Expectations of Emotional Labor

Women have always felt the pressure of perfection. Nobody in a woman’s life necessarily needs to pressure her directly - no strict parents, or overbearing professors, bosses, or coaches. They don't need to. Society does it for them.

Because not only are girls expected to be kind, sweet, beautiful, and all of the other cliche 1950’s housewife attributes, but they have new avenues of ways to excel - sports, academics, politics, ect. Women’s roles in the world grow, giving them more amazing opportunity, yet overbearing expectations also grow, disregarding the original goal of an “equal” society.

While nobody is perfect, most people have the desire to be. And if most women are working outside the home and to balance a social life and relationships on top of that, there is still a lot of “extra-stuff” that needs to happen in order to keep people happy, society afloat, and perpetuate this idea of perfection. This “extra stuff” that has more often than not been tinged with gendered expectation.

You know, the “extra stuff.” Remembering birthdays, coworkers coffee orders, “nagging” someone to make a doctors appointment. Taking up space in your brain to remembering Chris is allergic to peanuts and Lexi is a vegan, and getting two seperate cakes for the work party so they can both enjoy... Telling your boyfriend to call his grandma, because you know he misses her, but he’s busy and wouldn’t think of it. Picking out that perfect present for a person you don’t know very well, but still like and want to be happy. Smiling, day after day, even though you might hate your job and everyone around you. Always being open to hearing people's problems, even if you’re overwhelmed with your own. The “extra stuff.”

Oh and this “extra stuff?” It has a name. Yup - emotional labor. There is a name for this constant, never ending stream of to-dos that permeate most women’s lives, stretching to cover both the workplace and home, never truly giving them a break.

Most people wouldn't go to sleep and think “wow, i really overdid it on the emotional labor this week” like they would a midnight pizza binge or a going a little too far in a yoga class to impress a cute instructor. Because women do emotional labor without thinking, they do it naturally, they have been conditioned to do it, and most importantly, they believe “If I don’t do it nobody will.”

But what would happen if women just stopped doing emotional labour? Would relationships crumble? Would people be less well cared for? Would less happiness be spread? Would households go into a frenzy? Would David from accounting EVER get that joint office birthday gift??

Or would other people start picking up the pieces, equalizing the distribution of emotional labor between the genders, leading to a better balanced, fairer, and happier society?

People often accept things the way they are, because “that’s the way they’ve always been.” But if we really believed this, really stuck to it, so much of what makes our society great would be lost. Women couldn’t vote, segregation would still exist, and so many things that we now regard as normal would be denied to so many of us.

Our society isn't perfect - far from. But so many inspirational people have done their part to make the world a more equal, fair, and better place to inhabit. We could all do our part to help make society more equal, whether it’s picking up the slack with some of the “extra stuff” or candidly discussing that all things that have been forever deemed “woman’s work”... do not in fact need to be performed by a woman.

The article that started it all! (For me)

Beginning my MA final year project, I knew that I wanted to explore women's important role in keeping society running.

With a BA in History with a focus on women in modern western societies, I had assumed that my project that I knew would be about women would also be something historically based. (I love a good timeline)

While not completely wrong, my direction took a turn from exploring the history of working women, to women in the traditional work place, to what many feminist academics term "the second shift" - or the taking care of the household, onto the work women are performing in excess, on TOP of the "first and second" shifts... the emerging hot topic, "the third shift."

I landed on the article I'm attaching, and felt a resonance with each provoking sentence. Either myself, my mother, or my grandmother had performed the actions written about in the article without question, because we innately believed that's "what we were supposed to do."

This surprised me. I come from a progressive family. My parents have always equally distributed the household chores, as well as owning a business together where my mother, not my shy father, was more often the business liaison- winning business woman of the year in my hometown in 2017. My grandmother, although a "traditional" 1950's housewife of four, was known for her spunk and her ability to tell patriarchal figures where to shove it.

Yet still, myself and the previous two generations had all fallen into the trap of performing more emotional labor than our male counterparts, almost unknowingly, because we believed that it was "what we were supposed to do."

So here is my gift to you, a link to the article that started this journey for me. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

'Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?" - Rose Hackman