Wifedom: how are wives incorporated in their husbands’ work?

Have you ever thought about the contributions that the wives of academics have made to their husband’s work and how those contributions have been acknowledged? In Episode 1 we’re looking at the #ThanksForTyping that went viral in 2017, shining a spotlight onto the often hidden work of wives over the years. We’re joined by Bruce Holsinger, an author and academic based at the University of Virginia and Miriam David, a feminist educator at University College London, who has written about gender and the academy. We discuss how the hashtag came about and how and why it went viral. We reflect on the unseen contributions of wives to their husbands’ academic work and the implications of that in the past and today.

Episode Credits

Guests: Bruce Holsinger and Miriam David
Hosts: Ros Edwards and Val Gillies
Producer: Chris Garrington
Music: The Beat of Nature, Olexy
Artwork: Krissie Brighty-Glover

Episode Resources

• Married to the Job  - Janet Finch
• Wifedom; Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life  - Anna Funder

Find out more about Thanks for Typing at The Sociological Review. 

Transcript

Ros Edwards: 0:00

Welcome to Thanks for Typing, a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers' wives, to the studies that laid the foundations of modern Sociology. I'm Ros Edwards and I'm a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton.

Val Gillies: 0:17

And I'm Val Gillies, a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Westminster.

Ros Edwards: 0:22

Over the last decade, Val and I have been researching the role that the wives of social researchers played in post war British studies. Using archive materials and diaries kept by the wives of well known sociologists, we've been piecing together their central involvement in groundbreaking social research on families, class, and community life.

Val Gillies: 0:44

In this podcast, we reveal the major but unrecognised contributions sociologists' wives have made to the discipline and consider the implications of these overlooked collaborations for the development of social knowledge both then and now.

Ros Edwards: 0:58

In episode two, we're looking at the status of wife and how the underlying institutionalisation of that status means that wives are incorporated into their husband's work. The contributions that wives make to their husbands work is forgotten, and in some cases, the work that their husbands produce wouldn't exist without them. We're delighted to be joined by Anna Funder, and Professor Dame Janet Finch. Anna is the Sydney based author of Wifedom, Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, a book about the marriage between George Orwell and Eileen O'Shaughnessy, that was published in 2023. And Janet's an honorary Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, and an academic administrator. She has published extensively on family relationships, including a book published in 1983 called Married to the Job, which revealed the way that marriage is an important feature of women's subordination.

Val Gillies: 1:55

So we found both of your books incredibly useful for our work on wives' contributions to postwar Sociology. Anna, could you tell us a bit about your really quite eye opening account of Orwell's wife, Eileen.

Anna Funder: 2:08

I started reading Orwell, at a moment of what I started to think of, in my head as peak wifedom. I had three kind of tweens, kind of young teenagers and a husband working very hard and often away, a husband in an equal relationship, I might say or what we thought was, and we had just moved back from the States and it seemed like I was dealing with all the unseen, unspoken unasked for and, and thanked jobs, which kept everyone going mentally and physically and enrolled in schools and at doctors and going to the vet, and, you know, the pest exterminator and everything else. So I started reading Orwell, thinking he's so good at looking at power from this underdog kind of position. Maybe, if I read him, I will find some way of looking at my own situation in terms of the powers at work on me as a as a wife. But basically, I read my way through his work, and then through the six major biographies of him. And then I came across six letters from his first wife, who's barely known - Eileen O'Shaughnessy, to her best friend from their time studying at Oxford together in the early 20s. And she writes to her best friend, I'm sorry, I haven't written to you sooner. It's taken her six months to write to Nora. But we have quarrelled so continuously and really bitterly since the wedding, that I thought I'd just write one letter to everyone, once the murder or separation was accomplished. That was the moment at which I just thought, I have just finished reading six biographies, which barely mentioned this brilliant Oxford educated woman, who is she, she's hilarious. What are they fighting about? In these first months of wifedom, as she gets used to her role?

Ros Edwards: 4:08

Janet I think you had a much more academic motivation. And he sort of use the the terms incorporated input and so on in your in your book, which actually, I have found really, really useful in thinking about the two way process between structure and culture and agency and so on. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about where the idea for your book came from?

