Her game spread, becoming a folk favorite among left-wing intellectuals, particularly in the Northeast. She understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity. On some level, Lizzie understood that the game provided a context - it was just a game, after all - in which players could lash out at friends and family in a way that they often couldn’t in daily life. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.” “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie said of her game in a 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review. “The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game,” by Mary Pilon, to be published this month by Bloomsbury. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.” In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. Electric lighting was becoming common in American homes, reinventing the daily schedule: Games could now be played more safely and enjoyably, and for longer hours, than had been possible during the gaslight era. Changing workplaces gave rise to more leisure time. At the turn of the 20th century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace for middle-class families. It was a time of shifting attitudes and behaviors. The union was an unusual one - a woman in the 40s embarking on a first marriage, and a man marrying a woman who had publicly expressed her skepticism of marriage as an institution. Four years later, she married a businessman, Albert Phillips, who, at 54, was 10 years Lizzie’s senior. In the fall of 1906 she took a job as a newspaper reporter. If Magie’s goal had been to gain an audience for her ideas, she succeeded. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.” The goal of the stunt, Magie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women. The ad quickly became the subject of news stories and gossip columns in newspapers around the country.
#Monopoly board view full
Her ad said that she was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and that she had “features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine.” Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women it made national headlines. She had saved up for and bought her home near Washington, along with several acres of property. Unusually, Magie was the head of her household. She also spent her time drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking the game that she wanted to be based on the theories of George, who died in 1897. Though small-framed, she had a presence - an audience at the Masonic Hall exploded with laughter at her comical rendition of a simpering old woman.
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In the evenings, she pursued her literary ambitions, and as a player in Washington’s nascent theater scene, performed on the stage, where she earned praise for her comedic roles. When she wasn’t working, Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, struggled to be heard creatively. The typewriter was gaining commercial popularity, leaving many to ponder a strange new world in which typists sat at desks, hands fixed to keys, memorizing seemingly illogical arrangements of letters on the new qwerty keyboards. At the time, stenography was a growing profession, one that opened up to women as the Civil War removed many men from the work force. In the early 1880s, Elizabeth Magie worked as a stenographer. The anti-monopoly movement also served as a staging area for women’s rights advocates, attracting followers like James and Elizabeth Magie. His message resonated with many Americans in the late 1800s, when poverty and squalor were on full display in the country’s urban centers. George was a proponent of the “land value tax,” also known as the “single tax.” The general idea was to tax land, and only land, shifting the tax burden to wealthy landlords. As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone.