ONE
What Is Emotional Labor, Exactly?
POWER
A few days before Mother’s Day, a day that ended up being about everything except putting her feet up and being celebrated, Jennifer tells me she reached breaking point. The Rust Belt service sector professional had originally hoped that Mother’s Day Sunday would give her something she sorely lacked: quality, restorative time with her young son and husband, maybe even some time for herself. But a few weeks prior to the holiday, members of her wider family started to talk about getting together for another occasion falling this time of year: the one-year anniversary of her father’s death. Uncles, aunts, and cousins agreed on the date but couldn’t agree on who would organize the minutiae of the event. Quickly, Jennifer, who was still deep in the grieving process, whose schedule was already full, and whose idea this was not, was put in charge of organizing an event she wasn’t even sure she had the emotional capacity to attend. Complaining seemed useless. Besides, she was used to biting her lip and taking the higher road for the common good. She placed her feelings into secondary position and focused on the layers of logistics ahead.
The easiest, planning wise, would have been to gather in a restaurant for the occasion, she thought at first, but there were other factors to consider: she couldn’t risk being left having to foot the bill, a scenario she thought was plausible. “I love them, but my family is cheap,” she jokes when we meet. It wasn’t that she wasn’t generous herself, but she had her own nuclear family’s finances to look out for.
Last year, Jennifer had noticed that her husband of ten years, Shawn, who was generally closed off with his feelings, was acting more distant and down. Jennifer slowly, skillfully convinced him to share what was in his heart. “If you don’t open up, you’re going to be like a bottle of pop that you shake and shake and shake and eventually you explode,” she warned him. “I understand that you are trying to be the man of the house and take care of this stuff. But I can be the person you can unload on, that’s why I am here. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack if you don’t open up about this.” Her carefully crafted, therapy-like words paid off. Shawn eventually let his guard down, revealing that they weren’t making ends meet and were in such bad debt that they were barreling toward losing their home. A year on from confronting the financial disaster together, and solving it by appealing to one of the very few loved ones they had who could stretch to help them out, the couple had managed to keep the house. But risking being landed with a high-three- to four-figure restaurant bill was totally out of the question, as was trying to fit people inside their already cramped home.
Eventually, she convinced a cousin to host, with promises that she would still assume responsibility for the planning, the catering, the coordinating, the cake, and the ferrying back and forth of those family members who did not have a car on the day. That is to say, she would be in charge of generating a smooth and pleasant experience for everyone attending. And in making sure people’s needs were met—that everyone was given a suitable time and place to feel comforted in shared memories, in seamless togetherness, in family bonds and love, without having to worry about outside factors, including money—she would be shouldering the emotional labor necessary to conceive and produce the event.
On the Thursday before the gathering, her ever-accelerating juggling of logistics, accommodating of other people’s concerns, expectations, and needs, combined with the unbending nature of time, brought her to an emotional brink. Jennifer’s day began with an admonishment by her boss, a male family member who paid her according to how well his company was doing. The reprimand felt unjust and humiliating, but in exchange for inconsistent pay, Jennifer received flexibility of hours that meant she could stay on top of the other moving parts of her life.
That day, she needed this arrangement even more than usual. She had a delicate mission to accomplish, of all places, at the crematorium. A year on from her dad passing, no one had footed the bill for an urn, and his remains were enclosed in a plastic box. To avoid an expense she could not take on, and to avoid bringing her dad’s ashes to the gathering, where his presence had been requested, in a Tupperware-like situation, she had called the venue they had used for the funeral. On the phone, she explained the problem and, appealing to the owners’ good nature, asked them to loan her an urn for the weekend. They accepted but gave her a narrow window for the urn pickup: Thursday late afternoon, in between one wake and another. So, at work, she sat on her hands, smiled through the unpleasant experience, and focused on the bigger picture. She had a mission to accomplish, and she would not fail at the first hurdle.
