Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

INTRODUCTION

The summer I turned eighteen, my mother told me something that would take me years to make full sense of.

Rose, she announced firmly and approvingly from her position in the driving seat of our secondhand car, you are an excellent man manager. We were driving across Brussels to a neighborhood called Molenbeek, where my then boyfriend lived. I didn’t have my license yet and my mother, a single widow and a full-time office administrator, claimed that driving me to engagements when she wasn’t working was something she did with pleasure, as a way of getting quality time in. We had grown close over the three years we had become sudden one-on-one roommates—after my father had died and my two older sisters had gone off to college. To accompany me with the car, as the Belgians would put it, was a tolerant and generous gift on her part. Unfortunately for her, driving me had mostly meant taking me to my basketball games in the most unsuspecting corners of rural, postindustrial Wallonia, the French-speaking half of Belgium, where cows grazed on grass as we entered metal-walled, boxlike gymnasiums, bouncing balls echoing through the fields to the ears of no one in particular.

But today, basketball season was over, and I was off to see Eric, my on-and-off boyfriend of three years. He was having friends ’round to celebrate moving out of his parents’ home and into his first apartment. Halfway through our ride there, my Nokia cell phone rang. Eric was on the other end. A string of panicked sentences made their way through the airwaves.

I don’t know how to cook the chicken! I don’t know what to do! People are arriving in an hour! It was a stupid idea to have people over! I should never have done this! This was your dumb idea!

Gray streets of Brussels flashed by. I quietly listened and took in the information. Gradually, a picture started to form in my head. Eric, a man who believed that meals were not real meals if they did not contain protein of a formerly alive kind, had bought chicken to make for dinner but did not know how to cook it. I had been a vegetarian since I was eight. Clearly, I didn’t know how to cook chicken, either. I was pretty sure this had been his initiative, not mine. But that’s not what I said.

There is absolutely no need to worry. It’s all going to be completely fine. I can make the chicken when I arrive. Couldn’t be easier. What else do you have in the fridge? Have you prepared anything? I asked.

Dessert, the answer came back, a little calmer this time. If I felt exasperation, I didn’t let the feeling live for more than a nanosecond. Patience, reassurance, and love were what I knew I should give, and that’s what I expressed.

Amazing, I chirpily said into the phone. I love it when you make that. Okay. Don’t worry about the rest. I will figure something out to go with the chicken and make some sides when I arrive. I have pesto with me. We can do something with that. So delicious.

His mood shifted: I could almost hear it lift. He was totally calm now. The panic had gone. His voice was slower; it had gone back to a cadence that suggested a more relaxed, happy state of mind.

Are you good? Sorry you had that scare, I continued, bringing my task to a secure conclusion. I will be there very shortly.

He muttered acquiescence, possibly thanks. I can’t wait to see you, I finished, and pressed the button to end the call.

I put the phone back in my lap, my shoulders dropped, and I breathed out, letting go of some of the anxiety I had been suppressing and feeling relief that I had contained the situation. In my head, I hadn’t even arrived at the part of how I was going to cook this dinner. I had absolutely no idea what to do with raw chicken, the very fleshy peachy vision of which was enough to make my stomach turn. But that wasn’t the point. The point was rather getting my boyfriend to feel good, calm, and collected again. What was important—I had known immediately upon picking up the phone—was conveying that the situation was under control to him, even if it wasn’t yet. The concrete cooking activity ahead was truly secondary.

I looked at my mother. She smiled. That’s when I remember her saying it: You are an excellent man manager. You handled that brilliantly. I couldn’t be more impressed.

Man manager, I repeated back to myself after she said it. I turned my body in the passenger seat toward her. I had never heard the term, and I had no conscious idea it was something I should be striving toward, let alone something I had been performing. But I felt the glow of the compliment, and some kind of a shift in her words, a complicity, perhaps even a new form of respect.

We moved on to discuss ways to cook chicken and what to do with the pesto. She told me about timing and oven temperatures, and even how I should handle the chicken to cut it. My mother incidentally also didn’t eat meat, for health reasons, but she had learned how to prepare it and cook it to make the stomachs of the people around her happy.

