Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder observes that the labor that goes into maintaining a household has traditionally fallen to the wife and stresses that such labor is often overlooked and treated as mundane rather than important or useful. Funder argues that the necessary labor inherent in managing the domestic sphere has historically been delegated to women and remains grossly undervalued by society. The invisibility of such domestic work is one of the primary connections between Funder and Eileen; although they both in different times, with different professions and different marital expectations, the one continuous thread is the invisibility of the domestic labor that wives and mothers provide to their families.

Funder’s experience as a wife and mother shapes her interpretation of Eileen’s life and relationships. She says that “despite Craig and I imagining we divided the work of life and love equally, the world had conspired against our best intentions. I’d been doing the lion’s share for so long we’d stopped noticing” (10). The invisible labor of life is what she had largely taken upon herself: the appointments, the shopping trips, the planning of vacations and meals, and the effort to ensure that all the household chores were done. Even though she and her husband both work for their financial security and he performs a variety of household tasks, the invisible load of caretaking has fallen largely on her. When she talks to her friends who are also wives and mothers, they have similar stories. Although society has changed, supposedly empowering women beyond the role of homemaker, Funder discovers that she and her professional women friends are still overwhelmed by invisible domestic labor.

Along with providing a significant amount of financial support to her small family, Eileen also performs all the domestic labor for Orwell. Their first months of marriage in the cottage demonstrate that she is solely responsible for the cleaning, the cooking, and the animal caretaking, and she even runs the shop to supplement their income. When the outhouse overflows, she is expected to deal with it because the task disgusts Orwell too much. Likewise, when he leaves for Spain, she must stay behind to arrange for the care of the goats and chickens. When he gets sick with tuberculosis, she is responsible for arranging his medical care and maintaining the cottage. She edits his drafts, safeguards the scraps of observations in Spain, smuggles his manuscript out of Barcelona, and ensures that all his drafts are typeset on time. However, she barely appears in his writing, and he never acknowledges the massive amount of labor she provided to support him and his endeavors. This egregious omission is echoed in the biographies that deliberately ignore Eileen’s pivotal role in Orwell’s life. Although feminism has improved the lives of women in many ways—granting the right to vote, extended property rights, the freedom to divorce, a certain degree of reproductive control, and increased access to professional achievements—the fundamental role that women have always filled remains ignored. Funder’s goal in writing this book is to expose the fact that women’s domestic labor is largely ignored; ultimately, she wants to ensure that such labor is given value and attention in a supposedly more progressive world.