Janet Finch: 4:33

Yes, certainly. And it's delightful to be asked about it now that it was published in 1983. And the research, the initial research was done before that. So we're really talking about the historical study rather than the contemporary one. But interestingly, coming back to it after a long time, I hadn't read it for years before I started preparing for this. It still has resonances, and I'm delighted to know that the two of you are taking up these ideas again. Where did it coming from? Well, it was my PhD study. I was looking around for a topic. And it is this is a time in the early 1970s, actually, when I was being very influenced by the second wave of feminism. And, it occurred to me that the category of wife was interesting for a lot of reasons. Because I was assuming that most women like me, were also in some way influenced by feminism and that they, most women would be in some sort of quandary about how to build their lives with a man and not compromise on the sort of ideas that were coming through the feminist movement. I was wrong about that, I think in lots of different ways, but it was a very good topic for a PhD. And I chose to do, why the clergy because I was, for various reasons, in contact with a number of young women who were either recently married or planning to be married to clergy. And this is what what I saw in them. Yes. So wives of the clergy was where I started. And I eventually finished it, finished it as a PhD. And after that, I turned my attention to the question of whether I could publish anything from it. And it seemed to me and this would probably be very over ambitious, that what was really needed was a comparative study with different occupations. Well, I wasn't in a position to initiate that. But I did manage to put together a collection of other research that was already published that had some bearing on occupations which were in which I might find the same sort of thing. So that's how the book came about. But it really did challenge my initial starting point. Because when I first started to do interviews with wives of the clergy, and really started to listen to what the women were saying. They weren't saying they were in a quandary. They were aware of the challenges put forward by feminism, but they weren't really embracing them in their lives, but they were doing all the things, like childraising, domestic work, but also they

Ros Edwards: 7:30

That's absolutely really fascinating, because it does seem to me that that territory of wifedom as Anna were doing office work, such as answering the telephone, taking terms it and of marriage, it seems to be absolutely key in messages, making cups of tea, they were looking after the wives supporting and being effaced to some extent by their church building, removing dead flowers, that sort of thing. And husbands, and as having a hold regardless of changes that seem they were helping their husband directly to perform his duties, to have been going on in society over you know, many, many like preparing his robes or commenting on his sermon, there decades. I just sort of ask Anna, first of all, you draw resonances between wifedom for Orwell's wife, as you just did was a considerable variation in what people were doing. But it in the 1930s and 40s, and your own life, as a wife now. How do was accepted by all I think that this was part of being married you think that happened? Why does that category of wife have to a clergyman. such a hold across time?

Anna Funder: 8:11

That is the question of the book, and a question that we all are grappling with, I think. At the end of this long, seven years of writing the book, and now seven

Ros Edwards: 8:21

Right, thank you. Luckily we have a sociologist months of talking about it, I think that heterosexual marriage is still a place where gender assumptions, so what it is to be a man, a decent man to use an Orwellian term, and what it is with us so Janet if I could turn to you. I mean, as you said, you to be a decent woman, if you look at those terms, or what it is to be a man what it is to be a woman in a marriage, you can be a good man, without doing any of that, or very much, or your fair share of the domestic and emotional labour. But if you say developed your analysis of incorporation from a range of someone is a good woman, or a decent woman or a good mother or a decent manner, or a decent person, and they're female, that definition of being female comprises the work, you can't studies, mainly from the 60s and 70s I think. I'm interested, it really have a sense of yourself as a good person, as a woman, unless you are doing all of that work for others. You are organising Christmas, you are making sure the sheets are clean, the hair doesn't have nits. You're doing your part on is still relevant today - Val and I are investigating these the PNC at school, your ill neighbour has something to eat or all of that work is part of the definition of what it is to be a good person in a way that it's not for a man and I think that somewhere in that, speaking as a novelist and not as a issues. I'm interested in your ideas about why it has this sociologist, somewhere in those still current definitions of good men and good women is the work that means that women in heterosexual marriages are doing a lot more of it as if it's part effect of gendered inequalities, marriage and wifedom. And also, of what it is to be a good person - that's what I ended up thinking. I mean, if you have any thoughts about why it's an important topic to recover, at this time?

Janet Finch: 10:27

I completely understand where Anna's coming from. As a sociologist, I find that I want to say, I don't know whether I agree with you, because we don't have the empirical evidence one way or the other. Perhaps we will have when Val and Ros have completed their work, but we don't have it now. The thing that really strikes me coming back to this is the much greater diversity of women's lives, and women's intimate partnerships than I saw, or than I thought I saw in the 1970s and 80s. You know, we've got huge differences, you can now be a civil partner, rather than a wife, you can be married to a woman, or have a civil partnership with a woman. Separation of the partnership of any sort is much easier than it was, and so on. And then we have all the questions about race and ethnicity and cultural differences. And so if I was designing a project, now, it would be a very different project, because I don't know whether the situation is all women are in can be described as a single entity. So that's where I think I'm coming from.

Val Gillies: 11:28

Wives' contributions don't tend to be that easy to research, do they because either they are completely taken for granted or they are deliberately hidden. And I'm quite interested in the process of how you untangled Eileen from Orwell's shadow.

