15. Gendered Innovation: Female Patent Activity and Market Development in Brazil, 1876–1906

Arquivo Nacional (hereafter AN) ‘MC Castagnone & Cia,’ Livro 281, Registro 39084, 1893 & Livro 323, Registro 43296, 1896.

Stanley L. Engerman & Kenneth L. Sokoloff, ‘Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Different Paths of Growth Among New World Economies’, in Stephen Haber (ed.), How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): pp. 260–304, pp. 284–5; B. Zorina Khan, ‘“Not for Ornament”: Patenting Activity by Nineteenth-Century Women Inventors’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 2 (Autumn, 2000): pp. 159–95, p. 163 and Petra Moser, ‘How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from Nineteenth-Century World Fairs’, NBER Working Paper 9909 (2003): pp. 1–52.

In both England and North America, coverture mandated that a woman’s assets, as well as her labour and future earnings, became her husband’s property upon marriage. Although the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act (in 1882 in England and between the 1830s and 1870s in the United States) technically nullified the laws of coverture, most women did not exercise unrestricted control over their property. For a discussion of the relationship on patent activity and Married Women’s Property Acts, see B. Zorina Khan, ‘Married Women’s Property Laws and Female Commercial Activity: Evidence from United States Patent Records, 1790–1895’, The Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2, papers presented at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association (Jun 1996): pp. 356–88 and Deborah J. Merritt, ‘Hypatia in the Patent Office: Women Inventors and the Law, 1865–1900’, American Journal of Legal History 35, no. 3 (Jul 1991): pp. 235–306. More general discussions of these laws and working women in the United States and England can be found in Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); and Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984), especially Chapter 3.

Candido Mendes de Almeida (ed.), Código philippino ou ordenações do reino de Portugal, 14th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Philomatico, 1870), Livro 4, Títulos 42–46 and Título 96 (hereafter Ordenações). After independence in 1822, Brazilian family and inheritance law closely followed the Ordenações Filipinas, or Philippine Code of Portugal, until the enactment of the Civil Code of 1916. Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 13; Dain Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil 1870–1945 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 155; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘Making the Private Public: A Brazilian Perspective’, Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): pp. 28–42, pp. 30–31; and Muriel Nazzari, ‘Widows as Obstacles to Business: British Objections to Brazilian Marriage and Inheritance Laws’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (Oct 1995): pp. 781–802, p. 781.

Maria Fernanda Baptista Bicalho, ‘A imprensa feminina e a campanha suffragista no início da República’, Caderno Espaço Feminina, Uberlândia 6, no. 6 (1999): pp. 7–19; June Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Brazil, 1850-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 73; and Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 214.

See Eco da Damas and O Belo Sexo and Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, p. 31.

For a lager discussion pertaining to Brazil, see Sergio de Oliveira Birchal, Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: The Formation of a Business Environment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969); Anne G. Hanley, ‘Is it Who You Know? Entrepreneurs and Bankers in São Paulo, at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century’, Enterprise and Society 5, no. 2 (2004): pp. 187–225; Eugene Ridings, Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Joseph Sweigart, ‘Financing and Marketing Brazilian Export Agriculture: The Coffee Factors of Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1888’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1980), Chapter 3.

June Hahner, ‘Women and Work in Brazil, 1850–1920: A Preliminary Investigation’, in Dauril Alden and Warren Dean (eds), Essays Concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese India (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1977): pp. 87–117, esp. pp. 89–90; Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 192–194; and Nazzari, ‘Widows as Obstacles to Business’, p. 781.

The records for patent applications housed in the Brazilian National Archive span the years 1871–1910, with 1 patent filed in 1857 and 42 listed as ‘without a date’. This chapter focuses on the period beginning in 1875 in order to correspond with the nation’s early legislation on intellectual property, but the bulk of the analysis centres on 1880–1910, when female patentees first began filing their applications (1881). PI, 1857–1910.

Dante Mendes Aldrighi & Renato Perim Colistete, ‘Industrial Growth and Structural Change: Brazil in a Long-Run Perspective’, in Wim A. Naudé, Adam Szirmai, & Nobuya Haraguchi (eds), Structural Change and Industrial Development in the BRICS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): pp. 162–98, pp. 168–171; Anne G. Hanley, ‘Financing Brazil’s Industrialization’, in Jeff Horn, N. Rosenbamd, & Merritt Roe Smith (eds), Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (Boston: MIT Press, 2010): pp. 251–70, p. 254 and Brazil, Directoria Geral de Estatística, Recenseamento da população do Imperio do Brasil a que se procedeu no dia 1° de agosto de 1872 (Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger, 1873–1876); Recenseamento geral da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brasil em 31 de dezembro de 1890. Districto Federal (Cidade do Rio de Janeiro) Capital da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger, 1895); and Recenseamento do Rio de Janeiro (Districto Federal) realizado em 20 de setembro de 1906 (Rio de Janeiro: Officina de Estatística, 1907). See also Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968) and William R. Summerhill, ‘Transport Improvements and Economic Growth in Brazil and Mexico’, in Stephen Haber (ed.), How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): pp. 93–117.

Leis e Decretos, Law 556, 15 June 1850 (Código Commercial do Império do Brazil), Artigos 1 & 27–29 and Ordenações, Livro 4, Títulos 42–46 and Título 96.

Bicalho, ‘A imprensa feminina e a campanha suffragista no início da República’, pp. 7–19; Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, p. 73; and Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque, p. 214.

