Wifedom

unpacking the erasure of wives

I read Wifedom by Anna Funder toward the end of last year and it became one of my favorite books from 2023. I remember reading the review in The New York Times back when it was released in August and immediately knew I needed to add it to my stack. It was about a wife’s erasure. Erasure is the subject of my memoir, or more precisely, how I learned to erase myself. I also interrogate how women’s roles sometimes require their erasure. This was a book for me. 

The book is about Eileen O’Shaughnessy Orwell, George Orwell’s wife (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. I have to admit I have read neither classic. My interest in this book had nothing to do with George. It had everything to do with Eileen. 

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. Despite his posthumous success, Orwell does not come off as a good man, and some of the concept of the book is the erasure Orwell's biographers did to his more unseemly parts, to excuse away or diminish the impact of his actions on others (specifically women) in order to hold the writer in high esteem. 

Once they are married, Eileen moves with George to a decrepit cottage where she spends most of the day 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 her influence led him to write his classics. 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, comes from a poem Eileen wrote called…1984.

But Wifedom doesn’t have the plot of The Wife. And the author is not obsessed with 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 unseen, 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. 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 follows and works in a political office and is often the very person putting herself in danger to secure passports and papers to be able to get them back home. Yet in Orwell’s written account of that time in his life, Homage to Catalonia, he only mentions her 37 times and 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 become the genius he is now considered for being, was not theoretical for me. It hit home. Because I am currently in the process of trying to fight so that my presence, my work, my labor, isn’t made invisible in my divorce.

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 are considered community property. I live in California which is a 50/50 state, in other words, husbands and wives split community property equally. My husband owns his own business. The business that he built is our biggest asset. 

Now, is it separate property, because he started it before we were married and all of the labor he did to build it was his? Or is it community property because he was able to build said company on the back of my unpaid labor at home? 

This calculus is different when a wife keeps working full time upon the arrival of children. But if a spouse (usually the mother) shifts to part time work or stops working to support the family, it is her labor that allows her husband to build said company. (If I had been the one to have my career take precedence, and I wrote a bestselling book during the time we were married while he downshifted his career to tend to the home and children, according to California law, he would be entitled to the royalties of that book that I wrote during our marriage). It is very messy to disentangle all of this, and let me tell you, people have feelings. The divorce process can be uncomfortable as all these unspoken, unacknowledged agreements are brought into the light and unpacked. But needless to say, as I read Funder’s book about Eileen being taken for granted, being erased as the man himself is celebrated for what he was able to accomplish because of her efforts behind the scenes, it struck a nerve.

“For this bolstering of male centrality and of the male imagination to make the work, it is crucial that the supports to it remain invisible,” Funder writes. “A high-wire act is not awe-inspiring if you can see the wires. Invisible and unacknowledged, a wife is the practical and often intellectual wiring that allows the act to soar; and for it to be truly astonishing, the wires, and the wife, need to be erased both at the time, and then over time. Her work is barely acknowledged by the man whom it benefits, and she is later erased by his biographers from his achievement. One might think of this as millennia - or in Orwell’s case nearly a century - of male pattern blindness.”

But lest we think Funder’s book only interrogates the past, she writes this:

“To examine a marriage of eighty years ago involves the faux-comfort of distance (surely we are more evolved than that?) along with a frisson of horror: things have not changed nearly enough. I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of heterosexual relationships I know in which the man creates the domestic and other conditions for the woman to enjoy her time in life to an equal extent as she does for him….What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me. I live in a different age, in which women are said to be equal, despite doing an unfathomably disproportionate load of the adults’ work in households, caring for the generation to come, and in many cases, the one before. The gap between what is said to be and what is, is the gap we colluded in making by keeping all this work invisible. And it is a gap into which you can fall. 

…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 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. 

Now, 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 these efforts allow the scaffolding (of the man and his career) to stand. 

Funder is attempting to right this grave injustice and in doing so, she illuminates just how problematic wifedom continues to be.

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 have conversations about the invisible load. Today, we are working to get husbands more involved, more cognizant of how they add to wives’ burdens, rather than lightening the load. It seems to be the work of this generation of mothers to build a new model for marriage and motherhood. But it is hard labor and we must have men who are willing to give up the privilege patriarchy has afforded them, to recognize that to accept and receive that privilege is to keep women toiling away behind the scenes.

author

Paige on Instagram: “The cliff notes version of why I don’t often take advice from men #millennialmom #workingmom #successfulwomen #womeninbusiness”

January 8, 2024

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