Emotional labor was about paid work

Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase in the 1980s, but it explains a lot about our world today

The latest New York Times viral outrage story is a Catherine Pearson article looking at the trend of women who are “Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’”.

Mankeeping, Pearson explains, is a term devised by Angelica Puzio Ferrara for “the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.”

In its dissection of the issues, the article uses the modern meaning of “emotional labor”, which involves tending to the emotional needs of someone you have a personal relationship with. There’s no divinely ordained need for particular phonemes to represent particular things. But Arlie Hochschild, who invented the term, is a major intellectual force, and I think it’s interesting to see the ways in which the term has evolved from her original meaning.

Indeed, another recent viral New York Times relationship article noted that “emotional labor” has experienced tremendous concept creep, which Jean Garnett describes as an “indication of our need for more ways to talk about the invisible affective labor that often falls to women”.

That might be right. Hochschild’s original meaning, though, was focused on socioeconomic class, and I think this recent shift in meaning is also an indication of the need to make the concept more relevant to the kind of people who read and share New York Times articles. Which is fine! But the intersection of gender and class in the burgeoning service economy, the thing that Hochschild was talking about in the first place, is important in its own right. It explains a good bit about the contemporary economy, about the discourse around “struggling boys,” and about the appeal of Trump’s backward-looking economic vision.