Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women

Inspired by her own experiences and those of her contemporaries, Gabor set out to define the unique stuff of which great women are made and chart the often tangled territory in which love and ambition intersect. The portraits of the five brilliant, married women that emerged serve as both a model and a caution to contemporary men and women struggling with the same dilemmas today. Gabor combines a keen biographer's eye with an intelligent personal quest for answers to these questions. The women she chose as subjects - women of achievement with enduring marriages - are Mileva Maric Einstein, the scientist whose marriage to Einstein began with a shared passion for physics and ended in tragedy; Lee Krasner, a gifted avant-garde artist who helped cement the reputation of her husband, Jackson Pollock, before making her own mark; Maria Goeppert Mayer, who raised two children while doing landmark scientific research, but who couldn't get a paying job until shortly before winning the Nobel Prize; architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown, the woman behind such renowned urban renewal projects as Art Deco Miami Beach, who has struggled for years to emerge from the shadow of her famous husband, the architect Robert Venturi; and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who describes - in a series of unprecedentedly personal in-depth interviews - her commitment to family life as she rose in Arizona state politics and, ultimately, the judiciary. This is a book that anyone who is struggling to "have it all" will relish for its insight into women who have gone from being the smartest women in their classes to producing some of the most seminal work in their fields - and doing so even as they nurtured successful marriages to men who have been among the best-and-brightest figures of our century. This volume presents portraits of five women who were married to husbands in the same professional field as their own, while also helping the reputations of their spouses as well as achieving their own personal and professional goals. The five biographies focus on women who have achieved that balance between family and career. In the cases of scientist Mileva Maric (Albert Einstein's first wife) and artist Lee Krasner (painter Jackson Pollock's wife), both women sacrificed time and energy to advance their husbands' careers and provide harmonious domestic atmospheres (despite, in Krasner's case, a frequently drunken and abusive partner). Although the husbands of architect Denise Scott Brown and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer encouraged their wives to pursue their careers, the women were hampered by the sexism rampant in their professions. In a closing interview, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor describes how she balanced the traditional woman's role with a successful judiciary career.… (more)