[“Gentle-mannered and warm, Anna describes herself as “the opposite of a type A personality” and is explicit about the emotional labor she performs as part of her duties. “When I am with her you have to be happy and cheery,” she tells me, explaining that while Mia is in school or at an activity she has taken her to, she does housework exclusively associated to Mia but also takes the time to unwind and center herself. She knows how important it is that she be “on” for the child in her care. Anna’s emotional labor is tied to providing Mia with feelings of love and safety, which involves creating a positive environment and successfully executing the routines of Mia’s life, sure. But Anna’s emotional labor to the child in her care also involves providing her with an environment for emotional development, emotional exploration, and emotional literacy as she processes the world around her with prodigious sensitivity, ability, and speed. Sensory feelings must be given explanations and translated into emotions that must be given words.
“It’s a lot in that she is learning and having all kinds of experiences that need to be synthesized because she is five and a half and everything requires an explanation. Being the adult in the situation, you have to be there for her when she’s happy or sad, or [try] to understand where she’s coming from. Be very sensitive to her and not lose patience or not get upset at her because she’s not being difficult, she’s just trying to understand what’s going on around her.”
Academics tend to talk about the topic of “care” when it comes to these categories of workers, while the term “emotional labor” in private or public is often boxed in to being seen as a problem of the middle and upper classes, to be treated separately. In some circles, popular renderings of emotional labor have become synonymous with whining: entitled white feminism at its worst. One academic I interviewed, a leader in her field, advanced that contemporary emotional labor concerns were totally outside of the everyday concerns of working-class people or people on the losing end of systemic inequality.
Such separations may seem noble, but they enable the overlooking of common origin problems that, if clearly denounced, would help move the entire conversation forward. It is the devaluing of feminized emotional labor that makes care jobs so precarious. It is the propagation of a belief that love and empathy in action are not work that helps hinder labor rights and proper pay. It is the requirement that emotional labor should just emanate, uncomplaining, from feminized and racialized groups of people in exchange for little to nothing that ensures emotional labor go hand in hand with exploitation.
Besides stopping us from seeing the whole picture, the idea that working-class women or women of color are not burdened with heavy, extractive emotional labor expectations at work as well as at home is not only ludicrous, it’s offensive. The fact that Anna, a nanny who identifies as Afro-Latina, provides vast amounts of expected emotional labor in her professional life does not, suddenly, somehow invalidate it as a site for scrutiny. And it certainly does not mean that Anna does not have to deal with complaints and pressure from her boyfriend, who wants more time and emotional presence from her in private. These kinds of dismissals deny full emotional landscapes to working-class women and women of color.
One woman employed as a domestic worker in Detroit confided that the extensive emotional labor demands of her ex-husband, who expected to be catered to at all times, had been the most defining aspect of her early adulthood. She left him and was now in therapy. Was her experience with emotional labor not real? Is it really that shocking that she went to therapy? If anything, the additional weight of financial concerns, of insecure wages, and being in an environment with more crime, more historical state violence, or more addiction—these are all factors that make the soothing work of love and the nurturing involved in sustaining communities even more indispensable.
The erasure of emotional labor concerns from the private emotional landscapes of less privileged women doesn’t just help further dehumanize them. Treating the topic as exclusively elitist helps ingrain the sexist idea that women’s concerns are just so very silly, dismissible as irrelevant, trivial. Complaining about emotions as work? What will these ladies find to complain about next?
There is, in the short term, undoubtedly a perverse incentive for more privileged women to simply kick the can of devalued labor down the road and pass its responsibility on to a less privileged woman they can underpay. Hanging on to the sense of their own injustice, they fail—or refuse—to see their own complicity in the system toward others. This division that impedes progress is a temporary fix only for some. As long as people performing feminized tasks, including women of different backgrounds, do not see one another as fellow workers, there can be no colossal change.
One woman I interviewed in New York included in her accounts of emotional labor the burden of having to deal with her toddler’s nanny, who had a teenage son and an abusive husband and had started confiding in her female employer. The irony in complaining about someone who you arguably depend on for the performance of her own devalued emotional labor left me dumbstruck. How could my interviewee not see the irony, how could she so brazenly heighten her plight above her nanny’s? The devaluing and invisibility of emotional labor may have felt real to this interviewee in her blood family dynamic, but it undoubtedly affected her nanny even more—and most certainly to the employer’s benefit.
The point with emotional labor is not that it inherently points to an injustice. When seen, when valued or appreciated, or when part of an exchange, a mutuality, an ecosystem where love is power—then it needn’t be exploitative. Quite the contrary: doing emotional labor for people who are doing it for you is the goal, not the problem.
We have to connect the dots if we are to expose the problem and heal. The inclination—a sexist, classist, and racist one—with which we jump at the opportunity to commodify-at-a-discount the emotions of working-class people and people of color in public but deny the existence of any full, private emotional landscapes is part of the same sexist inclination that silently extracts women of all classes’ labor in private.”]
rose hackman, from emotional labor: the invisible work shaping our lives and how to claim our power, 2023
