The Mental Load of Defending "Emotional Labor"
Maybe instead of dismissing feminist thinkers for using language we find a little too clinical, we should start listening to what they have to say.
I recently finished reading What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life, by Allison Daminger (of The Daminger Dispatch). I liked it a lot. It is very much worth reading if you take an interest in homemaking. Daminger’s interest in the subject is oriented a bit differently than mine is. I think her aim was to get a clearer understanding of the gendered division of domestic labor, with the goal of rebalancing that labor within couples. My aim is to account for the value of domestic labor regardless of who is doing it, with the goal of rebalancing the costs of that labor between individual households and the rest of society. But whichever of these goals we prioritize, achieving it will require a much clearer understanding of what homemaking actually is and how it gets done—and that is precisely what Daminger offers.
The result of Daminger’s careful efforts is a genuinely impressive systematic breakdown of the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of domestic work. I think the book makes a pretty strong case that time use metrics are doing a poor job of capturing the true scope of homemaking. More importantly for my purposes, I think her close study of the cognitive dimension of homemaking makes it clear that people do not so much hop back and forth between the domestic and professional realms, but straddle them. Dropping a child off at daycare does not actually allow you to plant both feet at work. I finished the book ever more convinced that the only real, durable way to help women (and men!) balance their work in the separate spheres is to collapse them.
But that is a topic for another day. The reason I am writing about Daminger’s book now is that, while reading it, I kept having the same thought I had while reading that infamous mankeeping piece from last year. Something like: “huh, there are plenty of very interesting insights in here for those who are not so blinded by the fog of Gender War to see them.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, last year, the New York Times published a piece titled Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping,’ a fact I became aware of only because people on Twitter did a whole lot of dunking on it. If you are curious about the stir the piece caused, I encourage you to read the entire thing, but the gist is: men are struggling to build and maintain social bonds and are thus increasingly reliant on women to satisfy their social and emotional needs. Without anyone else to lean on, their female partners are left “doing all the emotional labor,” a.k.a. “mankeeping.”
Some people were sort of annoyed that the piece effectively made the male loneliness crisis about women. I can see that argument, though, to be honest, as a journalist and also someone who takes a great interest in work of the unpaid relational variety, it seems both plausible and okay to point out that the male loneliness crisis (which, apparently, is more of a youth loneliness crisis, anyway) is having social knock-on effects for women. But more than anything, it was the terminology the author chose to describe women’s bloated social responsibilities—specifically, “emotional labor”—that really set people off. A lot of people really do not like that term or others like it: the mental load, invisible labor, unpaid work etc… Articles or books that invoke them are dismissed from the outset, whatever their merits.
I think that’s a shame. Emotional labor, as Arlie Hochschild defined it (more on that in a minute) is not really my area of expertise, but it is part of (or at least adjacent to) a literature that I actually do know something about and consider really worthwhile. In the interest of defending that literature, of which Daminger’s book is a part, I feel compelled to explain why I think most of the critiques of the term “emotional labor” are pretty ill-conceived.