She was an inventor who faced those normal challenges while also operating in a market in which her race was an active disadvantage at virtually every stage of the commercialization process.

The eighteen years Mary Kenner waited after her sanitary belt patent was granted is comprehensible only in this context.

Why Inventors Disappear from History

Mary Kenner’s relative obscurity is one of the central facts of her story, and it deserves careful analysis because the reasons for that obscurity are not accidental.

The processes by which some inventors become famous and others become forgotten are not random.

They reflect the specific ways in which the historical record is constructed, maintained, and transmitted.