For Lizzie to try to put her ideas out in public so brazenly was something of a risk at that time. Most women didn’t do such things. It would be seventeen more years before women gained the right to vote, and while innovations such as the typewriter and the telephone had afforded new professional opportunities for women, common thought still held that they had little to contribute to the world of ideas. As one newspaper would put it in 1912, women may have greater longevity than men because “they don’t use their brains as much as men.”

Behind the audacity of her “monopoly game” was a progressive, political upbringing. Born in Macomb, Illinois in 1866, Magie was the daughter of James Magie, a prominent newspaper owner and political mind. In 1858, before Lizzie was born, James Magie had accompanied Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Medill, the thirty-five-year-old publisher of the Chicago Tribune, as the lanky lawyer traveled around Illinois debating politics with Stephen Douglas.

From a young age, Lizzie had exposure to newsrooms. She also watched and listened during the years when her father clerked in the Illinois legislature and ran for office on an anti-monopoly ticket — an election that he lost.

Just two years after patenting the Landlord’s Game, Lizzie moved to Chicago. Meanwhile, her game thrived as folk game, played by a constellation of left-wing intellectuals who began to start calling it “the monopoly game.” One of many young, professional women who were drawn to the vibrant city at the time, Magie lived in a flat at 307 Chicago Avenue in an era when the stinking stockyards and diseased meatpacking factories of the city were becoming nationally notorious.

Finding it difficult to support herself on the ten dollars a week she was earning as a stenographer, Lizzie staged a stunt. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. The ad read:

Lizzie also said that she had “rare and versatile dramatic ability; a born entertainer; strong bohemian characteristics, can appreciate a good story at the same time she is deeply and truly religious — not pious.” She said that she didn’t go to church, but obeyed the laws of God. She was a “crackerjack typewriter, but typewriting is hell.”

The goal of the stunt, Lizzie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women.

“Money only has a relative value,” Lizzie said. “Once $10 might have been opulence. I do not know, but $10 in a city like Chicago or New York can buy only the bare necessities of life. If we could be reduced to the character of a machine, having only to be oiled and kept in working order, $10 perhaps would be sufficient for the purpose. We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition. They see on every side women enjoying pretty clothing, comfortable homes, refined entertainment, and other luxuries. These they want also . . . But they cannot have them.