Behind every great man is a great woman – as being beside him may betray his painful mediocrity, the truer saying would go. Now, a new biography of Susan Sontag claims she was the brains behind her first husband Philip Rieff’s most famous book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She has long been known as its unofficial co-author, but the biography says textual and anecdotal evidence shows a then twentysomething Sontag is likely to have been its creator.

It is depressing, but it is hardly surprising. The crediting of the work of female scientists to men is so common it has its own name – the Matilda effect – but the phenomenon is prominent in most areas. For years, women’s contributions have been made invisible, or demoted to that intangible role of “inspiration”. Marianne Faithfull played the part of Mick Jagger’s muse publicly for years, but was, in fact, his collaborator: she was only given a credit for the song Sister Morphine almost 30 years after the song was released. Yoko Ono had to wait 46 years to be considered for a credit on John Lennon’s 1971 hit Imagine. Artist Jean Cooke, wife to the more established painter John Bratby, was pressured to stop signing off her paintings with her full name in favour of simply “Cooke” because, according to her obituary in the Times, Bratby “feared and resented the competition she offered to his reputation”.

So much of women’s historical credibility has been contingent on the mood men are in; earlier editions of Rieff’s 1959 book credit “Susan Rieff” with “special thanks”. By 1961, post-split, any acknowledgement of Sontag vanished. According to the new claims, the couple’s 1959 divorce settlement ordered that she agree to Rieff being acknowledged as the sole author.

Such erasures are intentional and aggressive. Walter Keane took credit for his wife Margaret’s “Big Eye” paintings in the 60s, but was finally exposed. Margaret later explained she went along with the falsehood because she was “afraid for her life”. In 1991, the Pritzker architecture prize was awarded to Denise Scott Brown’s husband, Robert Venturi, for work on which they had been co-partners. The board claimed it could only award a single person at a time – though two men had received the prize jointly three years previously. In 2013, a petition to award her the prize retroactively was rejected.

It is perhaps no coincidence that as women have increased control on their narratives, these stories are being unearthed at an unprecedented rate: the shortlist for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction was dominated by feminist retellings of history. Bookshop shelves are now full of titles such as Nasty Women, Forgotten Women, Bloody Brilliant Women. And then in film, Keira Knightley took on the role of Colette – whose husband took credit for her bestselling work, and Hidden Figures celebrated the lives of the three black women who were integral to Nasa during the space race. It is good to see this redressing of history, but given how frequently women’s work is left out, we are going to need a hell of a lot more books and films.