Margarete, Maria…. and, of course, Simone
A new twist on the simultaneous appropriation and dismissal of women’s intellectual and cultural production
Many years ago I read Joanna Russ’s delightful book How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), in which Russ documents all the strategies men use to deny, denigrate or dismiss women’s literary production as either non-existent (“she didn’t write it”) or lacking in some quality necessary for accession to the literary canon (“she wrote it, but it wasn’t any good”, or “she wrote it, but she only wrote one of it”, or, “she wrote it, but she shouldn’t have” [not her place], or “she wrote it, but look what she wrote about” [nothing important or serious], and so on).
I have since read many works on “women of ideas and what men have done to them” (to use the title of another well-known work, this time by Dale Spender [1982]). Every time, men’s simultaneous appropriation of women’s artistic and scientific production and dismissal of its importance astounds and shocks me. Astounds me because “how did they get away with it so easily and for so long” (even though I know the many and complex answers to that question), and shocks me because it is, well, shocking.
Thanks to the work of these feminists in unearthing so many stories of the disappearing of clever women, many of those women thus unearthed are now celebrated as artists, scientists, as political and intellectual pioneers, in ways they often (mostly) were not in their day: Artemisia Gentileschi, Marie Gouze a.k.a Olympe de Gouges, Ada Lovelace, Clara Wieck (Schumann), Harriet Taylor, Berthe Morisot, Camille Claudel, Rosalind Franklin, Mileva Marić-Einstein… to name but a handful.
Some have had novels written about them (Anna Banti’s Artemisia, or Catel Muller’s and José-Louis Bocquet’s graphic novel Olympe de Gouges), while others have been the subject of essays, biographies and films (as is the case, for example, of Camille Claudel). Even so, they more often than not continue to disappear into the background as more famous men they had some involvement with (brothers, husbands, scientific or artistic “mentors” or “collaborators”), or who dominated the historical moments or movements of which they were part (as in the case of Gouges, or indeed Morisot), are deemed more significant and given greater ongoing attention.
Even women who have always been well-known and admired in their own right are frequently eclipsed in collective memory and intellectual discussion by some bloke with whom they had involvement. This is the case, for example, of celebrated novelist, memoirist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir. Everyone (more or less) has heard of Le Deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) although a rather smaller percentage of that “everyone” has read it from cover to cover. It has nonetheless sold and continues to sell millions of copies worldwide, in several translations.
The impact of that work was such that the rest of Beauvoir’s writing (there is quite a bit of it, and it is both varied and excellent) is frequently overlooked today (“she wrote it, but she only wrote one of it”), or it is considered somehow lesser in relation to, for example, that of Sartre (“she wrote it, but it wasn’t as good as the work of Famous Man X [who almost certainly influenced her anyway]”).
The overshadowing by Sartre is more common than one might think: I have often heard Beauvoir’s name mentioned in conferences or articles as a preface to talking about the one they really want to discuss: Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir appears in such contexts as the intellectual or literary equivalent of the warm-up act, who got the gig because the star act approved it. True, Beauvoir and Sartre had an intellectual and sometime sexual partnership that lasted many decades. That said, Beauvoir was every bit as good a writer as Sartre (arguably better), and was, in the opinion of many, more politicised. In her book Hipparchia’s Choice (L’Etude et le rouet: “the study and the spinning wheel”), Michèle Le Dœuff pointed out that Sartre remained anchored in (sexist) individualism while it was Beauvoir who understood social structures and forces and became politically active within them, dragging Sartre with her as she went.
Sadly, one reason men continue to get away with disappearing or sidelining women’s intellectual and artistic production is that the women themselves defer to the men. Not through “bad faith” or “inauthenticity” as Sartre would have had us believe: I think of his famous (notorious) example of the young woman who on her first date remains passive as the man takes her hand, because she cannot make an “authentic” decision about what she wants. This example of “bad faith” used by Sartre is above all evidence of his own.
No, the women who defer are not doing so out of “bad faith”, but because of a lifetime education that tells us that Men Matter, Women Don’t. Beauvoir herself, for all her independence and formidable intellect, could carry on like a giggly teenager around Sartre (I once saw a filmed interview of the two of them where this behaviour was much in evidence), and credited him with having had the idea for her to write Le Deuxième sexe.
Many of you will have no doubt read Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom, on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, first wife of Eric Blair (George Orwell). Part meticulous history, part essay, part fictionalised biography, and passing fluidly from one format to another, Wifedom is incandescent. It astounds and shocks every bit as much as every other story, not only of the erasure of talented women by the men who exploited them, but also of women’s own complicity in that erasure. Men Matter, Women Don’t.
Which leads me to the other two eponymous heroines of today’s post. Both have come into my field of vision over the last twenty-four hours. First was Margarete Steffin, long presumed to be a “collaborator” on Bertolt Brecht’s work. However, this framing quite possibly (even probably) overstates Brecht’s own participation in this creative endeavour: it has been suggested that it was in fact Steffin who wrote the most important parts (even all) of Brecht’s most famous works. Brecht himself has been cited as acknowledging that he wrote “his” best work while Steffin, who died of tuberculosis in her early 30s, was still alive and working with him.
Why did I not know this? Why do these revelations not put firecrackers under our (masculinist) intellectual and cultural complacency?
Finally, I turn to Maria. Maria Anna Mozart, also known by her nickname Nannerl, was Wolfgang Amadeus’s older sister by some three and a half years. Like her brother, she was taught by her father Leopold to play harpsichord and Leopold took his pair of child prodigies on performance tours. But customs of the time and Daddy’s own son preference being what they were, Maria ended up consigned to relative oblivion as a piano teacher while Wolfgang went on to have his prodigious career. There is some documentary evidence that Maria also composed music but no traces of her compositions remain.
Maria has, however, been restored to public eye, not only through films such as the fictionalised biopic Nannerl, la sœur de Mozart (René Féret, 2010)—which is where I first learned about her (why did I not know this?)—but also through at least one award in her name. In 2016, Symphony Nova Scotia in Canada launched the Maria Anna Mozart award for women composers, at the initiative of sociologist Jane Gordon, who donated money to support women composers. Fast forward to 2024. The award is now announced as for “women and non-binary composers” and this year it was won by a male who “identifies” as non-binary. Maria Anna is, by proxy, returned to symbolic oblivion.
(Incidentally, I learned about both Margarete Steffin and the Maria Anna Mozart prize through social media, prior to doing some followup reserach of my own. In these times where social media get a bad rap it is strangely comforting to find these feminist gems there.)
In Australia, we are already well familiar with the non-binary incursion into awards and prizes initially set up for women. The country’s major literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award (so named for the pen name of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, author of, among others, My Brilliant Career), is, ironically, dominated by male authors. As a means of redress, a sister prize, the Stella Prize, was set up in 2013, with the same prize money amount as the Miles Franklin. Originally an award for women writers in any genre, in 2021 the Stella was opened up to—you guessed it—“non-binary” writers. So, any genre and any gender combined.
Joanna Russ’s book needs a new chapter: she wrote it, but she was in fact a he.
Thank you for documenting this Bronwyn. It is good to be reminded of the underhanded forces of misogyny, yet again. And today we face the new iteration of it. It makes me so sad, as well as despairing and angry.