Top Quotes: “Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward” — Gemma Hartley

Introduction

“Emotional labor was a skill set I had been trained in since childhood. My husband, on the other hand, hadn’t received that same education. He is a caring person, but he is not a skilled carer.”

“Managing your partner’s emotions – anticipating needs, preempting displeasure, and keeping the peace – is something women are taught to accept as their duty from an early age. Built into this premise is that it is “natural” and acceptable for men to be defensive, annoyed, or even angered in response to being asked to pull their weight in resolving emotional disputes. “In general, we gender emotions in our society by continuing to reinforce the false idea that women are always, naturally and biologically able to feel, express, and manage our emotions better than men,” says Dr. Lisa.”

“Even having a conversation about the imbalance of emotional labor involves emotional labor. My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way. Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character. It gets to a point where I have to weigh the benefits of getting my husband to understand my frustration against the compounded emotional labor of doing so in a way that won’t end in us fighting. Usually I let it slide, reminding myself that I’m lucky to have a partner who willingly complies in any task I decide to assign to him.”

“My husband is a good man and a good feminist ally. I could tell, as I walked him through it, that he was trying to grasp what I was getting at. But he didn’t! He said he’d try to do more cleaning around the house to help me out. He restated that all I ever needed to do was ask him for help, but therein lies the problem. I don’t want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative.”

“Women are, in many unpaid ways, expected to keep those around us comfortable at all costs – including the cost of self. We create an altruistic persona, allowing ourselves to be subsumed by the needs of others. We become the listening ear, the sage advice giver, the trip planner, the schedule manager, the housecleaner, the reminder, the invisible cushion that everyone can comfortably land on – with little regard for how it depletes us. When we perform emotional labor, we put the needs of those around us ahead of our own needs. The way we exist in the world becomes, in many ways, invisible. We bury or morph our emotions to cater to those around us – to keep the peace with our husband, to stop our kids from throwing tantrums, to avoid a fight with our mother, to stop street harassment from turning into assault.

Managing other people’s emotions and expectations means jumping through hoops to be heard, using up precious time you could be harnessing in more productive ways. You have to make sure your responses are carefully thought out with the other person’s emotions in mind. You have to ask in the right tone when you need to delegate work. You have to use restraint and be agreeable in uncomfortable situations. Putting yourself in the most advantageous position means thinking of how the other person is going to react. Don’t deliver your work along with a side of charm and meekness? You may be labeled negatively, hurting your chances for career advancement. Don’t smile and keep your mouth shut while a man yells lewd comments at you on the sidewalk? You may be followed, attacked, or worse.”

“There is benefit both in lessening the overwhelming load we have placed on women and in bringing men into a new and fulfilling realm of their lives. We should want not simply to divide the weight of emotional labor but to understand what comes along with carrying the weight. Even with the imbalance we are currently saddled with, we live longer and healthier lives because of emotional labor. We put planning and foresight into our lives, concern ourselves with creating and maintaining strong relationships, and work tirelessly to make others comfortable. Our partners, unsurprisingly, also benefit from this. A study from Harvard has shown that married men tend to live longer, healthier lives than unmarried men.”

Temporary Emotional Labor

“Women did the emotional labor and men stayed with them, loved them. In fact, I absorbed this ideology so fully that I was practicing it even in middle school with my first serious crush. On basketball game days, when he had to wear a tie (a team ritual at our small Christian school), I would straighten and fix it for him. I knew his schedule, though he never bothered to memorize mine. Emotional labor was my job even then.

