This book cannot be recommended to feminists without a health warning:  they will incur large dental bills as a result of grinding teeth down in rage and frustration.For this is an account of just some of the technological advances pioneered by women in the recent past, inspired by the author's researches in the London Patent Office.

They had some hoops to jump through. Originally, only women who were single or widows could hold a patent in their own names; married women's were granted to their husbands, and until 1870 the woman could not receive any income from a patent in her own right.  Hence Sibylla Masters, who invented a corn-processing machine in 1715, had to have it registered in the name of her husband Thomas.

The author suggests that talented women were originally attracted to science/technology because, being a relatively recent area of study at the time of the founding of the Office in 1617, the misogynistic barriers so well-established in the Arts did not operate so effectively.  The majority of patents granted cover what might be called "domestic" technology - textiles, house lighting and heating, cleaning, horticulture, laundry, nursing - but the list of those granted between 1637-1914 (Appendix) reveals far less gender-specific interests:  bridge-building, artificial stonemanufacture, chronometers, paper manufacture, musical instruments, mathematical instruments, metallurgy.....It was a woman who invented the bra, and it was another who, described as an "Electrician", devised a method of "Ventilating, Disinfecting and Fog Apparatus for Ships, etc."