First task of leaving work on time accomplished, she headed to school, where she picked up her four-year-old son, Spencer. Second task of speedy pickup done, she whizzed home to drop him off with her mother, Shelley, who lived with them and had agreed to take her grandson on a bicycle ride. It was there, at the third hurdle, that things started to fall apart. Her mother had come to stay four years prior for what Jennifer assumed was a short visit, but she had never left. She had been gravely hospitalized in the past for bipolar disorder and her medication dosage and symptoms needed to be closely monitored. Whether she had forgotten to take her meds, a triggering event had happened, or dosages needed to be tweaked, Jennifer did not know. What she did know was that shortly after the drop-off, her mother started screaming, hurling creative insults at her daughter and grandson—much to the young child’s astonishment. She yelled and yelled, and eventually announced resolutely she would no longer take Spencer on his promised bike ride.
Jennifer couldn’t believe it. She loved her mother, and she ultimately was pleased she had accommodated her family’s home life to welcome her in. Even if she had never asked whether she minded and now Jennifer had an extra person to care for, even if it meant Spencer had to share a room with his grandmother, even if Shelley’s late-night television habits had taken a toll on Jennifer’s sex life with Shawn as they became reluctant to make any suggestive noises through the paper-thin walls. So little was asked of her in return, and her unwillingness to help Jennifer with this one crucial task felt suddenly infuriating.
For a moment Jennifer let the mask of seamlessness come off. She stopped measuring her tone. Her voice broke, and the toll of the invisible labor she had been doing came rushing out of her mouth. “I am tired of taking on everything for you, taking on everything for him, taking on everything for Shawn,” she told her mother. “I am dealing with my own grief. I have been in a mentally very dark place and I was trying, just trying, to get through to Mother’s Day. I am sorry, I do not know what is wrong, but I cannot fix it, and I am tired. I don’t think you realize everything I do, everything I am responsible for.”
Shelley, astonished by the rebuttal, calmed down but was in no state to perform her duty. Once Grandmother was settled in safely at home, Jennifer packed Spencer into the car and headed to the funeral home, late. She ended up doing exactly what she had wanted to avoid: walking through the wake of a stranger not on time with a four-year-old in tow.
The Sunday gathering—featuring ashes in borrowed urn—went well. And in between the driving of uncles back and forth and making sure all were fed with the right foods, she barely caught a breath. By that point, though, she was just relieved she had pulled off the event without any further incident, and it was done.
When I sit with Jennifer, she keeps a pleasant, soft, and sweet demeanor throughout. Over the hours she manages to carve out for us to talk in person, tears intermittently well up in her eyes, but she never lets them pour. Every now and then, as she goes into the layers of uncompensated work she does, her tone starts to sound more pleading and her descriptions sound like questions, like she is clear that what she is doing is there but she needs someone, anyone, to hear her, to see her, to mark what she is doing as real.
“You’ve been holding shit down,” I say to her during one of those moments.
“Yeah. I hold shit down,” she answers, her face suddenly lightening up.
* * *
Performing emotional labor—identifying or anticipating other people’s emotions, adapting yours in consequence, and then managing to positively affect other people’s emotions—can often look like someone putting other people’s feelings first. This editing work on one’s own emotions executed for the benefit of other people’s emotions is sometimes easy to identify, sometimes not.
Jennifer intuiting that something was up and then coaching Shawn through his emotions to get him to communicate and find a solution is a straightforward example of emotional labor.
But in other circumstances, emotional labor is hidden just below the surface. Instead of prioritizing her private grieving, Jennifer adapted to broader family members’ needs and wishes. She took the high road. She put her own emotions and thoughtfulness to work for the service of others. Her emotional labor was a form of community work that meant her family could come together to mourn and rejoice—experiencing feelings of belonging, connectivity, and meaning.
Producing these kinds of feelings in others often became externalized into actual tasks she identified, performed, or delegated. Carefully anticipating emotions and behaviors, executing a variety of tasks, and managing logistics, including financial restrictions, to create an experience for others, to help maintain peaceful bonds between people—that’s a product of emotional labor, too, but it is rarely seen as such. It is mostly not seen as anything, really: not as work, not as an effort or a skill set, not as something time consuming. At best, it is seen as a fixed role. Except, of course, for the person doing it.
But emotional labor—just like physical labor, intellectual labor, and creative labor—is a form of work that does require time, effort, and skill.
