Empowering women with paper bags

Bangladeshi women combine work and family responsibilities while making paper bags at a microcredit-funded business in the village of Delduar. Thanks to their incomes, the women are able to play a more important role in a country where women are traditionally discriminated against.

Recently, New York's Museum of Modern Art tracked down the woman who was central to the creation of the brown paper bag. Margaret Knight was working for the Columbia Paper Bag Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, when she "designed a machine that could produce flat/square-bottomed paper bags, a great improvement on the earlier, structurally weaker envelope-style bag design. As a result, it is Knight who is more widely recognized as the inventor of the paper bag in the general form of the one shown in [an exhibition called] Counter Space. She's also believed to be the first woman to achieve a US patent."