There is no way to determine the precise percentage of the female population engaged in commerce in the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to inconsistent census records and a lack of a directory of the Commercial Tribunal (housed at the AN). My estimates are based on thorough reviews of formal business partnership contracts, requests for business licences in Rio de Janeiro and the Almanak Laemmert, the annual city business directory. Evidence from Rio de Janeiro is corroborated at the national level by Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy; Birchal, Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil; and Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex. Almanak Administrativo, Mercantil e Industrial do Rio de Janeiro [Almanak Laemmert]; Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Licenças para Commercio e Industria and AL, 1870 and 1880 and AN, Junta Commercial, Livro de Registros, 1869–1904.

Applications did not always include the design and a few illustrations were submitted without the complete written description of the invention. AN, Junta Commercial, PI, 1880–1910.

Escobar Andrae, ‘Female Entrepreneurship and Participation Rates in Nineteenth-Century Chile’, p. 82 and Merritt, ‘Hypatia in the Patent Office’, p. 254.

AN, ‘Guimarães & Fairbairn,’ Livro 429, Registro 53859, 1904 & PI 3211, Patent 3550, 1901.

B. Zorina Khan, ‘Invisible Women: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Family Firms in France During Early Industrialization’, NBER Working Paper 20854 (2015): pp. 1–41, p. 10; Kara W Swanson, ‘Getting a Grip on the Corset, Gender, Sexuality, and Patent Law’, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 23, no. 1 (2011): pp. 57–115; and Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2001), pp. 23–29.

AN, PI 3.132, 1901 and 3 patents for Alice Jacobsen: PI 4601, Patent 4926, 1907; PI 5344, Patent 5647, 1908 and PI 7886, Patent 8688, 1909.

AN, PI 3211, Patent 1252, 1893 and Khan, ‘Not for Ornament’, p. 177.

Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 49–50, 185; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 12–15, 19; and Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995).

AN, PI 4.39, Patent 4714, 1907 and PI, 1.788, Patent 2190, 1897.

Merritt, ‘Hypatia in the Patent Office’, p. 276.

AN, PI 8.859, Patent 171, 1884.

Hanley, ‘Financing Brazil’s Industrialization’, p. 253; Nathaniel Leff, ‘Economic Development in Brazil, 1822–1913’, in Stephen Haber (ed.), How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): pp. 34–64, pp. 42–46; and Wilson Suzigan, Indústria brasileira: origem e desenvolvimento (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), especially Chapter 1.

Leis e Decretos Decree 164, 17 January 1890 and Stephen Haber, ‘The Efficiency Consequences of Institutional Change: Financial Market Regulation and Industrial Productivity Growth in Brazil, 1866–1934’, in John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor (eds), Latin America and the World Economy since 1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998): pp. 275–322, pp. 277–278; Hanley, ‘Financing Brazil’s Industrialization’, pp. 257–8; and Gail D. Triner, Banking and Economic Development: Brazil, 1889–1930 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), Chapter 2.

Lerner, ‘150 Years of Patent Protection’, p. 25 and Da Silva, et. al., ‘The ‘Disguised Foreign Investor’, p. 6.

Out of the 9088 registered patents between 1880 and 1910, 7400 applicants listed their permanent residence, with 61 per cent local to Brazil. A total of 46 different countries were listed in the patent registry, with the top 5 nations represented being the United States (10%), England (8%), France (7%), Germany (4%) and Argentina (2%). PI, 1880–1910.

Da Silva, et. al. ‘The ‘Disguised Foreign Investor’, p. 14. Others have studied the role of the British in industrialisation, but this examination is the first to focus on British patent holders in Brazil in particular. See Birchal, Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil; Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil; Ridings, Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-Century Brazil; and Suzigan, Industria Brasileira.

Approximately 61 per cent of female partners were native-born, while 39 per cent immigrated from Western Europe and the Americas, AN, Junta Commercial, 1869–1904.

Ordenações Livro 4, Título 46 and 47. With few exceptions, marital property was legally classified as communal. A prenuptial agreement allowed couples to maintain separate property in marriage. Similarly, with a contrato de dote e arras, a husband reserved the right to administer the property his wife brought to their marriage (the dote or dowry) but he could not claim ownership over her dowry. See Lauderdale Graham, ‘Making the Private Public’, p. 31 and Muriel Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in São Paulo, Brazil, 1600–1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 188, n. 14.

In terms of its legal division, the family estate equalled three parts: two parts forcibly dedicated to their heirs and one part for the married couple to share evenly. Referred to as the terça, or the ‘third’, this latter portion enabled each spouse to freely distribute one-sixth of their conjugal property at the time of their death. Ordenações- Livro 4, Título 48; Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil 1870–1945, p. 115; Graham, ‘Making the Private Public’, pp. 30–31; Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs v. 1: Illegitimacy, Patrimonial Rights and Legal Nationalism in Luso-Brazilian Inheritance, 1750–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 4 and Nazzari, ‘Widows as Obstacles to Business’, p. 781.

Ordenações- Livro 4, Títulos 46–48 and Título 96; Lauderdale Graham, ‘Making the Private Public’, pp. 30–31; and Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry, p. 25. Several practices in nineteenth-century family law in Spanish Latin America also deferred control of communal property to the husband but the patria potestad was not legally sanctioned, as was the case for Brazil. See Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, ‘Liberalism and Married Women’s Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century Latin America’, Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2005): pp. 627–678, p. 647.

In addition to business women who self-identified as widows, either in their business partnership contracts or the name of their company, notarial and judicial records housed at the AN confirm that approximately 35 per cent of female partners and sole proprietors were widowed at the time they registered their businesses. AN, Junta Commercial, 1869–1904; Habilitações para o casamento, 1880–1910 and Inventários, 1870–1910.

Out of these eight women, one half patented distinct inventions whereas the other half represented versions of the original invention or technology. PI, 1880–1910.