Whether we start dating at twelve or twenty, most of us encounter the expectations for emotional labor for the first time when we begin to explore romantic relationships. Where boys are encouraged to be unattached and aloof, avoiding emotional attachment like the plague, girls are faced with an entirely different objective: how do I make this person happy? We’re encouraged to put ourselves in the background and our romantic interest in the forefront, entangling our self-worth with how good we are at performing emotional labor. When we start partnering up, we already have a lot of societally reinforced ideas about what makes a good girlfriend and later a good wife and mother, in addition to the consistently reinforced gender roles we’ve grown into. Girls become communal, are emotionally intelligent, and know how to forge bonds – behaviors that are discouraged in adolescent boys. It becomes “natural,” then, when we pair up, to fill in the emotional skills our partners lack – and we furthermore glean through culture all the things we “ought” to be. Girlfriends are supposed to be nurturing and caring, but not overbearing. Thoughtful of others’ needs but low maintenance with their own. Easygoing and flexible. These are, of course, in addition to a cavalcade of other patriarchal expectations that dictate acceptable appearance, sexual behavior, intelligence level, and style of humor, just to name a few. In the romantic arena, the need for women to keep men comfortable and happy is amplified to the extreme. The work that goes into presenting ourselves physically, the easygoing yet nurturing interactions we foster, the planning and forethought we put into our relationships are exhausting, yet all signs of effort must be masked. Everything must be perfectly smooth; the seams can never show. Indeed, there are few insults greater than being deemed “high maintenance,” a term almost explicitly reserved for women who ask for emotional labor from their partners. Emotional labor, when seen for the work that it is, is incredibly unsexy. Men want emotional labor from women, certainly, but they prefer to see it as a natural extension of our personalities – something effortless and joyful – rather than difficult work that will eventually run us into the ground.

Men don’t face the same expectations for emotional labor unless they are attempting to woo as a means to an end. They are then supposed to perform emotional labor, switching roles for a brief romantic moment to “get” the girl.”

“It’s no wonder that Nicholas Sparks novels have garnered so many movie deals and a multimillion-dollar empire – and not just because I was an obsessed fan in my teen years. He takes emotional labor to the extreme, and then hands the load over to men. That’s what young heterosexual women call romance. These acts are steeped in emotional labor that is scarcely found in real life. Few men take the initiative to think deeply about the needs of their partners and put planning and foresight into grand gestures. Though the cultural script may say men ought to perform some emotional labor in the dating and boyfriend stage, in general our culture is more lenient with men who don’t fit that mold. When I talk to my friends who are still in the dating game, there are few, if any, who are still caught up in the fantasy of finding the man they were promised in chick flicks.”

“I can’t ignore the fact that the teenage chick-flick junkie inside me still longed for the big romantic gesture I never received in that proposal. Now I know why. In the real world, the proposal is supposed to be the last big gesture of emotional labor before the slow and steady shift of power takes place.”

“Whether consciously or not, men tend to perform emotional labor as a means to an end, whereas women perform emotional labor as a way of being. That’s how we get from a happy and equitable relationship at the onset to the simmering resentment that appears years later.”

Domestic Work

“Men often have a slower timeline or lower standard when it comes to domestic work, so women take it on themselves, choosing to delegate work only when it’s most desperately needed. This may be in part because women tend to associate a clean home with their personal success, whereas men’s success is tied strictly to their work outside the home. Our worth is tied up in this work, whether we realize it or not. There’s also still a societal expectation that women are the ones who need to keep the home in order. If someone comes to the house and it’s an utter mess, I’m the one who feels guilty, not Rob. I’m the one people expect to care. So I always have.”

Parenting

“I asked Rob to make the decision, and he flat-out wouldn’t. “I don’t know. You’re the one who knows these things. You know what we need more than I do.” Except that I didn’t, and what I did know had much more to do with my personal research than some magical mom knowledge I was endowed with upon conception. Moms don’t innately know what the next steps look like, from what to put on a baby registry to how to diagnose common infant illnesses to what questions we should ask our doctors. But we learn. We put in the hard work, the time, the research, even when we don’t find these things necessarily compelling or interesting. Because if we don’t do it, who will?”

