In the fields of film, literature, music and science, history is full of brilliant careers derailed by social mores and the encumbrance of "women's place."
Gradually, however, many of these women are emerging from the shadows - Albert Einstein's wife Mileva Maric, George Orwell's wife Eileen, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's talented sister, Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia "Marianne" Mozart.
Maria Anna Mozart was a piano prodigy from an early age. Sister and brother toured Europe with their father, performing for royalty. But when Maria Anna reached "womanhood" she had to retire performance and prepare for marriage and motherhood, even though she had been fêted as one of the most skilful pianists in Europe.
The recent documentary, Mozart's Sister, directed and co-produced by Madeleine Hetherton-Miau, is an example of how women's stories can be lost but recovered. Discoveries of musical scores and handwriting analysis have helped put the pieces of the Mozart family jigsaw in place.
"How must it have felt for her when all of a sudden she's told she has to stay home?" wonders Dr Sheehan.
"Letters show that Wolfgang clearly misses her. She has been 'his person' and they've done everything together. He's composing pieces with her piano playing in mind, basically saying to her 'You have no peer as a pianist … I imagine you playing this …"
Mozart's Sister, says Dr Sheehan, is framed in a contemporary way - it's telling a story about Maria Anna Mozart but one that connects with women musicians in the contemporary world.
"In an opening scene, two actors are playing the siblings. A very young women is walking through the corridors of a school. At first it seems gratuitous – was an actor needed for that? - but then you see that this person you have dismissed as an actor is in fact a young composer and the conductor of an orchestra; she is a modern-day prodigy.
"It's a clever move that makes you confront your assumptions."
Double standards and dimmed light
One contributing factor to talented women's invisibility is the long-held belief that only a man can be a creative genius.
In Hollywood, says Dr Sheehan, budget blowouts and bad behaviour have long been tolerated from male directors. Women in film have also had to contend with the conviction that they were no good at business, didn't have the technical skills needed nor the creative capacity men have. They are held to impossible standards not expected of their male counterparts.
Neither is music immune to sexism. Says Dr Sheehan, "One example is from 2015 when Beck beat Beyoncé for album of the year at the Grammy Awards. The pro-Beck camp countered the social media backlash with a meme with the long list of songwriters and producers needed to make Beyoncé's Beyoncé. Beck's side of the ledger for the total number of writers and producers on Morning Phase said simply 'Beck.'
"That's meant to be evidence of what a genius Beck is. That he did it all himself. The lone male creative genius."
With its case that Maria Anna was his teacher, developmental peer, musical partner, and ongoing inspiration, Mozart's Sister challenges this same trope about Amadeus Mozart.
We have nothing like parity in the arts, in terms of numbers of and visibility of women and in terms of women in key positions of power.
The literary world is rich with writers who thought they'd get further if their readers thought they were men. Enter the pseudonym: Miles Franklin (Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin), George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Anne and Emily, who wrote as Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell, respectively.
Carmela Ciuraru, author of Nom de plume: A (secret) history of pseudonyms, has observed: "Charlotte …. was determined that they would publish as men in order to get reviews that wouldn't be condescending."
If not pseudonyms then gender-confusing initials. Among the most recognised are L. M. Montgomery, S. E. Hinton, E. L. James, P. L. Travers, and, in more modern times, the controversial J.K. Rowling. Initials are also popular with women writers of science fiction and crime.
One woman who had no intention of subterfuge was Madame Clicquot whose story was told in the film, Widow Clicquot.
After the death of her husband, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, his widow assumed the reins of the wine business the couple had built. Steering the company through taxing political and financial reversals, she takes on her critics and revolutionises the Champagne industry in the process becoming one of the world's first great businesswomen.
There are, of course, many great businesswomen today. Great strides have been made, says Dr Sheehan, but we are still not seeing equal pay for equal work, and there is still structural sexism.
"We have nothing like parity in the arts, in terms of numbers of and visibility of women and in terms of women in key positions of power. Women's place in STEM fields [science, technology, engineering and mathematics]is an issue."
Women's professional and creative lives continue to be constrained, too, by having to carry the bulk of domestic and care work.
Much of Maria Anna's time would be taken up with raising children, running the household and teaching piano. Her husband [the twice-widowed magistrate Baron Johann Baptist von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg] had five children when they married and they had three more together.
From admiring letters her brother wrote her, we know that she composed her own music. What might we have seen from her if she'd had the same opportunities as her brother?
"When women's stories are lost," says Dr Sheehan, "it's up to us to fill in the gaps."
Dr Rebecca Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts , Macquarie University.
