Wifedom Quotes

“Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view. Women are supporting cast – or caste. It is a story we all live in, so powerful that it has replaced reality with itself. We can see no other narrative for our lives, no roles outside of it, because there is no outside of it. In this fiction, the vanishing trick has two main purposes. The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark, doublethinking heart of patriarchy.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“So many women I know feel the same, but we talk about it sotto voce. We avoid conflict, thinking instead that each of us has failed, individually, to fix her life properly, and under the righteous resentment there’s a shame that keeps our voices down. I pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me. Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it’, is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“To talk about this level of inequality between a woman and a man who live together doing the work of care and love was for a long time taboo: you risk being seen as ‘complaining’ or, because this work has insidiously been made part of what it is to be a ‘good’ woman, a bad one. Reams of women’s magazines offer advice to overburdened women on ‘self-care’ or ‘juggling the load’, as if the problem is personal, and can be solved by yet more effort on our part – leaving the system that makes us and takes from us untouched. I am married to a man who’s emotionally astute, deeply engaged with our children. Craig and I share the financial load, we think we share most things in our lives. This was not enough to protect me. The patriarchy is too huge, and I too small or stupid, or just not up for the fight. The individual man can be the loveliest; the system will still benefit him without his having to lift a finger or a whip, or change the sheets. This is a story I tell against myself. And against the system that made this self, as well as my husband’s, and put her into his service. Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Another was the pleasure in finding a moment in which the unspeakable truth – unspeakable because so common as to go without saying, but, once spoken, unspeakably bad – was said: a wife was an unpaid sexual and domestic worker. I should be warned.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“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. Things in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear. 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.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“In an essay on Dickens, Orwell argues explicitly that an author’s mistreatment of a woman in private life should not affect how we read his work. He dismisses a novel about Dickens as ‘a merely personal attack; concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife’.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“She’d asked the vicar to take ‘obey’ out of the marriage vows because it’s a ridiculous thing to say, a relic from when the slavery of the arrangement had been explicit. The vicar, pale lashes behind his wire-rimmed glasses, didn’t blink; he’d known her for her whole life. George was startled, but then quickly said he’d no objection. He’s not a Neanderthal. Yet here she is, obediently corralled with the other domesticated animals, without anything having needed to be said. There is a way of feeling alone that is not about being alone. But these are not things to write to Norah.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Any man, I thought, ought to treasure such a wife – most attractive to look at, highly intelligent, an amusing and witty talker, an excellent cook. Yet I did not detect any fond glances or small gestures of attention from him to her.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person’s time to work is created by another person’s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“In the end, the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“The other reason it’s hard to talk about is because my husband and I think of ourselves as equals. To draw attention to the gendered load feels like driving a wedge between us – though in truth the wedge is already there,”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“The first task of the imagination, for a writer, is the creation of the writing self. It’s quite a job, and it helps to have two of you at it: she, believing in you, so you, too, believe in yourself. This nurtured self is then mother to the work. And the work, in turn, becomes evidence of a self: I made, therefore I am. And in that sentence, she disappears.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“LIFE IS BAD BUT DEATH IS WORSE George Orwell, last notebook”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“He must at the same time face – or efface – not one, but two devastating truths: the previous incumbent died of overwork and neglect, and he, too, may not have long.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Now, she’s on a triple shift, working by day at the Ministry; doing all the housework, shopping and cooking; and editing and typing his work in the hours that are left. She left no complaints – a good friend of hers later said she seemed ‘unruffled’ by their ‘gypsy lifestyle’.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“We want people to be ‘decent’ and we want our writers to be too. Orwell engaged with this question of good work coming from flawed people. Does it also require doublethink to admire the work and ignore the behaviour of the private man? The question arises for him thinking about Dalí, Dickens and Shakespeare – and, tellingly, how they treated their wives.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“The revolutionaries quickly outlawed tipping, the capitalist custom by which the undertaxed get to feel generous at whim in a world of the underpaid.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Lydia has made peace with none of it. ‘I came in a mood still barely resigned to the fact of her marriage, vaguely antagonistic to her husband and ready to be critical of his attitude to his wife.’ What she finds at the cottage appears to be some kind of masochistic rustic fantasy in full swing, an experiment in living on the breadline and suffering for someone else’s art.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“For a writer, the conditions of production are the conditions of happiness. Even if you’re writing in penury and misery (or, as Orwell is, broke and bronchitic in a hovel), at least you’re writing, and to write is to wrest the happiness of production from your life by putting a word count between yourself and oblivion. It is the difference between action and entropy; between life and psychic death.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Kay saw clearly the cost to Eileen of her decision. ‘I thought it was rather tragic that she should give it all up,’ she said about her degree and career. ‘I don’t think I would have.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, colour and class. There is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“If you don't care for someone, will they care less for themselves?”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

“Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male, but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions secretly, and not so secretly, carry. The other reason it’s hard to talk about is because my husband and I think of ourselves as equals. To draw attention to the gendered load feels like driving a wedge between us – though in truth the wedge is already there,”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“What to do with love that has lost its object? It lives on, lost and looking.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Possibly, there is no happy end without fiction. Or, it depends where you stop the story: early for happy, or keep going for the inevitable other.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Everyone thinks of Death and the Maiden, everyone is being asked to participate in a hopeless act of hope.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“The healthiest of writers can feel terror racing to finish a book. The idea that it must go off into the world is like watching your inner life continue without you. It will emerge leaving you husked like a cicada skin, to be blown away.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life