Nikola Tesla was an incredible futurist, inventor and engineer; his work is legendary and he is regarded by many as the greatest inventor in human history. The work he did paved the way for the wireless communications we use today.

One of the most surprising, lesser known, yet most incisive of Tesla’s predictions were a look into the future of society’s changing gender roles and considers how the advent of wireless technology would empower women, liberating them to develop their full intellectual potential repressed by patriarchy for centuries. In January1926, a reporter, John B. Kennedy interviewed Tesla about these very ideas. The piece was published in Colliers magazine under the title “When Woman Is Boss”

After reflecting on the future uses of wireless technology and practically predicting the iPhone, Tesla points to the empowerment of women as one of the most significant effects of technology on the world of tomorrow:

“It is clear to any trained observer, and even to the sociologically untrained, that a new attitude toward sex discrimination has come over the world through the centuries, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before and after the World War.”

This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.

It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.”

Tesla goes on to predict “the acquisition of new fields of endeavour by women” and “their gradual usurpation of leadership” as the inevitable result of that previously repressed potential, newly uncorked by the interconnectivity and educational empowerment that wireless technology would make possible:

“Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men. But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.”

Want to read more? Tesla: Man out of Time is an excellent read.