Book review: Behind Every Great Man by Marlene Wagman-Geller - the unsung heroines

Behind Every Great Man
by Marlene Wagman-Geller
Sourcebooks

International Women's Day fell earlier this month, and a viral video from the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation had the message "we're not there yet", meaning we've a long way to go before the end of the discrimination and oppression of women.

This is the sentiment inspired by Marlene Wagman-Geller's Behind Every Great Man: The Forgotten Women Behind the World's Famous and Infamous, a well-crafted exploration into the lives of 40 women who were coupled with some of history's and pop culture's most prominent personalities.

The majority of these women did not have happy lives. The book offers exceptions (baseball's Jackie and Rachel Robinson and US General Douglas and Jean MacArthur stick out as relatively happy couples, though they too had their battles), but most of the men either were unfaithful to their partners, abandoned their partners and/or children in times of need (of Alfred Hitchcock and wife Alma's first and only child being born: "He was absent during the delivery, explaining he could not bear the suspense") or both. Or worse.

Francoise Gilot, Pablo Picasso's longtime girlfriend, decided to leave him after his public affairs and private verbal abuse, and he blacklisted her in the art world and cut off all contact with her and their children for the rest of his life.

After Mahatma Gandhi's wife, Kasturba, picked up the same frugal dietary habits at home as he did while imprisoned, he wrote: "I am not in a position to come and nurse you. If it is destined that you should die, I think it is preferable that you should go before me."

In a drunken, jealous rage, F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed a gun at girlfriend Sheilah. (Her response: "Take it and shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn't pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.")