Inventors and innovators are a unique breed. Creative Innovation would like to spotlight those people who have helped change the course of history or simply made life better and easier through their innovative products, designs or processes. We’ll start with the editor of The Woman Inventor, Charlotte Odlum Smith, a woman who tirelessly worked to champion the rights and accomplishments of women inventors. Smith wasn’t an inventor herself, but she had a passion for women inventors.
If you’ve ever scanned a product label, benefited from a safer workplace, or taken inspiration from a list of women inventors, you’ve brushed against the legacy of Charlotte Odlum Smith (1840–1917). A self-taught entrepreneur turned editor and powerhouse lobbyist, Smith became one of the most visible advocates for working women in late-19th-century America. Newspapers called her fearless. Colleagues called her relentless. Today, she deserves to be remembered as a builder of institutions, a media maker, and the woman who insisted the nation count women’s contributions to invention. As a woman inventor I am thankful for that! (Wikipedia)
Grit forged early
Smith’s early life read like a survival manual. Born to Irish immigrant parents in upstate New York, she grew up moving from city to city as her mother supported the family by keeping boarders. During the Civil War years she demonstrated a blend of audacity and pragmatism. Reportedly running the Union river blockade while also nursing soldiers and selling milk and butter to federal hospitals. After the war she opened profitable shops, lived and worked in Mobile, Chicago, and St. Louis, and shouldered responsibility for her extended family. This restless, entrepreneurial decade shaped the organizer she’d become: equal parts practical operator and firebrand. (archives.lib.ua.edu)
An editor with a mission
By the early 1870s, Smith discovered a megaphone: print. In St. Louis she founded The Inland Monthly, a general-interest magazine notable for publishing science writing and being run by women. After selling it and moving to Washington, D.C., she launched The Working Woman to report on wages, factory conditions, and political fights affecting women who earned a paycheck. She wasn’t making “ladies’ magazines”. She was building a public sphere in which working women, and their advocates, could see themselves and press their case. (inventionandtech.com)
Turning organizing into outcomes
Print alone wasn’t enough for Smith. She built vehicles that could move legislation. She founded the Women’s National Industrial League, initially a union of women federal clerks that broadened to include wage-earning women across occupations. She corresponded with and lobbied powerful allies like Senator Henry W. Blair, supplying undercover research on working conditions and carrying the voices of seamstresses, clerks, and factory girls straight into committee rooms. Her League resolutions protested practices like convict labor undercutting wages and demanded tangible protections for girls and women. (archives.lib.ua.edu)
Food safety, fair work, and a bigger aperture
Smith treated reform as infrastructure. Change the rules, and you change lives. Over the course of the 1880s and ’90s, she advocated for dozens of measures—campaigning for food safety laws, against discriminatory hiring, and for the appointment of women in roles such as immigration inspectors. It’s easy to overlook how radical this was. She wasn’t only arguing “women can do these jobs”; she was arguing that public institutions work better when women serve in them and when the law recognizes women as full economic actors. (archives.lib.ua.edu)
The woman who counted women inventors
If there’s a single chapter that captures Smith’s strategic genius, it’s her campaign to make women inventors visible. When she arrived in Washington, even the Patent Office couldn’t say how many patents women held. Smith pushed until Congress funded the clerical work and, in 1888, a formal list of women patentees appeared. She then founded The Woman Inventor (1891)—a short-lived but groundbreaking journal timed to the Patent Office centennial—to publicize women’s technical creativity and to help them navigate patenting, model-making, and commercialization. She even created the Woman Inventors Mutual Aid and Protective Association to provide practical support. Visibility wasn’t symbolism; it was a market and policy strategy. (inventionandtech.com, Smithsonian Libraries)
A reformer with rough edges
Smith could be polarizing—part of what made her effective and, later, easy for historians to overlook. In Boston she organized the Women’s Rescue League, a moral-reform group that mixed job training and shelter with rhetoric modern readers may find paternalistic. She famously condemned women’s bicycle riding in the 1890s as immodest—a stance that today sounds more like culture-war skirmishing than structural reform. The contradictions are real: a visionary on labor and invention; conservative on some social norms. But they also reflect a broader 19th-century reform tradition, where activists often fused radical economic aims with conventional moral views. (Wikipedia, archives.lib.ua.edu)
Why she still matters
Three elements of Smith’s playbook feel strikingly current:
- Own the narrative, then the policy. By editing magazines and publishing lists, Smith didn’t just “raise awareness.” She produced evidence and framed debates so that lawmakers had to respond. For founders, city leaders, or advocates today, the lesson is clear: build your data set, tell the story, then write the rule.
- Design institutions, not just protests. Smith’s leagues, boards, and associations turned outrage into durable vehicles—coalitions that could lobby, provide services, and persist beyond one bill or news cycle. Movements that last build organizations with budgets, bylaws, and back-ups.
- Count what’s been ignored. Her insistence on cataloging women patentees is a master class in visibility as leverage. When an achievement gets measured, it can be resourced, studied, marketed, mentored, and legislated for. For anyone trying to diversify innovation pipelines today, start by counting—and publishing—who’s in the room and who’s not. (inventionandtech.com)
The closing chapters—and a call to remember
Despite national prominence in the 1880s and early 1890s, Smith’s star dimmed in her later years. She spent much of her money funding shelters and campaigns. When she died in Boston in 1917, press accounts noted her lifetime of crusades for working girls; she was buried without fanfare, in an unmarked grave. Erasure often follows women who spend their lives elevating others. Recovering Smith’s story is part of repairing that pattern. (inventionandtech.com, Wikipedia)
A tidy legacy with unfinished business
Charlotte Odlum Smith proved that media, metrics, and organizing can change the material conditions of people’s lives. She pushed the state to see women workers and inventors, and she gave those women tools to see themselves as agents of prosperity. The landscape is better because she lived—safer products, fairer workplaces, and a longer historical ledger of women’s ingenuity. But her project isn’t finished until innovative women don’t need a special list to be visible, and until the institutions that allocate capital, prizes, and patents default to equity and evidence.
If you’ve ever felt like your work is invisible, consider Smith your patron saint of being counted. Find the missing numbers. Publish the list. Build the league. And don’t be surprised when the room gets a little warmer once you arrive—and you have to suggest, as she once did to a room of senators, that the gentlemen might want to remove their overcoats while you have your say. (inventionandtech.com)
Further reading & sources: Wikipedia’s overview offers a concise starting point; the University of Alabama’s Special Collections finding aid adds biographical detail and evidence of her lobbying and organizations; Invention & Technology’s feature captures her work on women inventors; and the Smithsonian’s digital copy of The Woman Inventor preserves the magazine she launched in 1891. (Wikipedia, archives.lib.ua.edu, inventionandtech.com, Smithsonian Libraries)