Anna Funder: 11:45

It was very hard to find Eileen from under these six biographies where even though the letters that I was looking at just six of them were discovered, after their bios, those biographies were all written. There was plenty of material available had the biographers been interested in the women in Orwell's life. So not just Eileen. So we kind of expect domestic work, if not the cleaning of latrines and the walking of goats, which were things that Eileen did. She was enormously important to Orwell's work, which many people said, kind of in a head scratching way after they were married, improved enormously. We can't really see why. One of the biographers says, "Oh, well, whether by coincidence or influence, his work got better after the wedding". You know, there are all of these ways of belittling, the very obvious effect of having I mean, Orwell never went to University of having a brilliant Oxford English graduate who'd studied under Tolkein and others, editing your work and talking with you about it and encouraging you to do it is minimised in that way. Perhaps the most extreme thing is the fact that Eileen went to the Spanish Civil War with Orwell. And the most dramatic erasure of that is in Orwell's own account, in Homage to Catalonia of his time in Spain. And in that account, he mentions "my wife", quote, unquote, 37 times, but he never once names Eileen, no character can come to life without a name, and he won't do it. So I went and looked at what actually happened in Spain, which all the biographers ignore, DJ Taylor says, well she went to Spain, not because she was political at all, but because she wanted to be closer to her husband, and to be able to procure for him when available, treats to send to the front, like margarine, chocolate and cigars full stop. That's the end of what he has to say there. Eileen was working as a bilingual secretary in the propaganda department writing and producing propaganda at the headquarters of the political party for which Orwell was fighting. So she knew everything that was going on, she was in personal danger. She saved Orwell's life, at the end of their time in Spain, and so on. These were extraordinary discoveries for me to be making, and doubly so to be looking at how the biographers either didn't look at it, and following Orwell's lead, or ignored it or trivialised it. So it's almost an effortful erasure.

Val Gillies: 14:19

Yes, it's just so so interesting. There's so many fascinating insights in your book. Janet, your research was more empirical. And of course, it was much broader in focus. Did you find wives' involvement in men's work a challenging topic to research and how did you actually go about it?

Janet Finch: 14:40

Yes I did find it challenging, especially when I discovered I'd got the wrong questions at the beginning of it. It was a very conventional interview based study. So I had, I've forgotten how many now, about 60 I think wives who I interviewed in one area of the country. The reason why I found it so difficult was that when I realised that in fact my original presumption was that wives would find it very difficult to reconcile feminism or growing feminist interest with, with what was normally expected of them. They didn't, they didn't find it difficult or not, according to them. So typically, and this was one of the big hooks that I hung the whole thing on, they saw it as a partnership, they recognised that they didn't have to do all the things that they did do, but they wanted to this is out of choice. This is the way they described it. Sociologists would always, always always sort of lift up their eyebrows and that sort of thing and say there must be a different way of looking at this, but it was that was how they saw it. And so I really struggled to find a word to describe this. And that's how I came upon incorporation, because it wasn't ... involvement wasn't quite enough. That was too neutral. I didn't want to use any words that implied a degree of coercion in it, but I use incorporation to suggest a process, it's a process, which isn't like signing a contract, when you get married, where you have all the terms and conditions beforehand. It's not like that it grows, it evolves over time. And that's how I think the best way of looking at it sociologically is. It was a process in which wives were actively engaged, but they weren't entirely in control of it.

Ros Edwards: 16:19

Thank you. I mean, that how it happens is what I find quite valuable about that idea. I just want to circle back to the you were mentioning the diversity of women's lives today, you know, there are still these gendered inequalities, and they still operate in contemporary times, are these women who are living these other diversity of lives - are they being wives? Is it to do with being a wife do you think, that that continues on this sort of incorporation? Or do you disagree with me?

Janet Finch: 16:51

I don't know that that's that's one of the key questions I think and it's the important reason why if I were designing a study on this, at the present time, you'd have to do it in a way which puts that diversity front and centre. I mean, it will be fascinating to discover, but that just being a wife makes a difference. Or sometimes makes a difference, I mean, and I'm speculating completely. But I think if you look at what happens now, in the UK, if you look at a non diverse society, you're not seeing properly, you may have evidence on a number of different individuals who who see marriage as as a key step, and who changed their behaviour, subtly, without really knowing is as a result of being married, as opposed to cohabiting and not being married. But I don't know whether that's the case, though. And I'm being cautious here.