Treating it as a form of work that requires time, effort, and skill remains a controversial assertion. In our globalized, capitalistic world, work has remained equated with the production of goods and services for a fee in a public, traditionally seen as male sphere, mostly outside the home. In this market-driven economic system, work becomes real through formal compensation. In other words, if you’re not being paid, you’re not working.1
To many, though, this narrow, neoclassical economic definition of work does not just ring false, it also undermines the vital, often unpaid work that many women do. It helps strip it of its value and hide it in plain sight.2
Emotional labor, as a specific form of feminized work, also remains derided and unseen because it is unfathomable to many that tasks and duties tied to love, care, the family, and women could have anything to do with real work. Instead of seeing it as work, we have cast emotional labor as a passive expression of the supposed purest essence of femininity. Insisting it is an effort or anything but a mystical manifestation of woman-at-rest is tarnishing, we are taught, to the point of disempowerment. How dare we touch the figure of the divine, endlessly empathetic feminine?
But is it really disempowering to lift the curtain up and show emotional labor for what it is? And say it is, who stands to gain or lose power from such a revelation? Really. And besides, don’t we all know, deep down, that emotional labor is a skill and an effort that holds real value? Because don’t we all know someone is doing it? Whether it is us, and we are suppressing our own feelings, justifying it to ourselves with reminders of love and the Big Picture. Or whether it is someone else, and we are proclaiming our own innocence and ignorance, while engaging in subtle arm-twisting to get them to get a task done, followed by restrained gratitude when it is done—not too much gratitude, you see, lest we make the whole charade crumble.
* * *
Exhausted, Jennifer tells me she would like more gratitude and acknowledgment but that she loves her family, and she will ultimately keep on doing this emotional labor. “I am a people pleaser,” she confesses, “which is clearly my problem.”
Is it, though? Is the fact that she self-identifies as a people pleaser her problem, her fault for being someone who understands and cares about other people’s feelings? Or is it that she has been trained to do something that she has now internalized as a passive attribute? These questions were at the heart of the reactions I received when I first started looking into emotional labor in 2015. Whether I was met by confusion, shock, or enthusiasm from those to whom I explained what I was working on often depended on their gender.
Women I spoke to tended to ask a few questions and then exclaimed joy in their deep recognition. This was the case with one interviewee, Anita, a woman in her fifties, who had brought up four children with a father who was only intermittently present. She had not only been the main source of financial support for her children well into their adulthood but she had continued to emotionally carry them forward too. She helped them in between jobs with food and shelter, supported one adult child through addiction recovery, and made sure they all stayed connected, came together regularly, and felt grounded and loved. Money had been tight in recent years, but she never failed to find a way. “Emotional … labor…” she said to me, trying the two words on for fit. “Emotions. As work. But that’s what I have been doing for years!” Her life’s work having a term was deeply validating, and also relieving. It hadn’t all been in her head; her exhaustion did not mean she was morally deficient. Her toil had a name, and a name that included “labor,” a value.
Men, on the other hand, had very mixed kinds of reactions. They met me with horrified faces and furrowed brows. “Let me get this straight. You are saying that emotions are work women are forced into doing?” one male friend of mine, Tim, asked me, incredulous, over a lunch he was making for us in his Harlem home. Tim was not only baffled by the concept, he was also visibly upset by it. “Why is the fact that women provide emotional support work, though? What if they actually enjoy it? What if women are just better at emotions than men? Why do we have to make that something negative? Why do you feminists have to make normal things into issues to be debated?”
There was, of course, some exasperation coming from Tim, who was a caregiver of sorts himself. He was a constant source of support to his extended family. He loved to fix problems for his loved ones and for his community and had become an informal leader. On the days I popped by when I was in town, I would sometimes watch him out of the corner of my eye, his tall, athletic frame delicately watering and spritzing his plants. As he went by each plant, you could hear him singing and talking under his breath, and it was unclear whether it was to himself or to the greenery.
Didn’t Tim perform emotional labor too? Undoubtedly. Men and women are perfectly able to perform emotional labor, but the expectations placed on women are far greater than those placed on men, resulting in a notable penalty-versus-credit gulf. Tim would likely get credit where Anita wouldn’t. Whatever Tim provided in thoughtfulness and geste was identified and tended to be seen as a plus, as having value, especially because Tim was so stereotypically masculine on so many other fronts. Tim was lauded. But there was an army of emotional laborers who weren’t Tim around him, and whose work was expected, rarely highlighted, and mostly discarded to the depths of oblivion. His sisters, his mother, his niece.
