The Year We Wondered if Emotional Labor Should Come With a Price

Article here. Excerpt:

'In May, Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times about how women are still responsible for most of the “worry work” in their homes—a type of labor that requires “large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of it all.” Sociological research finds that moms continue to direct most or all of domestic and familial matters, even if fathers are increasingly helping in the execution of such tasks. “Whether a woman loves or hates worry work,” Shulevitz writes, “it can scatter her focus on what she does for pay and knock her partway or clean off a career path. This distracting grind of apprehension and organization may be one of the least movable obstacles to women’s equality in the workplace.”

That same month, activists Lauren Chief Elk, Yeoshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith, started #GiveYourMoneytoWomen.* As Chief Elk explained in an interview with Vice, the hashtag was intended to call attention to all the emotional labor women do for men’s benefit as well as the emotional—and sometimes physical—abuse women experience in the company of men. In July, Jess Zimmerman wrote in the Toast about her many years providing counsel and support to her lovelorn male friends and questioning why her efforts aren’t valued as work (unlike activities such as editing her friends writing and taking care of their animals). In the Guardian in November, Rose Hackman asked, “What if much like childcare and housekeeping, the sum of this ongoing emotional management is yet another form of unpaid labor?” Hackman pointed to a 2005 study finding that women’s propensity to do emotional labor was linked to gender constructions, as opposed to biological sex, and ended on another question: Is it time to demand “adequate, formal remuneration for emotion work provided in the workplace as a skill?” If such a demand were met, Hackman added, it would “be a shake-patriarchy-to-its-core revolution.”'