She Did it First! An Exploration of the Women who had their work stolen
by Katie Ward
The figurative list of ‘The Greats’ – the great writers, inventors, scientists, explorers – has historically contained very few women. Does this mean that women are less intelligent, inventive and creative than men? Obviously not – it means that women were historically not afforded the same opportunities that men were to be those things. It also means that a lot of women who managed against the odds to be those things were buried in history, robbed and uncredited by their male counterparts. There are, unfortunately, many famous examples – some of which may come as a surprise. From the wives of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Albert Einstein to the first computer programmer and the woman who really discovered the shape of DNA, here are some of those nameless – named.
‘Who wrote the Great Gatsby?’ is a question that often appears at some point during pub quizzes and the like. The answer to that question is, of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or is it? Well, sort of. While the book is technically Scott’s own, it was heavily inspired and supplemented by the life and diaries of his wife, Zelda, for which he never credited her. In a review written by Zelda on Scott’s The Beautiful and the Damned, she exposed where the lauded novelist was really getting his ideas. ‘It seems to me that on one page I recognized 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. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home,’ [1] she wrote. Later in Zelda’s life, she wrote Save the Night, a semi-autobiographical novel. This was also stolen by Scott, who became incensed that she had used material from her own life that he had wanted to use for his work. He forced Zelda to edit out the parts he had planned on using, allowing her to publish her book only once it had been completely mutilated and destined for failure. Scott, on the other hand, was able to release his own book, full of Zelda’s ideas and experiences, exactly as he wanted it. That book became Tender is the Night, which was his last novel and the cementation of his legacy as a great American novelist – a legacy which rightfully should have been shared with Zelda.
Unfortunately, it was very much not unusual for a woman’s work to be stolen by her own husband. Another – highly controversial – example of this is Albert Einstein and his wife, Mileva Einstein-Marić. Claims have been made that Mileva made contributions to Einstein’s famous theory of relativity and was never credited – claims that are substantiated by his self-professed horrific treatment of her [2], his erasure of her work with Paul Habicht, and his admittance to the fact that she did ‘all his mathematics’ [3]. Painter Margaret Keane was another victim of this particular kind of theft. Her husband, Walter, took it upon himself to sell her paintings at a Beatnik club in San Francisco. It wasn’t until she visited him at this club that she realised that while her paintings, famously known as ‘Big Eyed Waifs,’ were rapidly growing more and more successful, her husband was the one receiving all credit for the success as he was pretending they were his paintings and squandering the money made by selling them. In 1970, she revealed herself to be the real creative behind the paintings, prompting Walter to sue her for defamation; a case she ultimately won.
It was not just husbands committing this theft. Rosalind Franklin famously was not credited for her work in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Her colleagues, James Watson and Francis Crick, who stole her data to make the discovery, were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work; while Franklin, a key player in said discovery, was not even mentioned [4]. Similarly, Charles Babbage is often credited with the invention of the computer – a credit which ignores the extremely large contribution of Ada Lovelace. Mathematician Anna Siffer says of Lovelace; ‘Her vision of a machine that could also process musical notes, letters and images, anticipates modern computers by a hundred years. In her now famous note “G”, Lovelace also adds a step-by-step description for computation of Bernoulli numbers with Babbage’s machine – basically an algorithm – which, in effect, make her the world’s first computer programmer’ [5].
From the arts to science, there have been many women throughout time whose contributions to the canon of human history went ignored – some dying without ever having their work recognised. All we can do for those women now is remember them, their names and their accomplishments, and celebrate the women of today’s world achieving success in those fields.
Sources Used:
[1] Gayá, Cati; ‘Zelda Fitzgerald: The Writer Plagiarized by Her Husband F. Scott Fitzgerald.’ https://www.domestika.org/en/blog/7192-zelda-fitzgerald-the-writer-plagiarized-by-her-husband-f-scott-fitzgerald
[2] Smith, Dintitia; ‘Dark Side of Einstein Emerges in His Letters’ https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/06/arts/dark-side-of-einstein-emerges-in-his-letters.html#:~:text=Mileva%2C%20Einstein%20wrote%20to%20Elsa,Mileva%20had%20a%20nervous%20breakdown.
[3] Troemel-Ploetz, Senta; ‘Mileva Einstein-Marić: The woman who did Einstein’s mathematics.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229008534960
[4] Biography; ‘Margaret Keane’ https://www.biography.com/artist/margaret-keane
[5] Siffer, Anna; ‘Ada Lovelace and the first computer programme in the world.’ https://www.mpg.de/female-pioneers-of-science/Ada-Lovelace