“I was the only one they seemed to speak directly to. And yet, during the three days we were hospitalized, none of the nurses learned my name. They simply called me “Mom.” There was a deep desire within me to tell them I had a name, that I didn’t want my personhood erased by this new role, but that would have disrupted their comfort. So I let it go. They kept calling me “Mom.” Every interaction seemed imbued with the same meaning: you’re a mom now; this is your job.

There isn’t much I remember about those first few sleep-deprived days of motherhood, but I do remember my husband asking, often, “What can I do?” It was a question meant to help me. He didn’t know what to do because he hadn’t been inundated with hospital pamphlets, he hadn’t read the baby books and blogs, he hadn’t prepared in the same way I had. Instead, he looked to me for direction. It was my job, after all.”

“It’s not uncommon for me to get the comment “You have your hands full,” but that’s about the extent of stranger interaction when I’m out with all three. My husband, on the other hand, is inundated with praise and admiration for his brave efforts. Multiple people stopped him on his shopping trip to comment on what an outstanding parent he was. He spent the entirety of the ice cream trip being commended by an older gentleman for taking on this “dad day” to give me a break. Nearly everyone he encounters thinks that simply being out in the world with all his kids is an extraordinary and novel accomplishment.”

Strategies

“Handing over the reins to her husband seemed to also mean turning a blind eye to a job done incredibly poorly. She tells about how she handed over mail duty to him, and it piled up on the table for three months before being opened. There were parking tickets that went to collections, birthday invitations that went without an RSVP, not to mention the eyesore of a mountain of mail. When he offers to take over meal prep duty after she receives a job opportunity, he makes a single stew for them to eat all month long. It’s not the way she would have done it, but it’s efficient, and it works. She says she feels capable of letting her preconceived standards slide because she is clear on her priorities. “It’s important to disrupt what a standard even is,” says Dufu. “I take issue with the narrative that a woman’s standard is either the best way or the most efficient way.” I have to admit, it’s a pill that’s hard for me to swallow. She tells me they have come to a bit of a compromise on the stew (he has added a bit of variety and makes a different meal each week nowadays), but they don’t have a lot of back-and-forth to perfect the way he does his part. They never have. The work she is doing in lieu of micromanaging is more important than making sure everything is done “her” way.

Clearly going completely hands-off works for her. She shifted her priorities and let the less important balls drop, along with any guilt she felt. She even tells me about a birthday party her daughter had recently missed because she does not handle the calendar (that task is squarely in her husband’s court). Since most parents don’t forward invitations to dads, this isn’t an unusual occurrence. Her daughter was in tears. All her classmates were at the party, and she wasn’t, and for a second grader, that’s total devastation. Dufu knows she could have prevented this and other calendar heartbreaks. But she won’t. She doesn’t pick up the balls she has decided to drop, or the guilt that goes with them. Instead she takes her daughter out for a pink-sprinkle doughnut and knows another party will come. She knows her value as a mother doesn’t hinge on one missed party or anything else she has decided to forgo for the sake of fulfilling her best and highest purpose. “There are so many things that I don’t do, that I have decided are okay for me not to do.””

“When friends asked me what I was up to, I never had an answer. I was at home, deciding what to do with my baby – what the best choice of clothing and food and activities was for us. Worrying over whether he was gaining enough weight, or whether he had died from SIDS every time he was down for a nap. Do I take him to the store or go out later, after my husband gets home? Will the baby be unhappy if I take him out? (Will he poop up the back of his onesie? Almost definitely.) Will my husband feel neglected if I steal off to the store during our precious alone time? Should I breastfeed now or should I try to pump? Should I put the baby in a cute outfit or keep him comfy in pajamas? Even when my days appeared uneventful, I was in my head all the time but rarely thinking about myself in that bigger, deeper way that used to make my life feel meaningful. What consumed most of my mental effort had minimal emotional rewards. It simply left me feeling drained. I finally understood why so many women said they lost themselves after becoming mothers. I no longer had the mental and emotional capacity to tend to my interior life, my creative life, my meaning-driven life. At the end of the day, I had nothing left in my mind to give.”

