foreword Chapter 1: women and their wardrobes Chapter 2: the body beautiful—and not so Chapter 3: ladies' matters of love Chapter 4: in the ladies' room Chapter 5: ladies look at the animal kingdom Chapter 6: women doing it for themselves Chapter 7: saintly manifestations and royal subjects Chapter 8: women's sporting life Chapter 9: celebrity sightings of the female variety Chapter 10: final feminine facts you absolutely can't live without selected bibliography

From the book: Inventive Young Ladies What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laser printers have in common? They were all invented by women. Margaret Knight was no fly-by-night inventor. Her creations are still in use today—more than 100 years later. A child laborer, she was only nine when she went to work in a cotton mill. There she witnessed a steel-tipped shuttle fly off a loom and injure a coworker. She thought that was not right, so she invented a device that prevented shuttles from coming off the loom. Later she invented a machine that turns out square-bottomed brown paper grocery bags. That device, patented in 1871, is the one manufacturers still use today. Ms. Knight had to fight for her patent, though. A man who had seen her make it claimed it was his idea and used her gender against her in court—how could a woman make such a mechanical device? She proved the idea was hers, though, and went on to be granted twenty-six other patents. Do you hate cleaning the dirty cat food spoon? I certainly do. But rather than complaining, six-year-old Suzanna Goodin decided to do something about it. She invented a spoon-shaped cat cracker so pets can eat their food and their utensils. That clever idea won Suzanna the grand prize in the Weekly Reader National Invention Contest. When she was fourteen, Becky Schroeder had an idea for an invention that is still in use today by doctors and astronauts. Wanting to write in the dark after lights-out time, she took phosphorescent paint and put it under writing paper. When she wrote, the glowing letters shone through. Doctors now use this device to read hospital patients’ charts at night without waking them, and astronauts use it when their electrical systems are turned down for recharging. Chelsea Lannon was a kindergartner helping her mother with her baby brother when she had the thought that a diaper would be more useful if it came with a pocket to hold baby wipes and a tiny powder puff. The patent process being what it is, it was not until she was eight that the patent was actually issued. In 1914, Mrs. Natalie Stolp was on Philadelphia’s mass transit when it occurred to her that men would use the crowds as an excuse to cop a feel of female travelers. So she created and patented a device that would attach to a woman’s petticoat and jab a sharp needle into anyone who applied pressure to it. Three French women got the idea in the 1980s to create a diaper that played “When the Saints Go Marching In” when wet. It was a woman who invented Monopoly. Lizzie Magie had the idea in 1903 and patented it under the name “The Landlord’s Game.” A man named Charles Darrow later adapted it. At first it was believed to be too complicated to become popular, but proving that pundits don’t know all, more than 200 million games have been sold. Four men who were supposed to be on the fatal voyage of the Titanic missed the boat because the women in their lives had a premonition of danger and begged them not to go. In three cases, it was their wives; the fourth, his mother-in-law.