There’s a line of poetry that’s been bobbing about at the back of my head for at least 30 years: “It can’t have been fun for the Buddha’s wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life.” Ruth Silcock’s poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was pervasive and uncontroversial. Hardly surprising: it had been a cornerstone of feminist thought ever since Charlotte Perkins Gilman lifted the lid on wifedom and servitude with Women and Economics in 1898 or, for that matter, Mary Wollstonecraft insisted women were more than male property in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman back in 1792.
I’ve been wondering lately if feminism is subject to a Groundhog Day-style curse in which all previous knowledge is periodically obliterated. In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself bitterly metabolising the revelations of #MeToo, cognisant for the first time that she as a wife had taken up the lion’s share of parenting and housework. She turned to George Orwell for insight into her oppression, only to discover lurking in the shadows the emblematic figure of his wife, Eileen, whose story she seizes on as a way of exorcising her feelings.