“On average, we make about thirty-five thousand conscious choices per day, two hundred of which involve food.”

“As I sat with Cheryl Strayed recording the Dear Sugars podcast on emotional labor, she told a story of watching her son sweeping with a toy broom. It is always a fun spectacle to watch our children playing grown-up, mimicking our behaviors with their imaginative play, but this instance in particular stuck out in her mind because when she asked him what he was doing, he answered, “I’m pretending to be a daddy.” Strayed said it stopped her in her tracks. It was child’s play that spoke to a revolution.”

“There are so many reasons I want to change the balance of emotional labor in our lives, but the one that stands out is the fact that changing this dynamic will change our children’s lives. It will change the future. The revolutionary change I want to see in the world starts here, with us, with our children watching and learning what it means to be true equals. They will not learn their roles in the world from a textbook. They will learn them, first and foremost, at home. What we choose to do now will shape their worldview. What we choose to do now changes everything. I want my sons to be willing and able to carry their own weight in emotional labor. I want my daughter to know that it is not her job to keep everyone around her comfortable and happy. I want us to break the cycle, so all of our children can live better, fuller lives – not just at home but in our shifting world as well.”

“In truth, the expectation that women should constantly perform emotional labor to keep those around them comfortable and happy has consequences beyond the perception of our ability to lead the world or our stalled progress in personal relationships as we continue to lead on the home front. The demand for women’s emotional labor includes being told to make ourselves smaller and quieter, to not disrupt – even, indeed especially, when criticizing men who have wronged us.

The demand for emotional labor keeps women from speaking up when problems arise, because we do not have the same ground to stand on. We cannot criticize a male boss, a male peer, a male partner, a male period, without having our integrity questioned, because we are disrupting the comfort of those around us. We are breaking the social rules. When we do not give the deference expected from us at home, it can lead to a fight. At work, to a career setback. But out in the world, on the streets, while walking home at night, it can lead to much worse. When we aren’t employing emotional labor to gain ground in our relationships or to get ahead at work, we are using it to survive.”

Conclusion

“The expectation of women’s emotional labor, the demand for women’s emotional labor, seriously contributes to rape culture. Men can feel emboldened to cross one line, and then another, because of the very real expectation that women will not do or say anything to disrupt their comfort.”

“Over 70 percent of murders in domestic violence cases occur after the victim has left. Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of Crazy Love, a memoir of abuse, says that this is the final step in the abuse pattern because the abuser at that point has nothing left to lose.”

“I don’t expect my husband to intrinsically understand emotional labor in the same way that I do, but I do expect him to put in the work to understand it better, to ask the right questions when he is unsure, to want to work on it for himself, for our relationship, for our kids and their future relationships. If he does not, the constant demand for my emotional labor is going to keep us running in circles forever. We’ll never make any real progress until men willingly take on the role of allies and begin talking to one another about how to make emotional labor work in their relationships. Because if there is one thing that comes from the cultural demand for women to shoulder the bulk of emotional labor, it is this: it maintains the status quo. It keeps men comfortable and maintains both their position of power and their passivity.”

“Only an egalitarian structure would lend that critical insight about how the hell we get out of this mess. This led me to anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s research on “the best dads in the world”: the men of the Aka tribe. The Aka Pygmy tribe consists of around twenty thousand people who live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that isn’t without gender but certainly bucks what we would think of as traditional gender roles. Hewlett found the Aka to be the most egalitarian parents of any people he had ever studied. The roles of men and women are interchangeable both at home and on the hunt, with men slipping effortlessly into caregiving roles without micromanagement of any kind, and women often outperforming the men when they go out to hunt. Everyone in the Aka tribe seems to know what needs to be done and how to do all of those jobs without being told. Even, perhaps especially, when it comes to parenting.

