Monopoly. The Game.

Yesterday was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
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It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped. 

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not. 

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

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*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

And To War, To War We go? On Iran As The Next Target.

Joshua Muravchik has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post about what the United States should do with respect to Iran's plan to acquire nuclear weapons.  Muravchik would like some other people to sacrifice themselves in a war against Iran, because he believes that a war with Iran is the best possible answer to the disagreements. 

Even the title of the piece says that if you are in a hurry and can't read the rest of the column:  "War with Iran is probably our best option." 

The opinion piece is fun to read if you ignore what it's all about.  Muravchik worries about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran's hard-liners and explains to us why it is imperative to avoid that situation:

What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality. Ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world. Iran aims to carry its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond. A nuclear arsenal, even if it is only brandished, would vastly enhance Iran’s power to achieve that goal.

Hmm.  I think it's Saudi Arabia that is financing and spreading the Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond, in the form of Sunni Wahhabism.  And Pakistan, a major base for various Islamist terrorist groups, already has nuclear weapons.  Some suggest Pakistan has a deal with the Saudis to let them have those weapons if necessary. 

Indeed, though Iran has been an eager beaver at home in propping up the rules and restrictions concerning women*, those pesky critters which just won't stay inside their allotted little cages and therefore rattle the structure of the Islamic revolution, I don't see Shia Islam as a major aspect of today's international terrorism.

The whole opinion piece is probably one of those click-bait pieces.  But it's also a little like that time-honored Tarzan move:  You bang your hairy chest with your fist and ululate, to frighten everyone who happens to be within hearing range in the jungle. 

But that doesn't work when every country in the area is run by their own Tarzans, all banging their chests.  And then you have to do something more or you lose face.

Muravchek's piece made me wonder who the "we" in the title of this post might be.  But it also acutely reminded me of the types of opinion pieces we got after 911, all telling that Iraq is the place the US should invade to find bin Laden who was in Afghanistan etc. 

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*You can download a whole report on the position of women in Iran at that link. 

And More Grumbling

Suppose, just for the sake of an idle example, that you have spent the whole weekend and most of Monday working on post #3 in your series about women and IS.  Suppose that you have twenty footnotes, all with extra links and comments, and that the total length of the post is beginning to approach a small book.

Suppose, then, that it's Tuesday, and you are ready to draw the finishing touches on that post.  You enter the edit mode on this ancient sewing machine called Blogger and start merrily typing away.

You make a mistake, and then use the undo-command to correct that mistake.

Instead of the expected reaction (i.e., mistake corrected), everything written into the draft disappears.  Texts, pictures, footnotes, links, all gone.

What would you do then?  Madly press the undo-command, perhaps?  But because you are a very very stupid goddess you have the auto-save on, and Blogger helpfully saves the empty pages for you.

Well, this happened.  I then spent hours trying to get the post back, but none of the tricks worked.

This is how life teaches you....something.   

Grumbling

Remind me NEVER again to promise a series of long-form posts on any topic whatsoever.  They take ages to write.  AGES!  And nobody probably reads long-form posts because they  now have that Public Service Announcement in their very name which warns potential readers that they are going to be loooong.

This is an explanation for my recent silence on the blog.