cover image Einstein's Wife and Other Women of Genius

Einstein's Wife and Other Women of Genius

Andrea Gabor. Viking Books, $24.95 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-670-84210-0

The difficulty of reconciling a career with marriage is dramatically illustrated in this study of five pioneering women. Gabor (The Man Who Discovered Quality), formerly a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report and a married mother of two, combines excellent research with lively writing in these portraits of five women married to husbands in the same professional field as their own. 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. (Aug.)