While we may be wedded to the idea that mothers or other female allo-parents are the most natural nurturers for a child, the men of the Aka tribe turn the biological debate on its head in how they raise their children Hewlett noticed during his stay with the Aka that male breastfeeding (or at least using the nipple for comfort) was a completely normal way for men to comfort their babies when the mother was away. It wasn’t unusual for men to gather for a “guys’ night” and drink palm wine while cradling infants to their chests. Hewlett found that Aka fathers were within arm’s reach of their children 47 percent of the time — more available to their children than any other fathers in the world. There is no stigma attached to men slipping into the role of primary caregiver, because there is no preconceived notion among the Aka that women should “naturally” assume that role. Intimacy between father and infant is the norm, just as intimacy between mother and infant is.”

“While all these statistics helped it rise to the top of the list, it was the notably different attitude of Icelandic men that really set the country apart. In fact, she found that most Icelanders didn’t consider themselves part of a feminist or egalitarian utopia. Men didn’t believe that women had made it to a place of equality, though they hoped to see that change. They also didn’t see themselves as persecuted by the strongly feminist agenda of the past decade. Indeed, they viewed many American men as weak for this precise reason. By contrast, Icelandic men’s machismo was intertwined with a commitment to equally shared power. Most men she spoke to felt confident in claiming the title of feminist, and it is this spirit of solidarity that seems to be catapulting the country forward.”

“When we’re talking about the big picture in this context, we’re usually focusing on the interconnected ways emotional labor affects us in our relationships and lives. That’s hard for many men to understand because they’ve never experienced it. They don’t see how emotional labor drains our personal resources — our time, our mental energy, our emotional resilience — in a way that not only prevents us from leading the fullest version of our lives but in fact enables our partners to cruise through their lives at our expense. Instead they see our resentment and assume it is simply tied to them forgetting a minor detail: the dishes, the vet appointment, a single ingredient or two at the store. They don’t see our emotional labor as a whole — as we do. To them there is no clear connection between sorting the mail and keeping the calendar and doing the laundry and making the shopping list, but we see the party invite that we need to open immediately and make sure to RSVP and put it on the calendar, then ensure everyone has the right clothes ready and the gift and card are bought in time. One task leads to an avalanche of other tasks that need to be done, because we put each task into a broader context, whereas men often compartmentalize each single task as unrelated to any other.”

“Viewing our imbalance as part of a larger cultural problem resolved the issue of personal blame and allowed us to each examine the baggage we were bringing to the table. Now we can slowly unpack each piece, thereby ensuring we don’t pass it on to our children.”

“What women need to abandon is our perfectionist striving, which leads to control issues and a false narrative that no one else could do what we do. It’s a narrative that undermines and infantilizes men, preventing them from ever trying to do more than offer “help.” We need to realize that our issues run so much deeper than a desire for control, because we obviously struggle with the push and pull of wanting less control, then taking it all back against our better judgment. We want our partners to take on more emotional labor, but we hesitate and thwart ourselves, because their way isn’t our way. It isn’t perfect. It never will be.

Our partners could do what we do, given enough time and practice. What we do is exhausting, yes, but it isn’t impossible to learn. Given step-by-step instructions, perhaps a quick glance at my thirty-minute time-log spreadsheets, Rob could definitely do exactly what I do. There’s a reason he doesn’t want to, though, and it has nothing to do with laziness or incompetence. The degree to which I perform emotional labor doesn’t make sense to him. It only makes sense to me because I’m still stuck believing that my worth is tied to things like putting a well-balanced meal on the table or never losing my temper with my kids or keeping my closet well organized. He takes note of what is necessary, while I take note of everything.”

“One of the most shocking things I discovered when I began researching emotional labor was that there was no generational divide. My mother experienced this, just as my grandmother experienced it, just as I and my friends experienced it. The imbalance of emotional labor was insidious, crossing borders and boundaries unlike any sociological phenomenon I had ever known. Unlike the divide of domestic labor, which was easily visible and correctable, emotional labor has been sticky because of its invisibility. It has eluded us until now.”