Emotional Labor
The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“An urgent look at emotional labor....Hackman’s words reveal the agency of women is still possible while the power of care, empathy, and love in action can lead us to the best in our humanity.”
― Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play
From Journalist Rose Hackman, a deeply-researched foray into the invisible, uncompensated work women perform every day—and a profound call to action.
A stranger insists you “smile more,” even as you navigate a high-stress environment or grating commute. A mother is expected to oversee every last detail of domestic life. A nurse works on the front line, worried about her own health, but has to put on a brave face for her patients. A young professional is denied promotion for being deemed abrasive instead of placating her boss. Nearly every day, we find ourselves forced to edit our emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others. Too many of us are asked to perform this exhausting, draining work at no extra cost, especially if we’re women or people of color.
Emotional labor is essential to our society and economy, but it’s so often invisible. In this groundbreaking, journalistic deep dive, Rose Hackman shares the stories of hundreds of women, tracing the history of this kind of work and exposing common manifestations of the phenomenon. But Hackman doesn’t simply diagnose a problem—she empowers us to combat this insidious force and forge pathways for radical evolution, justice, and change.
Drawing on years of research and hundreds of interviews, you’ll learn:
· How emotional labor pervades our workplaces, from the bustling food service industry to the halls of corporate America
· How race, gender, and class unequally shape the load we carry
· Strategies for leveling the imbalances that contaminate our relationships, social circles, and households
· Empowering tools to stop anyone from gaslighting you into thinking the work you are doing is not real work
Emotional labor is real, but it no longer has to be our burden alone. By recognizing its value and insisting on its shared responsibility, we can set ourselves free and forge a path to a world where empathy, love, and caregiving claim their rightful power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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," according to this thought-provoking survey. Journalist Hackman interweaves her personal experiences with sociological and scientific research documenting how the "emotional labor" performed by women in personal and professional settings is undervalued. Profile subjects (identified by first name only) include Joann, a parks and recreation manager in California, who tells her female swim instructors to temper their coaching with encouraging words because parents expect "upspeak" from women, and Lilith, a former dominatrix whose work was "majority psychology and emotional labor, and minority sexual act." Hackman also analyzes how criticism of Hillary Clinton's lack of personal warmth helped derail her presidential campaign, cites neuroscience experiments suggesting that "fixed gender traits have been exceedingly exaggerated," and analyzes the links between slavery and the American economy's reliance on "the free labor of women." Throughout, she makes clear that men also suffer from the societal expectation that they must rely on women for emotional support. Expertly blending case studies and statistics, this is a profound call for reorienting "our fundamental value systems."
