She's Been Buying. They Haven't Been Listening.

The first wristwatch was made for a woman. June 8, 1810: Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, commissioned Abraham-Louis Breguet to build a repeater watch mounted on a bracelet of hair and gold thread. The archives at Breguet's Place Vendôme headquarters still hold the ledger entry. Delivered December 21, 1812. No. 2639. Five thousand French francs.

The first purpose-built wristwatch in history — designed for a woman, by her request, sixty years before anyone thought to make one for a man.

For the next century, wristwatches remained women's instruments. Men carried pocket watches; anything worn on the wrist was considered decorative, feminine, insufficiently serious. A 1916 article in La Revue Internationale de l'Horlogerie dismissed wristwatches as "an essentially feminine article of jewellery, useless for men." The British press mocked soldiers returning from the Boer War wearing "wristlets."

Then came the trenches. Men discovered what women had known for a hundred years: a watch on the wrist is superior to a watch in the pocket when your hands are occupied. By 1917, the British War Department was issuing wristwatches to combat troops. By 1930, the industry had pivoted entirely.

The wristwatch — invented by women, for women, refined by women for over a century — became a masculine object. The industry rewrote the origin. And then it spent the next hundred years treating women as an afterthought in a market they created.

Forty-seven watches examined. Eleven houses. Auction records traced. Failures documented.
(For the shorter thesis version, see The Watch · An Edit.)