SThe president of the President of the INCE, Donald Trump, on January 20 Executive decree Against, what he calls, the “illegal and immoral” Dei programs, the Trump administration was busy ordering an Orwellian erasure of the achievements of women in the public file. In January, NASA was ordered To remove the mentions of “everything that specifically targets women (women in leadership, etc.)” of his website. The pentagon has deleted Online many mentions of military women who have made history. Even a dead woman is always a threat: the website of the Arlington cemetery erased Pages on veterans.
It seems orwellian, because it reminds us of Orwell's novel 1984in which Winston Smith's work at the Ministry of Truth is to send unwanted truths to the “memory hole” to erase. Winston lives in a surveillance tyranny that falsifies history, in particular by erasing the names of people who have been “vaporized, and who were therefore considered to be never existed”.
But it also seems orwellian in a deeper way if we speak to refer to the way Orwell lived his life, rather than only in his novel. Orwell had a brilliant wife who was erased from history, and he started it.
Never heard of her? This is because the name of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, as well as her enormous contribution to the life of Orwell (she saved it) and the work (she helped to do so) went down the patriarchal memory hole. When the Trump administration orders the erasure of women, it openly does something that is generally, in patriarchy, is slyly.
In Wifedom: the invisible life of Ms. OrwellI explore to what extent a woman so crucial for the life and work of a man can be erased from history while she is alive, then, after her death, from history.
And I also ask, why is it so important in our culture to disappear from women in history? It turns out that this is how patriarchy is created. Erasing women make men in the main characters in life and history, and women in actors or supports of support.
O'Shaughnessy graduated from Oxford in literature, writer and publisher who had studied under the famous British author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Before meeting Orwell, she wrote a poem entitled “End of the century, 1984. “She had the word” obedient “of her marriage wishes abolished – the first act of the genius of the publishing she brought to the marriage. said“Revealing their relationship” as if they were characters from a book. And she was extremely courageous. O'Shaughnessy saved the life of Orwell during the Spanish civil war, but to read his account in the Memoirs of Orwell, Tribute to Catalonia You wouldn't even realize that she was there.
O'Shaughnessy was the main support for the parent and worked during the Second World War in the London Censorship Department. When Orwell proposed to write a critical essay on Stalin, she told him that he would never be published. Thus, the couple began an animal fable instead, a book unlike any other that he had written before, a print with the mind and fantasy of O'Shaughnessy, and their acute sense of others. The publisher and friend of Orwell couple, Fred Warburg, was amazed by Animal farm. “How this writer of rather gray novels, with heroes embodying an aspect of his personal character, had suddenly took wings and became-a poet,” he said in his memory. Warburg could simply not understand. “There were some,” he wrote, “after all, little in the previous work of Orwell to indicate that he was capable of this supreme effort.”
Too often, the miracle of the man and his masterpiece is carried out by making a woman disappear, even if she stands there, probably serving them dinner.
After six years of research, the popular biographies of Orwell have visible to fictions of male success and innocence (or “decency”, to use a term orwell), created by the erasure of women. We do not hear about what our hero could their duty (as mothers, teachers, publishers, mentors or financial), nor what he has done or with them (as prostitutes, wives, mistresses and, unfortunately, victims of sexual assault).
The most sneaky way of women is erased is through passive voice. The manuscripts seem to type (or improve), the idyllic writing circumstances simply exist, an escape from Stalinist pursuers “is made”. Whenever I saw “he was arranged” or “no one was injured”, I became aware – who arranged him? Who could have been injured?
And without the work of women, the successes of some of the most famous men in history have no meaning. You will never understand by reading the biographies that Orwell grew up in a family of feminist women on the left. His mother was a socialist Fabian; She and her sister Nellie, to whom Orwell was near, were suffrages. They raised a boy who thought he was also an outsider, and who – to our great advantage – could see through the stories that the world tells about itself.
While the self -feeling of O'Shaughnessy was distant and his life reflected, I saw something more sinister. Orwell's feeling of himself as a man and artist was reinforced not only by his work, but by his power over her.
It is the power that Trump's policies could give back to unhappy men from around the world: Jobs have disappearedYou have inadequate health care and you feel vulnerable, but you always have your most basic power, which is power over women.
Kidnapping Women of public recognition as astronauts, patriots or anything else, is a step towards pretension to claim that their achievements have never occurred. Orwell said best, in 1984“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” A Maga-The revised stories would read that women have always been kept at home, it is their “natural” place to work without remuneration – and at unregistered costs for them – in the interests of men and families.
And then, after having erased the women of the public sphere, the men of Maga could take the impunity of unhindered power that they feel in the private sphere and spread it everywhere, to move quickly and take / break things.
This does not mean that we must reject or “cancel” Orwell. Indeed, we need his important work to understand the world today. But we must not erase the women who show us who he really was, or the American women who have made and marked the story. Understanding the truth of Orwell's life gives more meaning to his art. We can see the women who did it and showed him another world under the “normal”; And the women he used and abused to feel like a man, and to do his job. And by recognizing how women are erased, we reveal the fight against male law: some animals are more equal than others.
Orwell's work is important to give meaning to our world, because it is addressed to the power blocks of opposing monitoring autocracies, and we carry “telescopters” at any time, revealing everything that can erase us with a non -accounting keystroke.
Or, the president can command it. The venerated institutions vulnerable to its autocratic reprisals style policy have erased women from the historic file. I just hope that they first saved their databases, so that when this time of memory hole is over, they can put the women who made history there by clicking.
And for O'Shaughnessy – and all those who fear being disappeared in domesticity, not to mention history – there is Wifedom.