As unremarkable as it may sound, I never forgot the pesto chicken man manager exchange between my mother and me. Today, it’s clear to me that this is the first time I can pinpoint the emotional labor I performed, as a part of my gender and to the benefit of a man, explicitly being acknowledged and elevated.

Of course, I didn’t know what to call it at the time. Indeed, it would be another decade before I would read about emotional labor and emotion work in any official context. And even longer before the term would explode into the mainstream as an invisible form of work we desperately needed to reckon with before we collapsed from its effort. But that day, those words, I believe them to be beautifully momentous, because that short comment was in fact one of the most significant mother-daughter conversations my mother and I would ever come to have. With those words, I had passed the final secret test in a rite of passage I had never been told about, and I was welcomed into womanhood.

I may be one of the few to whom the punch line of this lesson was marked explicitly, but women across the world are taught from a very young age to regulate, modulate, and manipulate their feelings in order to have a positive effect on the feelings of others. Women, endlessly told to smile but also tasked with making other people smile, are held accountable not only for the expression of their own feelings but also for the feelings of others.

This happens in families where women are expected to ceaselessly put their energy, effort, and time toward catering to the building of a pleasant emotional world for the group—whether in invisibly forging and reforging a sense of emotional self, belonging, and connection in others, or silently taking on necessary chores and activities everyone benefits from but no one wants to do. It happens in relationships where women are trained to manage volatile moods and tempers and chronically put their significant other’s feelings, experiences, and desires before their own. It happens at work where women, in addition to their actual job descriptions, are pushed into performing the roles of mother or sexpot for the enjoyment of others but rarely for any real benefit to them. It happens on our screens where the intellect, morality, and humanity of women are judged based on how these women—their expressions and presentation—make viewers feel, not based on what they have to say or what they have done. It even happens on the street where, starting at a young age, girls and women are told to smile by male strangers—and are then taught through traumatizing experience that if they do not, punishment may ensue.

This is emotional labor: the primordial training that, before anything else, women and girls should edit the expression of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild first coined the term four decades ago to describe the skill American workers were required to perform in the service sector as it was exploding and slowly replacing the manufacturing one. A pivotal part of jobs was no longer just physical, intellectual, or even creative, she pointed out, but also unambiguously emotive. Employees were now expected to change the outside expression of their emotions in order to provoke an emotion in their clients, customers, passengers, debtors, or patients.¹ Hochschild related this kind of work back to an equivalent and feminized emotion work we had long been used to seeing women do in private, without compensation, alongside other forms of unpaid work.² Lacking other resources, women make a resource out of feeling and offer it to men as a gift in return for the more material resources they lack, she wrote at the time.³

The study and understanding of emotional labor have remained largely relegated to academia since the terminology was first introduced— a fact that has been immensely detrimental to conversations we urgently need to have across society about continuing harmful inequalities. With these ongoing emotion-geared performances, our position as women in both professional and personal settings is firmly established in the world: the caregiver, the appeaser, the listener, the empath, the subordinate. Is it bad to express empathy? No. Is it bad to use emotions to help others? No. But the expectation that we as women, and we alone, are the main bearer of this burden is no longer sustainable. Our emotional bank accounts are overdrawn, and yet our survival and advancement in this society continue to depend on us doing this invisible work. Such expectations point to an unsettling and enduring distribution of power we have become inured to. These expectations are not only the consequences of living in a male-dominated society. In many ways, as I will explore in this book, they are one of the main reasons we are still in one.

The last one hundred years have seen profound changes in the lives of women in the United States and beyond. American women were granted the right to vote in 1920, in a move that initially mostly benefited white women, but was eventually broadened out to include all women in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. Women have gone from representing one third of the workforce in 1950 to just under half today.⁴ As of 2019, women represented half of the college-educated workforce. Starting in 1974, we no longer needed a husband or a male family member’s signature to apply for credit or a credit card.⁵ In 1972, birth control was legalized for all, and in 1973 abortion became legal, giving women greater control over their own bodies and the planning and course of their economic, social, and political lives.

But that last right endured for only fifty years. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court shockingly reversed federal abortion rights, suddenly depriving millions of their right to self-determination and bodily autonomy. How could such a snatch back in fundamental rights occur? Hasn’t the issue of gender equality been settled?

