Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

• CO-INVENTOR of the cotton gin
• Married Nathaniel Greene, aide to General George Washington, and stayed with him in Valley Forge throughout the brutal winter
• After the Revolutionary War, they moved to Georgia, but Nathaniel died within a year, leaving her with five children and two plantations to manage
• Met Eli Whitney at a party and hired him to tutor her children
• While the cotton gin was certainly her idea, and she definitely financed the entire engineering process, Greene's level of involvement in the actual design and construction is unclear. Some think she had fully developed drawings before meeting Whitney, others say she merely provided minor suggestions throughout, and some historians claim the invention was a full collaboration between not only Greene and Whitney, but also an unnamed slave.
• Unwilling to break with the perceptions that a woman of her economic stature shouldn't be involved with such dealings, she refused to include her name on the patent
• Not only did she receive no credit for the invention, she made no money off of her idea, largely because she made the mistake of showing the gin to other plantation owners who simply copied the design and made their own
• She spent much of her wealth defending the patent in court

Not So Awesome

She was a plantation owner with slaves so... yeah. That.

Bibliography: Vare, Ethlie Ann and Greg Ptacek. Patently Female. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002. Print.

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