’i are campaigning to rename Dean Hall to Alice Ball Hall.

A particular favorite chapter revolves around Mary Anderson who designed windshield wipers for which she got a patent in 1903. No car maker was interested because they deemed the invention unnecessary. Windshield wipers did not become standard on cars until 1916, but Anderson was not credited nor paid even though her patent was still active. William Folberth invented an automatic version of Anderson's design, and Robert Kearns invented the intermittent wiper and patented it in 1967. Anderson, however, conceived the original idea and solved a problem Folberth and Kearns modified her invention. In 2011, Mary Anderson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In some cases, women invented something they thought would benefit humankind and wanted the work widely used. Tabitha Babbitt, for example, did that with her invention of an early version of a circular saw. She never applied for a patent, which makes it difficult to prove her invention except that the design was published in newsletters before a patent for the saw was issued.

Sometimes women refuse to take credit for their work or defer to men as the only way to get their creations adopted. Historically women are taught that it is unladylike to call attention to themselves and one should always defer to men, and this book offers evidence-based rebuttals to that nonsensical notion. And it raises the question of just how many other inventions, paintings, writings, and other creations came from the minds, talents, and work of women but have been claimed by men.