CORPORATE CONTROL---expansion of IP is a way to control women’s bodies and cultural knowledge. Only reframing IP interaction through feminist view solves.

The processes of intellectual property production during the early twentieth century seem very simple. Without the realm of the digital and genetic, the path to obtaining intellectual property rights appears more straightforward. Yet, during the early twentieth century, some of the same issues of translating social and cultural knowledge into readable scientific data by technical communities inside and outside of corporate organizations existed. In this Article, we will return to the early twentieth century to examine this type of translation. Translation, or the process of converting information from one form or medium into another, is the central focus of this Article. In this case, it is the translation of privately understood, but publicly unspoken, social and cultural knowledge about women‘s bodies into data points that can be integrated into patentable artifacts. We view the translator as the fulcrum upon which social and cultural knowledge is integrated into intellectual property. Often, this translator ends up being an individual. In the context of women‘s hygiene practices, one such translator was Lillian Gilbreth.

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A mother of twelve who held a Ph.D. in psychology and formed a partnership with her husband exploring motion studies and efficiency models, Gilbreth was well qualified to facilitate social, cultural, and scientific translations.1 Her marriage to Frank Gilbreth in 1904 began a personal experiment in work and family life partnerships that placed efficiency at its core.2 Her children each came to learn their specific jobs in the family and how best to undertake them, and she credited her home factory system as affording time for her career. Frank and she claimed great success in bringing efficiency studies together with psychological training to improve management and production in the nation‘s burgeoning corporations.3 This successful teamwork ended upon Frank‘s death in 1924 at age 55. Though an expert in her own right, Lillian was left a smart woman researcher in a man‘s world. After Frank‘s passing, she strategically redirected the Gilbreth brand beyond time-motion studies to include new social-scientific work that early twentieth century technoscience corporations found valuable.4

Based on this new trajectory, Johnson & Johnson hired Lillian Gilbreth in 1926 to better understand women‘s purchasing patterns. The company wanted to know what women purchased and why, and more specifically, how it could design and sell a better sanitary napkin to women. Johnson & Johnson also wanted to improve the management of its employees, who were also increasingly women.5 Within the context of this research, Gilbreth, however, was interested in educating women as consumers and providing them with tools that would enable more efficient spending. Better products, she argued, would decrease housework and give them more time.6 The Johnson & Johnson contract offered her an opportunity to slip this agenda into the company‘s business model. Gilbreth had always been interested in fatigue, even writing about how it affected production and productivity in her dissertation.7 A question she had harbored was one not often asked: was there a relationship between menstruation and fatigue, especially as it affects women in industry?8 More importantly, was this a problem that could be solved with a better sanitary napkin? After Johnson & Johnson held a conference that same year on the study of sanitary napkins, it commissioned Lillian and her team to conduct a study on women‘s opinions about and use of menstrual hygiene products.9 She described her findings, simply called ―Report of Gilbreth, Inc.,‖ as an investigation into that very matter. Its goal was ―to serve as an illustration of the method of research which may be applied profitably to other problems.‖10 Gilbreth positioned herself as an expert who could extract information from women and then adeptly translate this knowledge into readable data for corporations that incorporated it into new products beneficial to many women.

What is interesting about this transformation is that it presents an opportunity to redirect early twentieth century discussions of intellectual property rights away from the traditional sites of patents, copyrights, and trademarks, to the less well-traveled locations of society, culture, and explicitly, the knowledge women have about themselves and their bodies. It subsequently broadens discussions about intellectual property to include the cultural contexts of women, gender, and feminism. This Article aims to disrupt the historical power of the ―patent to control discussions of intellectual property production during the early twentieth century and endeavors to reframe analyses of gender and intellectual property to examine locations not specifically defined by the federal protections of patent law.