Women Behind the Scenes

 by Manon Francis

Throughout history women have been overlooked and underappreciated for their contributions towards aspects of science, the arts and humanities. Here are four women whose contributions were forgotten. 

Maria Anna (Marianne) Mozart

Nicknamed Nannerl and a musical prodigy in her own right, 4 and a half years older than her famous brother Wolfgang, she began to learn the harpsichord at age 7. Her father Leopold took her and her brother on tour around Europe, and she was regarded as an excellent fortepianist and harpsichord player, and occasionally considered the more talented of the two. In 1762, the siblings played for aristocrats in Munich, and Count Karl von Zinzendorf wrote afterwards in his diary: “The little child from Salzburg and his sister played the harpsichord. The poor little fellow plays marvellously. He is a child of spirit, lively, charming. His sister’s playing is masterly”. Society at the time rendered her incapable of pursuing music as a career and touring with her brother, and though she composed and played in her spare time until her marriage in 1784, it became more difficult as she grew older due to the demands of marriage and child-rearing. It is known that she composed and orchestrated works for her brother, and sent compositions to him so he could voice his thoughts, however none of these works, much like her legacy, have survived. 

Marie Anne Lavoisier

Marie was a French chemist and noblewoman, and is mostly known as the wife of famous chemist Antoione Lavoisier. Although mostly serving as her husband’s laboratory assistant, her knowledge of Latin, French and English ensured she and her husband could keep abreast of scientific discoveries and developments. Having previously had training from her upbringing and through her husband's work, she was able to critique many translations of scientific papers referenced by her husband. Subsequently, it was her process of critiquing papers like Richard Kirwan's 'Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids' whilst translating that enabled the discovery of oxygen gas to occur. She was also instrumental in the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's 'Elementary Treatise on Chemistry', which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field.

Caroline Herschel

Caroline was the sister of William Herschel, who was known as the first professional astronomer and was famous for discovering infrared radiation, the planet Uranus and other gas giants. Born in Germany, she lived in Britain for most of her life. She detected by telescope three nebulae in 1783 and in 1786 she became the first woman to discover a comet. In 1787, the king gave her an annual pension of £50 in her capacity as her brother's assistant, and she thus became the world's first professional female astronomer. The following year, she discovered a periodic comet that was later named 35P/Herschel-Rigollet. Over the next 11 years, she spotted seven other comets.

Zelda Fitzgerald

The wife of Great Gatsby author F Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda became known as 'America's First Flapper', when the term was coined in the US in the 1920s. Fitzgerald was known to include dialogue and phrases from people he spoke to in real life in his works, and no exception was made for his marriage. When Zelda, delirious after the birth of her first daughter and still high on anesthesia, said, "I hope she's beautiful and silly, a beautiful little fool," Scott wrote these words as coming from the mouth of his character Daisy in Gatsby. He also used excerpts from her diary: "It seems to me that on one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine, which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar." Whilst it is reported Zelda gave her husband permission to use various extracts from her personal diaries, she is never credited in any of his works.

#Thanksfortyping

Bruce Holsinger is a fiction writer and literary scholar, and started the twitter hashtag ‘thanks for typing’, after he realised the wives of authors in many scholarly books were acknowledged for typing up their husbands manuscripts. He said: "I put the kind of slightly sarcastic #ThanksForTyping along with a maybe cynical comment or two about women being anonymous or unrecognized or, you know, unnamed in their husbands' work". A number of the responses from the posts talked about the politics of academic labor and writing, the role of women as collaborators, often even unacknowledged co-authors of academic work. Kathleen Kennedy, an associate professor of English at Penn-State Brandywine, says people found it shocking that the women thanked for their labour were much more than typists, which already could be considered a hefty job. They were translators, editors, proofreaders and copy editors, she says. This was not limited to modern works - Leo Tolstoy's wife, Sofia, reportedly copied at least seven drafts of his magnum opus, War and Peace, and the blind seventeenth-century English poet, John Milton, is said to have dictated verses from Paradise Lost to his daughters, who then wrote them down.