And as genuinely caring and progressive on many gender issues as Tim was, that he believed “women were just better at emotions” was a little worrying to me. It was an essentialist view of gender as well as emotional labor that I have bumped into time and time again in the years I have spent researching this. Tim, a scientist, would never have dared say to me that women are better cooks or women are more talented cleaners. And yet Tim did seem to say unapologetically to me that women were just “naturally” more gifted with emotions. Not only that, he also insinuated that if we were “naturally” better at emotions, it was heresy to allow that “natural” exertion to translate into an activity qualified as work. Never mind that men were translating supposedly “natural” male gifts into highly lucrative performances and careers all the time.
This line of argument fails basic logic, but it is so widely propagated; it demands attention. Psychological essentialism still reigns supreme for many people—not just for Tim. Many would posit that Jennifer being a “people pleaser” was just the way she was born, and some might even advance that this is just how women tend to be. These assumptions reflect our persistent cultural stereotypes that maintain that women and men have impeccably opposing personality traits. Under this dogma, women are cast as empathetic, emotional, insightful, warm, expressive, other-directed, interpersonally adept, and more aware of the feelings of others, while men are cast as more dominant, rational, active, decisive, performance- and status-driven, hierarchy-aware, self-directed, selfish, and less aware of the feelings of others.3
Despite these commonly held beliefs, research from the fields of psychology and neuroscience shows that fixed gender traits have been exceedingly exaggerated. Cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain,4 stresses that today’s science shows that brains are prodigiously affected by social cues and stereotypes and react to them, not the opposite. In 2016, in the British Psychological Society’s monthly publication The Psychologist, she explained: “A key breakthrough in our knowledge of the brain in this century, fueled by the stunning technological advances in research, is that brain structure and function is not fixed and unchangeable, and not the same irrespective of context or culture. It is, in fact, exquisitely plastic, moldable by experience throughout life. It is also ‘permeable,’ responding to social attitudes and expectations, as is shown by brain-imaging studies of stereotype threat.”5
Human brains have the ability to constantly evolve and be taught new tricks or skill sets. But their permeability means they are also heavily affected by context and environment. If someone’s brain receives positive messages expecting them to perform a task well, they will be more likely to perform that task successfully. The same is true of the opposite: if a brain receives a negative message about performing a task, it will be less likely to be successful at it. Our brains are very aware of gendered stereotypes—and the easiest, least stressful course of action for them is to go along with those stereotypes. Men’s and women’s brains are not the cause for the status quo then; they are the product of it.
This helps explain why studies that have specifically investigated the performance of emotional labor across gender lines have found that women do more of it than men but that its performance is tied to them performing their gender rather than performing their character traits.6 But even with this finding, it still remains hard to rigidly separate out a personality trait from the social pressure to develop it.
Jennifer may identify legitimately as a people pleaser, but cultural stereotypes and training have incentivized her brain to focus on this skill set. Bucking expectations is costly. Social scientists and psychologists have found that there is a “backlash” effect toward people who veer from cultural, gendered stereotypes.7 Openly sensitive men risk being branded as weak, incompetent, suspicious, or even dishonorable, and openly ambitious women risk being branded strident, untrustworthy, malicious, unbalanced, and even dangerous.8 This backlash mechanism is a powerful tool to keep gender extremes in personality traits intact.
As for the stereotypically feminine trait that is particularly important in the performance of emotional labor—empathy—four decades of research have also shown it to be tied to incentives rather than innate ability.9 In one influential and rather hilarious paper10 by Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges at the University of Oregon, researchers found in an initial study that men and women had the same empathic ability (the ability to infer what another person was feeling), except when participants were tipped that the study was about interpersonal skills—traits deemed communal and therefore feminine. In that case, women, incentivized to perform their gender, did better than men on the exact same exercise. This had been true of previous studies that found that women and men exhibited similar degrees of empathic ability, finding a difference favoring women only when participants knew they were being tested on a trait deemed feminine, such as this communal, interpersonal one.11
Copyright © 2023 by Rose Hackman
