It was 42F, and the 79-year-old senator from Vermont was cold. Bernie Sanders slumped uncomfortably in his folding chair, coat pulled to chest, hands clad in chunky mittens. Probably because of the expression on Sanders’ face – a mix of discomfort and irritation, the sort of grouching that Larry David has forged a career out of – the image flew across the internet. There were memes of Sanders on the Iron Throne, alongside Forrest Gump and sitting courtside with Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
Almost immediately, the feminist backlash began. The Drexel University professor Amelia Hoover Green tweeted: “Ice cold feminist take: I love Bernie, I really do, but sir: emotional labor is not beneath you. Not feeling it? Fucking pretend for one minute, like [most] women do every minute.” The artist Anne B Kelly tweeted: “This is misogyny.” The TV writer Liz Sczudlo added: “White men get endless latitude and forgiveness other Americans aren’t afforded.”
They were quickly dunked on. Sitting on a chair, looking bored, isn’t sexism, some said. Others rightly accused Green of projecting. Many highlighted the absurdity of painting Sanders as a misogynist given his long history of championing women’s rights, from pushing for a higher minimum wage (which would lift many women out of poverty, as they are the most likely to be in low-paid jobs), to advocating for paid parental leave.
Fundamentally, these tweets are a salutary lesson in why some insights are best saved for WhatsApp chat. But it also exposes the intellectual confusion of popular feminism, and the devolution of a movement that once solicited collective social and political gains, but has increasingly become little more than a framework for the expression of personal grievances. There is possibly no greater example of this mangling of feminist terminology than the term “emotional labor”.
“Emotional labor” was coined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1983 to reflect the work that predominantly female employees do to suppress their emotions in order to do their jobs. For example: a flight attendant appearing calm during an emergency landing, so as not to alarm the passengers. (While Hochschild’s concept was gender-neutral, she recognized that women often perform this type of labor more commonly than men, as they work more commonly in service industry jobs.) In addition to emotional labor, there is also what Hochschild terms “emotion work”: managing your feelings for a greater social or familial good. This may include the scheduling of family events, or keeping the peace between siblings. The two concepts are often confused, but when people talk about emotional labor, what they usually mean is emotion work.
Seeing the Bernie tweets circulating after the inauguration, the feminist academic Dr Hannah McCann of the University of Melbourne called it “a classic example of how the term is being misused”.
“The original concept spoke about the work that many women had to perform in workplaces, to muster up the emotions needed to perform their jobs – now that’s emotional labor, and it comes out of a really thorough and vigorous critique of women’s work in the workplace. But emotional labor is not a concept you can extrapolate into any interaction that women have.”
The overuse of the phrase “emotional labor” began in earnest with the publication of a viral Harper’s article by the writer Gemma Hartley in September 2017. Hartley recounted asking her husband to book a cleaner for Mother’s Day.
When the service he contacted at the last minute was too expensive (she controlled the household finances) Hartley’s husband cleaned the bathroom himself, as a present. Hartley was upset with him, for not understanding that she “wanted him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, [and] do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me.”
She describes her husband as “a good feminist ally,” because he performs chores when she asks him to. But while men treating female partners like unpaid household managers is soul-crushing, it’s not emotional labor, it is actual labor. You can’t emote your bathroom clean – you scrub it. The same goes with managing a household.
Hartley expanded her viral article into Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward, a book that should have been a tweet: leave him, if he won’t clean up after himself. The book consists of a series of interviews with predominantly married women about how they house-train their husbands – the husbands are mostly not interviewed, but observed like zoo animals – alongside tips such as: explain to your husband why it’s important to take care when choosing presents. Hartley concludes that the key to getting a man to do the housework is by giving him “the time and space to come to grips with his competency … [so he can] feel confident taking on the emotional labor that had so long been my domain.”
The average American woman performs four hours of unpaid work a day, compared with two and a half hours for men, so there is an important discussion to be had about the gendered allocation of housework. But treating men like four-year-olds might not be the solution. Earlier generations of feminists posited radical solutions to the gendered imbalance in domestic work, such as paying women for housework, as the Marxist feminist Silvia Federici believed we should. “When we speak of housework” Federici wrote, “[we speak of] … the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class.”