Anna Funder: 17:44

I'm just fascinated by what Janet was saying, if I can allow myself a question to her. I'm wondering whether the church as an institution expected to get this sort of two for one deal. If you had a clergyman in a parish, who was married, it would be expected by the institution in a way that the work that had to be done there was the work of two people, and one of them was the wife doing the flowers and helping with the sermons and making tea and coffee for parishioners and everything else. And if the clergyman weren't married, then would it be other women in the parish? Who would step up to do that? Or is that too speculative?

Janet Finch: 18:23

I wondered that too, at the time. And I did actually interview, I think two or three very senior clergy in the church who said, more or less the same thing as the wives. It's a choice. But that's how they that's how they were seeing it. And it's a partnership. So that didn't get me much further actually. I think that the reason why in the book, I was looking, I wanted to look at other occupations, because I think there are other occupations which have similar characteristics to the clergy, which maybe is one of the factors though not not a decisive factor, in whether some women do what I've described, and others perhaps do less. So yes, I think I think it isn't isn't exclusive to the church. But there's the structure of the context in which the marriages take place and all this happens or doesn't happen can be described in terms like, if you've got a job without boundaries, or a job that's based in the home, or if you live in what used to be called a tied cottage or house which is owned by the husband's employer, and which is associated with his work, or things you can I can list about eight different factors like that, which, look as if they might make the context in which certain marriages take place more likely to produce an incorporated life or a more incorporated wife.

Ros Edwards: 19:39

Earlier Janet, you mentioned about finding a publisher and for your book. I wonder Anna about publishing a book about wives was, I mean, you're you're an established novelist, so it was perhaps a bit different for you, but do you think it was easy to interest publishers in your book?

Anna Funder: 19:56

You know, I have a very patient and extremely patient and trusting and publishers in various countries and they just probably had more faith in me than I had. It was a very big project to look at Orwell's life through this prism of six biographies which occlude or omit, or trivialise, or disparage women, and particularly about Eileen's contribution to his work. So the book is doing several things, it's looking, it's resurrecting Eileen from her letters and other material. And it's looking at what was really going on in the marriage that lasted nine years and made him into the writer that he became, gave him the confidence and certainly, they co wrote Animal Farm, effectively, then also looking at the strategies employed by the biographers, whether consciously or unconsciously, to really make Eileen and her contribution disappear. Almost. So yeah, that the publishers were very trusting. I mean, it was it was until it was done, I didn't really show it to anyone, because there were these strands that had to pull together in the narrative and my publisher was very, very excited about it. More than I was and I was extraordinarily believed.

Val Gillies: 21:16

Can I just turn the conversation back to you mentioned about Orwell's Animal Farm and the co-writing? I did want to ask a question about editing, because it is one of the key contributions that Eileen made to Orwell's work. And we're definitely finding that's the case for sociologists' wives as well. They did a lot of editing. I did wonder about the difference between editing and writing, because it can be quite a blurred distinction. And particularly when it comes to projects that wives are so intimately involved in so I just wondered do you think is there sometimes a strategic downplaying of wives' intellectual labour, by calling it editing, do you think?

Anna Funder: 21:59

So just to take their case of Animal Farm, and this is not new work of mine. This is alluded to in the biographies. Again, this is something that Orwell himself after Eileen died, she died before Animal Farm was published, very sadly, he played down her contribution enormously, he said to a friend, it's a shame she didn't live to see the publication of it, because she even helped in the planning of it, which is to catastrophically and astonishingly minimise her contribution. Eileen said of Orwell that he had a remarkable political simplicity. She was a very sophisticated thinker. One of the biographers Sir Bernard Crick couldn't bear that. And he republished that quote, he simply rewrote it and said that Eileen said that Orwell had a remarkable political sympathy. But Orwell with his political simplicity wanted to publish an essay critical of Stalin at the height of World War Two after the Blitz in London, and London was still very much under attack. And Stalin, as we know, was helping the Allies win the war, Eileen was working to support the two of them financially, at the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information at Whitehall. She said that will never be published. You cannot write at this point in the war, an essay critical of Stalin. So I don't know how the rest of that conversation went. But the upshot of it was that they conceived together the novel Animal Farm, and by the time they were writing it, she was working, continuing to work to support them in the Ministry of Food. And she worked there with a rather wonderfully named woman who was a graduate in classics from Oxford and a novelist, wonderfully named for working at the Ministry of Food, her name was Lettuce Cooper, and she has a terrific account of how it was. So every day Eileen would come into work and regale them with the next instalment, then she would go and shop at lunchtime for what they were going to eat, go home after work, cook it for whichever friends had been bombed out, or whoever was there. And then after that, Eileen and Orwell would get into bed because that was the only place I could stay warm enough, they couldn't afford to heat the flat and work on the book going forward, work on what he'd done that day and what was going to come. So it's a very intimate process, step by step, page by page day by day from the concept of the book as a novel, so she's got the sense of wit and whimsy that imbues Animal Farm. He thought it was the best of his work. His publisher, Frederick Warburg, who knew Eileen and liked her says, when he read Animal Farm, he couldn't understand he simply couldn't understand it. He said, it was "as if the writer of rather grey novels had suddenly taken wings and become a poet". So all of Orwell's other work has an underdog, grumpy, disgruntled, funny stand-in Orwell character in it. Animal Farm has a cast of characters, including female characters, who are deftly swiftly acutely drawn, as well as being this beautiful little political fable, so her work there was much more extensive than editing and typing, which I'm sure she also did.

