In the late 1800s a woman placed a newspaper ad offering to auction herself to the highest bidder as a wife, a viral stunt protesting the gender wage gap. That woman was Lizzie Magie, born in Macomb, Illinois in 1866 to an abolitionist newspaper publisher who accompanied Abraham Lincoln during his debates with Stephen Douglas. This episode follows her through jobs as a stenographer, poet, actress, and Dead Letter Office typist, her 1893 typewriter patent at a time when women held less than one percent of US patents, and her devotion to Henry George’s single land tax philosophy.

In 1903 she designed The Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904, with a circular board and two rule sets: a cooperative Prosperity mode and a ruthless Monopoly mode meant to show how land monopolies breed misery. Players loved the ruthless version. The game spread as a folk tradition through colleges and Quaker communities, who added Atlantic City street names, until Charles Darrow sold a copied version to Parker Brothers in the 1930s as his own basement invention. Magie received about 500 dollars and no credit. The truth surfaced decades later when economics professor Ralph Anspach, sued over his Anti-Monopoly game, unearthed her original patents.

• How Georgism and a 10-dollar-a-week salary shaped a radical inventor
• Why the circular board was a design innovation compared to the linear race games of the era
• The two rule sets and the irony that the anti-monopoly lesson was the boring version
• Parker Brothers, the Depression-era rags-to-riches story, and the hush-money games Bargain Day and Kingsmen
• The 1970s Anti-Monopoly lawsuit that resurrected Magie’s legacy from the patent archives