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