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.