Emotional Labor. Once more.

Politics seep into most activities in a society, in life, in work, you name it. This blog is no exception. Although ostensibly about philanthropy and nonprofit endeavors, the writings published here range from the personal to the… yes, political, with adjoining areas in between. To be strictly either or, personal or political, have never really been my thing, and going forward, I am keeping it that way.

So what is political and what I personal? Honestly, I was trained to not divide the two; instead, to see correlations and causation in how we position these concepts against, and perhaps in support of, each other was the way to organize thought, theories and themes.

My background in combining the two standpoints of the personal and the political grew out of the second wave of feminism, which famously connected these concepts in the 1960s (and continued in to the 1980s). The collective rise of women’s awareness showed how their participation in society had been consistently discounted and diminished. Consciousness-raising groups formed, focusing on reproductive rights, domestic labor and sexual politics. Women’s labor were still mainly defined in relation to the domestic sphere, i.e. how to organize paid labor in the professional sphere while simultaneously being responsible for the private sphere, especially after the 1950s glorification of the nuclear family. And although women always have worked, especially in service-related areas, the lower status of women’s contribution started to change as increased intolerance of the disparity became mainstream.

Access to birth control, and lifting stifling legislation that limited women’s ability to earn and control their own money, were slowly put into place. By the mid-1970s, women’s reproductive rights had taken center stage, and belatedly, women could apply for a credit card, a bank loan, and even start a business, although in the U.S. that was not until the early 1980s.

Kate Millet's seminal book Sexual Politics, published in 1970, paved the way for continued gains for women. Her groundbreaking formulation of what hindered women’s full participation, not only in the labor market, but in regular life, became a cornerstone for subsequent waves of the feminist movement, including but not limited to #MeToo.

What does sexual politics and consciousness-raising have to do with emotional industry, you may ask? And even more so, how can you ever set a price on, or pay someone, for helping another individual in need? Well, it is connected to… everything.

Emotional labor features highly when contemplating what is a woman’s work, paid and unpaid. The labor that goes into helping people, charitable work as it was called and still is, has relied on contributions that have not been adequately, at least monetarily, compensated, and mainly performed by women. And diminished, as well. That nurses were told and instructed that they had a calling, not actually trained in a profession, stayed for decades, if not centuries. (As a side note, although it’s not, the US. Department of Education is now recalling and reclassifying certifications and degrees for a slew of professions that mainly women populate, e.g. therapists, social workers, specialized nurses and the like, which will make it harder to qualify for student loans for continuing education, and charge appropriately for professional services.)

It remains difficult, it seems, to instill that people (read: women) work in the nonprofit sector to support themselves, and deserve both reliable working conditions and adequate compensation. Emotional help is further brought to evidence in the growing mental health industry where psychological support, guidance and therapy, is clearly worth paying for.

But the old images of charity, accompanied by emotions, color what is seen as regular work.

Traditionally, women carried out this work for free. Today, not so much. More and more women are gaining strength, quite literally, to not take on other’s emotional burden, and if they do, making sure that their time is counted, and appreciated accordingly.

The family is one place where this silent revolution is played out. Social media is awash with tales of emotional labor, especially in examples of weaponized incompetence, where women no longer are assuming the burden of the manager of a family unit. Instead, women are realizing their own worth and are taking another look at the labor that goes in to living a fulfilling life, on their own, or with someone they love.

This summary of sorts begs the question of how do we manage to fill our lives with rewarding emotional labor, the kind that we know will fulfill a life, and support a life worth living? How do we know that what is for us, is for all around us, and still know that we have earned the respect for that life, not being taken for granted?

It is a perpetual question, which is aired in many and varied forums. It will continue, and will be influenced by outer pressure and inner turmoil. It is what makes us ‘us’, in a way; to always question why we are who we are, and what for. These are the sophisticated questions that make us individuals, social human beings, and warriors for our humanity.

I will continue to stretch the boundaries of what this blog set out to do, to mirror emotional industry, as a verb even, not only as a substantive. To be industrious is to labor for something, and likely different for each and every one of us. But what is connecting us is our trust in what we mean to each other, and the reliance on that we will always be in constant proximity to our emotions and the labor to sustain them.

ps. in a fitting coda to this text, as I was searching for a photo on a free photo site, I typed in the word ‘labor’. In all the photos that came up as suggestions, there were only men pictured. I could not find one woman. When searching for ‘emotional labor’, photos with extremely sad, and exhausted women appeared, along with the previous ones, showing men laboring with hard manual work.
The photo for this blog post was selected from a search for images of ‘emotional labor’.

Photo by Daniel Velásquez via Unsplash.