It has not. We live with the illusion that we have reached gender equity, but so many indicators around us point to the contrary. We are in fact still living in the midst of a thriving patriarchy. That we are is a strange concept to reconcile. Those of us fortunate enough to have been brought up in wealthier economies and democracies have likely also been accustomed to our governments and institutions pointing out how comparatively unequal other societies and cultures are, rarely turning the mirror on themselves. We are also acutely aware of how many more rights and choices we have compared to our mothers and grandmothers. Acknowledging and honoring the sacrifices of parents has especially become a part of the identity of children, including daughters, of first-generation immigrants. Those of us who are white are reminded, quite rightly, that we are accorded more access and opportunities than our sisters of color. Black women are forced to witness a system cracking down on their Black brothers in a way that can corner them into diminishing the urgency of their own struggles.

These comparative advantages are fair and important to point out. But they do not change the fact that women continue to be placed below men, that our experiences are diminished and often expunged for the sake of men, and that the fundamentals of gender power distribution have remained intact.

Men are still considered heads of households. When men are absent from households, the household becomes regarded as an incomplete, defective unit.⁶ Women are still expected to take on their male partner’s name upon marriage, and even if increasing numbers of women,⁷ albeit a minority,⁸ are opting to keep their own last names, men are still overwhelmingly the ones to pass down their last names to their offspring—meaning the clan’s name is the man’s, and women’s contributions are, at least nominally, erased generation after generation.

To date, the United States has only ever had male heads of state. The January 2022 US Congress counted the highest number of women it had ever seen, with 149 women holding seats, representing 26.9 percent of all members,⁹ just over a quarter. As of February 2022, there were 31 women holding CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies, representing an abysmally low 6.2 percent total.¹⁰ In 2021, the ten wealthiest people in America were all men and were all white.¹¹ On the flip side, women continue to be more likely to be living in poverty than men and are more likely than men to be among the working poor, with the greatest rate among Black and Hispanic women.¹²

Yes, we have made progress, but this is a society that is still plagued by male domination, and in which it is no coincidence that women are expected to take on the lion’s share of emotional labor.

And frankly, we have reached breaking point.

During the worst years of the COVID-19 epidemic, economists reported that women were quitting their jobs at twice the rate men were.¹³ By the beginning of 2022, while men had recouped job losses, there were still one million fewer women in the workforce than there had been two years prior. In the space of just a couple of years, women’s economic advancement was said to have been set back by a generation.¹⁴ This disparity was due to women being far more concentrated in the lowest-paying, high-contact service jobs on the front lines of the epidemic¹⁵ and was also due to women being far more likely to assume increased childcare and caregiving responsibilities.

These crises only exacerbated what had silently, inequitably long been going on. A 2020 analysis in The New York Times found that if women in the United States had been paid minimum wage for the unpaid work they provided at home in 2019, they would have made $1.5 trillion.¹⁶ That same year, an analysis by Oxfam calculated that women’s unpaid caregiving work alone was adding value to the global economy to the tune of at least $10.8 trillion a year, a figure three times larger than the money generated from the tech industry and equivalent to the revenue of the fifty largest Fortune 500 companies.¹⁷

This figure, while huge, is an underestimate; because of data availability it uses the minimum wage and not a living wage, and it does not take account of the broader value to society of care work and how our economy would grind to a halt without this support, the report stated.

We have fought for gender rights, made key advancements, but the unseen and unequal burden of emotional labor continues to hound us. Women may have entered the formal workplace alongside men, but they are still expected to provide almost all of the either unpaid or underpaid support work that enables economies to function in the first place. This includes child and elderly care, domestic and family work, and community work keeping relationships and societies alive and connected. Humans need to be fed, dressed, housed, educated, tended to, and cared for, and they need to feel meaning, belonging, and connection to be able to function in an economy.

This support work is extraordinarily valuable—vital—even as it is often unseen and unrecognized. But we continue to take work deemed feminine for granted, so that it is ripe for extraction. In the words of radical feminist Heidi Hartmann, the material base upon which patriarchy rests lies most fundamentally in men’s control over women’s labor power.¹⁸ One of the cleverest tricks of patriarchy is that it transforms all work deemed feminine into fixed, subliminal expressions of femininity—however much that work involves active time, effort, and skill. The best way to maintain a system in which women work for little to nothing, and for the benefit of others, especially men, is to convince society that they are not working at all.

