No matter what egregious things women feel their husbands have done, these men are “amateurs” compared to the men featured in her new book, author Marlene Wagman-Geller says.
Behind Every Great Man: Forgotten Women Behind the World’s Famous and Infamous (Sourcebooks), Wagman-Geller’s fourth work of non-fiction, profiles 40 women who were married to prominent men but whose own accomplishments – or the impact they had on their husbands – have been largely overlooked.
In order to make it into the book, Wagman-Geller said, the women had to fit the following three criteria: they had to be married to a famous man whose story is part of the “cultural literacy,” they had to have a fascinating story in their own right, and they had to be “a forgotten footnote in history.”
The 40 women profiled include Constance Lloyd, wife of Oscar Wilde; Kasturba Kapadia, wife of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi; Eva Braun, wife of Adolf Hitler, and “Jenny,” wife of Karl Marx.
Several of the stories may be of particular interest to the Jewish community, Wagman-Geller said, like the love story of Simon Wiesenthal and his wife, Cyla Muller.
“It was a love story born from the ashes of the Holocaust,” she said.
A former English teacher at North Toronto Collegiate, Eastern High School of Commerce and Northern Secondary School, Wagman-Geller, 60, now lives in San Diego with her husband and teaches history at a local high school.
The genesis of the book came one day when it dawned on her that “everyone knows about Gandhi – he’s so iconoclastic – but nothing about Mrs. Gandhi.”
She began doing research on her and discovered “that she had this fascinating story.”
In some cases, Wagman-Geller said, research for the book required a fair bit of digging, as some of the women had little written about them.
For Gandhi’s wife, for example, Wagman-Geller said, she had to rely heavily on “a very slanted biography” written by Kapadia’s grandson.
The lives of several of the women contained elements of tragedy – in some cases because they tirelessly devoted themselves to men who were dysfunctional, abusive, negligent or all of the above.
“Just as no man is a hero to his valet, no man is a hero to his wife,” Wagman-Geller said. “When some of these women said ‘I do,’ they had no idea what they were agreeing to. Though I guess a price has to be paid for marrying a genius.”
As for whether she considers any of the women in the book to be geniuses or exceptional, Wagman-Geller said, “I think, for the most part, a lot of them were just historic helpmeets. But then, take Mrs. Einstein [Mileva Maric, Albert Einstein’s first wife]… She went to the European Polytechnique and was a brilliant physicist in her own right. He would write in his letters to her, which were kept in an Israeli vault for years and opened about a year ago, ‘When our great theory is exposed.’ So a lot of people in the scientific community went, ‘Was she equally a partner in his brilliance, but he monopolized all the glory?’”
Another woman whose accomplishments were overshadowed by her husband’s was Oskar Schindler’s wife, Emilie Pelzl, who Wagman-Geller said “was instrumental in saving Jews, but her husband’s big ego didn’t let that be known.”
Her ultimate takeaway, Wagman-Geller said, was that these women were “shortchanged by the times they lived in.”
Still, she’s unconvinced that society has progressed beyond pushing women’s stories to the side. She gives the contemporary example, also featured in her book, of Bernie Madoff’s wife, Ruth, who went from being the “Queen of Manhattan” to losing everything.
“Her life is just as fascinating as America’s worst scumbag’s, but the spotlight has been on him, not her… So yes, I still think men are a bit egocentric and are still garnering the spotlight.”