On the shoulders of giants

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Anyone with some familiarity of famous quotes and bumper stickers will tell you that these are the words of Isaac Newton, whose work in the 17th century - as an insidious prank to high-school students and economics majors - gave birth to calculus and classical mechanics.

It may truly be his sentence and, as it happens, the very expression itself illustrates the point. For the metaphor of dwarfs on giants, nanos gigantum humeris insidentes, and versions of it have been traced back at least to the 12th century. Whatever our thoughts and ideas, they spring from what was before us. 

Or sometimes beside us. It is a popular part of feminist literature - scholarly and otherwise - to examine great women behind famous men of historical consequence. I recently read this in a New Yorker piece on Jane and Kurt Vonnegut: Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text. She was there: that was her.

We can find in history the tales of Constance Lloyd (Mrs. Oscar Wilde), Alma Reville (Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock), Winifred Madikizela (Mrs. Nelson Mandela) and so forth. Untold sometimes is half, or even more, of our known history.

In Sweden and Finland, the romantic-age national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg is believed to have been in strong literary creative symbiosis with his wife Fredrika Tengström (Mrs. Runeberg), who, at the time, chose herself to publish under pseudonym, perhaps to avert gender prejudice.

Some have even suggested that Emma Wedgwood (Mrs.Charles Darwin), on the side of giving birth to 10 children, was the person behind Darwin's ideas of evolution, though that claim seems refuted. Sometimes, but more rarely, couples have a more overt and public co-operation, as in the case of Marie and Pierre Curie, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discoveries.

I love reading about these individuals. Finding new people to admire is to become a bit more admirable. It leaves less mental space and time to despise those who deserve not, as nobody does, contempt. Hatred and disdain corrupts the mind, so don't do it when mere disregard will do just fine!

Gender studies, although in my opinion clearly a liberal and why not even libertarian agenda, are sometimes seen as a marxist project: the careful analysis of how inequalities can become so indiscernibly embedded in the social fabric that special attention is needed first to observe them and then to expel them.

It is, by the way, fortunate that it is this part of Karl Marx's legacy - the critique of suppressing, alienating and inequitable side-effects of any given social order - that stays with us rather than his misguided and revolution-sparking conclusions about an economic system which he did not really understand.

With regard to gender studies, it is perhaps ironic that the subject itself displays a certain historical determinism suitable for a hegelian-marxist autopsy. It follows a logic of two reformatory stages:

In a first, typically feminist phase, it uncovers unappreciated deeds and the unfair treatment of women. Then it seeks to understand the implicit - sometimes even explicit - injustices that cause this. At this point, proposals can be made as to how to rectify the situation.

It is usually there that begins the second phase and the critique ripens from feminism into a gender-neutral analysis.

When it comes to the discovery of some covert espousal prodigies behind famous people, we will recognise the beginning of the second phase when we start reading stories about men whose wits, faculties or plain quotidian heroism are behind the flourishing of some celebrated female. Or why not, of course, about the women beneath their women or men behind their men.

Since I am lazy and this scribbling is just a pastime, not a submission to a journal of feminist studies, I dare simply hypothesise based on a quick look at this segment of literature that very little has been written about the importance of smart men behind great women.

If this observation is true, it must mean one of the following: Either my historical determinist theory of gender studies is false and we should draw no conclusions about the phase of gender studies at this point. Or it might be that the theory holds, in which case the studies have not yet reached the non-feminist, gender-neutral second phase, and much work remains to complete the first.

Well, there is also a third possible explanation: Many great men have needed their even greater but unknown spouses' support, inspiration and even ideas for their own ground-breaking work. But great women - like Gertrude Bell, Florence Nightingale, Catherine the Great of Russia and so forth - perhaps they simply needed nobody?

Maybe the lives of their partners - if indeed the smartest women accept male companions at all - are just like those of most men: an insignificant electromagnetic disturbance lasting a few decades in order to propagate the genome of the geniuses of the more beautiful and more intelligent sex.