In the late 1800s a woman placed a newspaper ad offering to auction herself to the highest bidder as a wife, a viral stunt protesting the gender wage gap. That woman was Lizzie Magie, born in Macomb, Illinois in 1866 to an abolitionist newspaper publisher who accompanied Abraham Lincoln during his debates with Stephen Douglas. This episode follows her through jobs as a stenographer, poet, actress, and Dead Letter Office typist, her 1893 typewriter patent at a time when women held less than one percent of US patents, and her devotion to Henry George's single land tax philosophy.

In 1903 she designed The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904, with a circular board and two rule sets: a cooperative Prosperity mode and a ruthless Monopoly mode meant to show how land monopolies breed misery. Players loved the ruthless version. The game spread as a fo ...