“For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants– all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.”
–George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1936
“This is western feminism’s dirty little secret. Behind the glorious image of the have-it-all woman in the Armani suit, with a Gucci briefcase on one arm and a baby tucked under the other, too often lies a tale of the oppression of another woman. Domestic servitude has only been escaped by passing it down to another cadre of oppressed women. Battalions of low-paid women – in America most of them foreign – have taken up the domestic duties, along with the dirty washing, discarded by professional women who have fled the home. Liberation for high-fliers breaking through glass ceilings is only possible because of a flotilla of unseen, unheard women who care for their children, clean their homes and cook their meals while they live liberated like men.”
—Polly Toynbee reviewing Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild
A chapter from the book, by Ehrenreich, appeared in The Guardian.
As for “Nancy poets,” Orwell was obviously a man of his time.
