This week I’m a guest over on Hot Girls Save Money talking about 5 ways men benefit from marriage more than women (you can read the post here). So I thought I’d return to this concept of how being a wife started out as a job.
A book that perfectly illustrates this point is Wifedom by Anna Funder. The book is about the wife of author George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy Orwell, (please note my addition of her maiden name, one of the ways wives’ previous existences are erased). George Orwell was the author of Animal Farm, that staple of high school English classes, as well as 1984, the dystopian novel that shot back to the bestseller lists upon Trump’s election.
Eileen was a writer in her own stead when she married George, a sickly, poor man with what sounds like a tendency to assault women. She was embarking on a postgraduate degree in psychology (in the 1930s!) when they married.
Once they are married, Eileen moves with George to a decrepit cottage where she spends most of her days trying to keep them warm in a house with a barely functional fireplace so that George could sequester himself upstairs to write. He is not well known or successful. She supports him financially during most of their marriage, becoming the primary breadwinner. It also becomes clear that she deeply influenced his work. Animal Farm, an allegory about Stalin, was almost unrecognizable to those who knew Orwell as a writer. However, it had much of the whimsy and creativity that Eileen was known for. The title of 1984, which Orwell wrote after Eileen’s early death after a pathological neglect of her own health because to tend to her ailing body would have required money they did not have, comes from a poem Eileen wrote called…1984.
But Wifedom doesn’t have the plot of The Wife. And Funder is not focused on trying to claim Eileen’s influence on these seminal works as much as she is trying to display how much Orwell’s work depended on the unacknowledged, invisible work of Eileen, the woman, Eileen, the wife. In other words, none of the writing can be done unless someone else is tending to the chickens, going to the market, cooking the food.
This is where Wifedom is brilliant in its interrogation of how the role of wife has always been a job, has always allowed work in the public sphere to be undertaken. And the reason that Funder wrote this book is that the many biographers of Orwell literally erase Eileen’s presence and influence. Her name barely appears even though many times her actions literally saved Orwell’s life, such as when he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Eileen comes too and works in a political office and is the one who puts herself in danger to secure passports and papers to be able to get them back home safely. Yet in Orwell’s written account of that time in his life, Homage to Catalonia, he only mentions his wife 37 times and never by name.
Never. By. Name.
Funder’s accounts of these erasures by both Orwell and his biographers, how they put actions in the passive tense so that things are done or accomplished, with no actor present is chilling. As Sarah Bakewell wrote in her New York Times review: “Authors’ manuscripts apparently type themselves and edit themselves or even suggest beneficial improvements to themselves. The women behind these miracles are unnamed and unseen.”
And yet, as I read this book about a woman’s work being taken for granted, being made invisible even though it was this work that allowed a man to build an empire, these discussions did not feel theoretical. Because I was reading it in the midst of my divorce, while I was arguing that my support, my work, my labor, should not go financially unacknowledged.
As part of divorce proceedings, a husband and wife must account for all their assets so that they can be divided. If an asset was acquired before marriage, it can be labeled separate property, if the asset wasn’t commingled with the marital assets. Any assets that are jointly owned or accumulated during the marriage are considered community property. I live in California, a 50/50 state, in other words, the law presumes that husbands and wives split community property equally (that is, if you go through the courts. Most couples do some form of mediation which is less expensive but also means you don’t necessarily get what you are legally entitled to). My ex owned his own business. The business that he built was one of our biggest assets.
Though my ex technically started the business before we were married, it had gone through a number of transitions during our union, including buyouts and new partners and new names. Upon the birth of children, I shifted to part-time work and was the primary caretaker during our entire marriage, allowing him to build that company unheeded by the demands of children for over a decade. He didn’t think I should receive anything for the business he would continue to own after our divorce. Once it was clear I didn’t agree, he did everything he could to whittle the value of said business down to zero.
Needless to say, as I read Funder’s book about Eileen being erased as Orwell is celebrated for what he was able to accomplish because of her efforts behind the scenes, it struck a nerve. She writes toward the end of the book: “Patriarchy is a planetary Ponzi scheme by which the time, work and lives of women are plundered and robbed.”
After Eileen dies, Orwell is desperate to remarry. Not due to loneliness but because he is looking to fill a job. Without a wife, he must secure a spinster sister to take over the work of taking care of the house and his needs so that he can continue to write. He and Eileen had adopted a child just a year before she died, so he needs a nanny as well, but even that isn’t enough. He needs someone else to not just tend to the child but tend to the man.
Today, we no longer need wives to feed the fire, to kill the chickens and gather the eggs. But we do still need someone to ensure the house is stocked with food, the children are looked after, the house is clean, something is on the table for dinner. We are expected to do this as women out of love for our family, or hire others to do it for us, but I want us all to name the unspoken thing: these efforts often provide the scaffolding of the man and his career.
Funder continues: “To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided - whether you wrested a fortune from a conquered isle, or words from the void. Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife.’”
Today, we are having the hard conversations about the invisible load, working to get husbands more involved, more cognizant of all their wives are carrying (see this recent New York Times article for proof). But this requires men who are willing to give up the privilege patriarchy has afforded them. This requires men to acknowledge that the current structures are designed to protect their time and keep women toiling away behind the scenes.
I wrote this piece originally in January 2024 and have updated it and republished since it aligns so well with the essay I wrote for Hot Girls Save Money.
FURTHER READING ON THIS TOPIC FROM THE MOTHER LODE:
The Problem with Part Time Work
Oof--this whittling away his business until it looks like it's not worth anything, as a move to try to keep it all to himself--resonates with me. I know at least one man who did this, with the complicity of his (male) accountant to make it all look real. I got the idea that this was a common divorce strategy with this group of men that they shared with each other. The presumption is that women are undeserving, even when they are the partner that has literally fed you and your kids!
I'm so sorry this happened to you.
we still talk about a man’s success as though it happened in isolation.
But someone was often carrying the home, the children, the interruptions, and the thousand invisible things that made his focus possible.
Invisible labor may not show up on a résumé or balance sheet. That does not make it worthless. ❤️