Ros Edwards: 25:16

That's such fascinating detail again about the process of how this happens. Anna, Janet, you've, you've long been part of the academic world. And I wondered whether you thought there was anything in particular about the contributions of wives of academics that you've picked up on over the years?

Janet Finch: 25:37

I think there is. And I think the question really is about how much it's changed. As a result, actually, one of the things I didn't mention before was as a result of more women being in the labour force and having jobs as a normal part of their lives. Because if we're talking about wives now of academics, I'd be fascinated to know what sort of incorporation there might still be. In the past, you certainly could find people who were prominent sociologists and other other types of academics who were seeing their marriage as a partnership and where wives were entertaining postgraduate students, that sort of thing, and sometimes helping with the office office work. But now, I don't know, I think it'd be much less likely to find people who are doing that now, because women, many women have a commitment to employment, as well as to a marriage or partnership. So I do think that there is scope for wives to do things which we would regard as incorporation in their husbands' work. There probably still is scope. But whether a lot of a lot of people take that up, I don't know.

Ros Edwards: 26:46

Certainly, from the work that Val and I have been doing looking into the past, I think the university also incorporated wives into its daily sort of running, if you like, I think I mean, university wives' clubs, since for some universities, and as you say, there was the expectation that wives would be entertaining postgraduate students and perhaps their own wives as well, which isn't so overt today.

Janet Finch: 27:14

No, it isn't. And there are a number of reasons for that. But the employment of women, I think it's an important one there.

Ros Edwards: 27:21

One of the things I get concerned about is because we're doing this work, it doesn't mean to say that we're diminishing the work of Dennis Marsden, Peter Townsend, or Peter Willmott, we're not trying to do that. It is to sort of put them alongside.

Janet Finch: 27:37

I understand that very much....

Anna Funder: 27:39

People kind of subsume the work that women do, as you say, as typing or as editing, or as domestic or as emotional, but really what Eileen was doing, she was teaching Orwell, she was guiding him, mentoring him, supporting him financially. But really, she was an intellectual lodestar. And it seems to me as well as doing all of the practical things, it kind of seems that it's very hard for people to accept that. It's hard to say, we've got this genius man. But actually, he really needed his wife, who was at least as smart and in many ways smarter, but we can't talk about that, because that is as if to diminish him in some way. It doesn't affect the work at all, we can all enjoy Animal Farm even more when we know its origins. And we can, in my book, can see very clearly her voice in her letters is the same as the sort of tone of whimsy in Animal Farm. So it takes nothing away from that. We're still running up against this patriarchal expectation of men doing it all, even though it's not possible. And it's not actually what happens. So in order to have the fantasy that they do it all alone, you have to have a lot of belittling, ignoring, minimising or in fact saying, 'Oh, she must have been happy and consented to it', which I guess goes a bit back to what what Janet was saying. So there's consent and consent, you can consent to things when you've got no option and make a good fist of your life in a patriarchal world. Or there's real consent, which means you've got to have options. So I was interested in all of those non sociological questions.

Ros Edwards: 29:05

Thank you. This has been absolutely fascinating, so interesting for Val and I to be able to talk to you both and to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks to our guests Anna Funder and Janet Finch and thank you to you for listening. Thanks also to Chris Garrington and Krissie Brighty-Glover our production team at Research Podcasts. In our next episode, we'll be looking at wives in the archives with archivist Sophie Bridges, who has been researching the personal papers of people involved in social research, including Michael Young, and Phyllis Wilmott. We'll also be joined by Chris Renwick from the University of York, who's explored the crucial role that Peter Townsend's wife Ruth played in his career and research.

Val Gillies: 29:50

Thanks for Typing is brought to you in partnership with the Sociological Review Foundation, whose mission is to share sociologically imaginative insights on our world and help pave the way towards a more just future. Find out more about all of the Foundation's podcasts at thesociologicalreview.org.