Women are increasingly taking control of their narratives, but we will need a lot more books and films to right all the wrongs
Behind every great man is a great woman – as being beside him may betray his painful mediocrity, the truer saying would go. Now, a new biography of Susan Sontag claims she was the brains behind her first husband Philip Rieff’s most famous book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She has long been known as its unofficial co-author, but the biography says textual and anecdotal evidence shows a then twentysomething Sontag is likely to have been its creator.
It is depressing, but it is hardly surprising. The crediting of the work of female scientists to men is so common it has its own name – the Matilda effect – but the phenomenon is prominent in most areas. For years, women’s contributions have been made invisible, or demoted to that intangible role of “inspiration”. Marianne Faithfull played the part of Mick Jagger’s muse publicly for years, but was, in fact, his collaborator: she was only given a credit for the song Sister Morphine almost 30 years after the song was released. Yoko Ono had to wait 46 years to be considered for a credit on John Lennon’s 1971 hit Imagine. Artist Jean Cooke, wife to the more established painter John Bratby, was pressured to stop signing off her paintings with her full name in favour of simply “Cooke” because, according to her obituary in the Times, Bratby “feared and resented the competition she offered to his reputation”.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2W4Moso
