The secret (feminist) history of Monopoly
FOR: PRETTYFACE
Ah, Monopoly. In these uncertain times, we salute you. Fulfiller of secret capitalist desires and destroyer of family morale – you keep us sane (or maybe drive us a little bit more unhinged?). While we’re stuck at home, you’re there for us, and we thank you.
Got a spare day and don’t know what to do? Let’s have a game! A spare week, even, is no problem with Monopoly around. You can keep that shit going for as long as you want. The longest Monopoly game ever played lasted 70 straight days – and although it often feels like we’ve been going for that long, we actually haven’t. It’s been 43 minutes, Dad.
Monopoly is more than a game. And you need look no further than the plethora of ‘which Monopoly piece are you?’ personality quizzes the internet has to offer, to realise it. (I’m the top hat, since you asked.) Familial bonds are formed and broken over the course of a game, meals are forgotten, futures postponed. All for the joy of Monopoly.
The thing is, though, we feel guilty, don’t we? The clue’s in the name – monopoly means one person having it all. And if you end up being that person with it all, it’s equal parts absolute joy and utter shame. It’s like you didn’t know what you were doing. You were in a trance, you wake up and – bam! You’re surrounded by piles of multi-coloured paper money, and, oh wait, no one else has any. Mum has her head in her hands, Granny is crying and Dad huffed off an hour and a half ago. What have you become? It’s literally the only game where you feel worse if you win than if you loose. Well, aside from those ‘who can eat this doughnut the fastest’ competitions, but who’s actually ever done one of them?
The thing you need to know about Monopoly, though, is that everything you know about Monopoly is wrong. Stay with me. So, you know how for years, everyone thought Monopoly was invented by a man? “Charles Darrow,” they’d said. “He invented Monopoly. Fine chap.” The world knew Charles Darrow as a hero. An inspiration.
For almost 80 years, this was the story: Darrow lost his sales job during the Great Depression, and was barely managing to scrape a living doing odd jobs. Then, he invented a game, Monopoly, and it made his fortune. Games manufacturer Parker Brothers bought the idea, and it took off. Much like you do in the game, Darrow traded his property, and got rich – millionaire rich, to be precise.
Except, the thing people had wrong was that Monopoly wasn’t Darrow’s invention. “It was invented by a woman, Lizzie Magie, in 1904,” explains writer Mary Pilon. “The game was played extensively for 30 plus years, but in the 1930s, Parker Brothers buried her story in the ashes of history.”
In 2015, Pilon published The Monopolists, a book five years in the writing, which investigated the real Monopoly story. “It’s the true story of the woman who invented maybe the most iconic board game of our times, and never got credit for it,” says Pilon. Having been optioned for film by the producers of Little Miss Sunshine and A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood, the story’s set to make it to the screen. But until then... aren’t you interested to know what happened?
In 1903, a woman named Elizabeth Magie saw a problem. Income inequalities in the US were huge, while monopolists were growing all-powerful. So she set about changing it. With a board game. Magie was a stenographer (she transcribed things in shorthand for a living), and was unusual for the time, in that she was left-wing, unmarried and owned her own house. An increasingly popular pastime, she identified board games as the perfect way to disseminate her political philosophy. So, she invented The Landlord’s Game.
Look at photos of the original board and you’ll see it’s strikingly similar to Monopoly’s. In fact, it basically was Monopoly. The only difference was the name, and the moral. In The Landlord’s Game, there were two sets of rules. One anti-monopolist set, where everyone was rewarded when wealth was created, and one monopolist, where the aim of the game was to GET ALL THE MONEY and crush your opponents. I’ll give you one guess as to which version became the icon. And another guess as to the implications of that for society. Anyway, Magie patented the game, and it became a favourite amongst left-wing intellectuals.
Now for the twist. In 1932, Charles Darrow went to dinner at a friend’s house and was introduced to a property buying board game. Darrow asked his friend, Charles Todd, to write down the rules of the game (then referred to as ‘the monopoly game’) and, voila! Lizzie Magie was written out of history, and Charles Darrow became the rags-to-riches poster-boy for a capitalist work of genius.
So, it’s time to rectify that. As you launch into another herculean Monopoly session, remember the game’s true inventor. “When I started looking at the archives, it really made me appreciate just how exceptional she was for her time period,” says Pilon. “Even though she died in 1948, there are so many Lizzie Magies throughout history. We all know one. You can see the amount of work they do and they never get credit.”
But with Pilon’s screenplay on its way, it won’t be long before Magie’s work is recognised. “It’s amazing that people can pop out of history that would never have seen it coming,” she says. So, play Monopoly, enjoy it, play it again. But remember: it wasn’t invented by a self-made man. It wasn’t Charles Darrow’s creativity that dragged him out of unemployment and into fortune – it was his ability to sniff out a good idea.
Monopoly was invented in 1904 by a left-wing woman trying to change the way the world works, and reduce the gap between the rich and poor. Funny how some things never change, eh? ︎