At the heart of this system, then, lies emotional labor, which is the most invisible and insidious form of shadow work expected of women and extracted for the benefit of men and society at large.

Emotional labor does not encompass all support work that enables society and our formal economy to function, but it is a heavy component of much of it. It is its own stand-alone form of work, as well as the impetus behind much unpaid work continuing to be done. Putting other people’s feelings first and crafting meaningful emotional ties between humans is a huge part of care, child-rearing, and connective community work. But putting other people’s feelings first is often also why a woman is expected to take on more tasks and responsibilities that are not necessarily strictly emotional. Being the one who drives children to practice on weekends, turning down a promotion and going part-time, showing a relative how to set up their new iPhone, staying up to wash clothes.

Emotional labor relies on the fundamental understanding that women should prioritize other people’s experiences before their own. Emotional labor is what is happening when someone first seeks to cater to the emotional experience of someone else and then puts their own emotions to work for that other person. Under the distribution of this form of work, in which women are expected to provide emotional labor and men are not, there is a basic acceptance that a man’s existence is to be protected as a priority over a woman’s. This system is one in which men’s quality of life matters primarily and women are put to work for it. There could not be a starker expression of gender hierarchy than that.

The reality that such a vital form of work is swept under the rug, relegated to women, is one of the roots of gender inequality because at its core emotional labor is not only overlooked, it is also degraded—in turn degrading those who are tasked with performing it.

In this latter manner, emotional labor, when it comes to gender, is describing a state of being that bears many parallels to theoretical frameworks developed by great Black intellectuals and figures of the twentieth century, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, Frantz Fanon’s description of the white mask, and Ralph Ellison’s account of visibility denied. Emotional labor as a more gendered burden has been depicted explicitly many times in fictional works by women—whether in the novel Sula by Toni Morrison, or The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, which was made into a film starring Glenn Close. But the naming is new. It is also necessary.

This book exposes and challenges these persistent roots of patriarchy—roots that are intertwined with white supremacy and class prejudice. It uncovers the singular form of extractive emotional capitalism propped up by these systems. It points out the unequal—and unfair—distribution of emotional labor, its systemic misvaluing, and the consequences of the chronic protection of men’s experiences over women’s, and dominant groups’ experiences over nondominant groups.

While my reporting has been intersectional, my primary area of concern here is gender as a category. Specifically, I am concerned with the ways in which women continue to patently face extreme forms of life-defining injustices and inequality with only mild concern from broader society. The messaging seems to be that we should accept our gains, and whatever brutality is left is just, somehow, an inherent by-product—or at least something we should put up with out of gratitude that we do not need to put up with more.

Such fatalistic thinking is not only hindering exciting progress, it is false. Understanding how emotional labor operates in homes, in communities, in work environments, on our small screens and our big screens reveals this quite clearly, as this book will explore. This is a form of work that is imposed on those who lack power, obscured, and then used to keep them in place. It is a form of work that has become so equated with femininity that it has almost entirely desensitized us to the ways in which women are perpetually forced into subjugation and then viciously kept there. And yet this is also a form of work that holds deep, far-reaching, unchallengeable worth, that deserves to be seen, that deserves to be valued, even as it needs to be spread out far more evenly. It is, in fact, a form of work that when placed in our present context demands nothing short of a total rethinking of our collective moral principles and our attitude toward work itself.

Emotional Labor is the product of seven years of inquiry, five of which were spent in intense reading, research, reflection, and confrontation, including through hundreds of interviews in person, over the phone, and via email. These interviews cut across social, racial, economic, and age demographics and were mostly performed in the United States, with a special focus on voices from Michigan, Mississippi, and New York—where I physically spent most time. Interviewees were typically anonymized and they chose their own pseudonyms, unless they insisted on having their full name published and were not deemed in danger.¹⁹ While only a small percentage of people who gave the project the honor of sharing their stories are featured, those whom I discuss in these pages reflect the diversity of America as much as possible in a book that is inevitably—by its very nature—thoroughly incomplete. If an interviewee’s race is not specified, that does not mean they are white; it simply means that race was not used centrally when they shared their experience—for instance, in relation to a partner of the same