Some contemporary feminists argue that universal basic income would be a better way of compensating women for the unpaid work they routinely perform. It would give women the economic freedom to exit unfulfilling or abusive relationships more easily (although the basic income touted by supporters like Andrew Yang would need to be higher to achieve that) and rectify some of the inequalities inherent in a capitalist system that relies on the unpaid labor of women. McCann wishes we discussed emotional labor in these terms: from a structural analysis, rather than a place of personal antagonism towards a chilly senator. “We’ve lost the structural sense of feminism,” she says, “in this general trend towards individual, consumer-based feminism.”
Like the worn-out gusset on a pair of tights, over the following years, the term “emotional labor” has grown baggy with overuse. Hochschild, for her part, is horrified by how the term has been distorted. “It’s very blurry and over-applied,” she told the Atlantic in 2018. (When I emailed Hochschild asking for her thoughts on the Sanders incident, she responded: “Poor man.”) Dr Catherine Rottenberg of the University of Nottingham, however, argues all language evolves: “I don’t think a term should be tethered to a particular meaning for ever.”
The current emotional labor discourse has collided with the vogue for speaking like a therapist. This attitude is best summed up with a 2019 viral tweet thread from the feminist educator Melissa A Fabello. “Asking for consent for emotional labor, even from people with whom you have a longstanding relationship … should be common practice,” Fabello wrote. Being a friend? Emotional labor. Sympathising with a colleague after a rough encounter with your boss? Emotional labor. Emotional labor has become a catch-all term substituting for a wide range of expressions: politeness, tactfulness, courtesy, professionalism, friendship.
As emotional labor distended as a concept, bloating across pastel-coloured Instagram activist pages and Etsy shops, it encountered neoliberal, “secure the bag” capitalism, and the two had a demon child. In this iteration of emotional labor, people should expect monetary recompense in exchange for being there for family and friends. “Compensate people for their emotional labor,” writes the Instagram account @tai.draws, which has 8,506 followers. “If you would buy your friends a pizza when they help you move, do the same for an emotionally taxing ask,” says illustrator Ethan Tai Bossuyt, the creator of the post.
Speaking with Bossuyt on the phone, it’s hard not to soften towards him: his account, which shares reflections on social justice issues, is obviously well-intentioned. Doesn’t his model of emotional labor reduce all relationships to economic transactions? “It’s not necessarily that the friend has to give something back,” he says. “I just want them to show appreciation for the labor I’m giving.” Bossuyt, a 20-year-old student from London, explains that asking for consent before venting at a friend is something he consciously practices, and it’s been a beneficial experience for him. But to me, personally, compensating our friends for being kind to us does not feel like gender solidarity, it feels like a relationship between worker and boss.
At other points, online emotional labor discourse veers into straightforward misandry: the Instagram account @realmanbabies, which has 15,000 followers and advertises itself as “about emotional labor and sisterhood”, shares memes that read “you’re never childless, when you have a husband” and “how to love a man – don’t”.
“It’s just man versus woman,” says McCann, about this sort of perspective. “That’s it. Men oppress women. There’s no class analysis.” The creator of @realmanbabies, who prefers to stay anonymous but is a thirtysomething woman living in Stockholm, defends her position.
“I have tried talking to men for many years,” she tells me, via email, “but too many times it ends up being a waste of my time, energy, and health, because men don’t listen to women. And why should they? They reap the benefits.” She longs for a day when women don’t have to perform her version of emotional labor. “I hope for a ripple effect of women coming together and smashing the patriarchy,” she says. Laudable, perhaps, although it is unclear how we’ll achieve total systemic change without involving 50% of the population.
Where does this all end? In a recent interview with US women’s publication the Cut, the novelist Lauren Oyler expressed a deep fatigue with the contemporary state of feminist discourse. Oyler argued that feminism has been hijacked by wealthy women who aren’t suffering much, if at all: women who get mad at Bernie Sanders for not wearing a tie to the inauguration, because they project on to him every shitty boss who ever put his feet up on the desk. The women who could most benefit from feminist organising probably don’t care about Sanders’ posture at inauguration, because the real ills in their life are low pay, long hours and harsh conditions – not smiling at events when they’d rather not.
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