She was not idle.

She was not waiting passively for the world to change.

She was working and inventing and living a full life.

But one dimension of that life — the commercialization of her sanitary belt design — was blocked by a force that had nothing to do with the quality of her work.

The arithmetic of waiting is its own kind of evidence.

The specific number — eighteen years — makes abstract the concrete reality that this was a person’s life, not a hypothetical scenario.

She waited for eighteen years because the world she was operating in had decided, in the specific way that markets and businesses decide such things, that it did not want to do business with her.