Hasbro is launching Ms. Monopoly: a new, feminist edition of the classic board game. But let's look at the game's history.
No board game knows how to monopolize itself better than Monopoly. We’ve got Monopoly Junior, Bacon-Opoly , Monopoly for Millennials , Casinopoly , Grateful Dead-Opoly . The list keeps going.
The first prototype for Monopoly was patented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie. Bold, progressive, and not one to abide by societal rules for women of that era, Magie supported herself and married at 44. While working as a stenographer and secretary, she wrote short stories and poetry and even performed standup comedy.
Magie named it The Landlord’s Game, and included two sets of rules. Like Monopoly as we know it today, players who fell behind on monopolizing land would be financially destroyed with rent, taxes, fees, and debt, and left penniless by the winner who ends up with everything. However, players could vote to play under the other set of rules in which the accumulated wealth was shared.
Understandably incensed and not one to keep silent, Magie took to the press. In 1936 interviews with The Evening Star and The Washington Post, she condemned Darrow’s infringement of her creation and held up her original game boards for the photographer in effort to show the world she was the true inventor of Monopoly. In 1948, Maggie died a widow with no children. Both her obituary and headstone neglected to mention her role in the invention of Monopoly.
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