"Women, treated like emotional thermostats whether they like it or not, not only must constantly manage their own feelings but they are also held responsible for the feelings of others. When women are told to "smile" by a stranger on the street, they are being reminded of this through harassment. When women going about their business are accused of having "resting bitch face," they are being reminded of their expected constant enthusiastic performance for the benefit of the world. A man not smiling while going about a task is never told he has "resting dick face." He's likely treated as busy and important, if his expression is noted at all.” - Rose Hackman

Wow! This is an empowering exploration of the often-overlooked work that women perform daily - emotional labor. This book is deeply-researched and filled with insights from hundreds of interviews, from the corporate world to the food service industry. It is not merely an analysis of society, but a call to action, offering strategies for addressing the imbalances rooted in race, gender, and class.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a bit of a slow read for me, but it’s such an important topic and I really enjoyed how much research the author did for this book. Emotional Labor details all of the invisible, unpaid work that women do every day all over the world with an emphasis on women of color and women with lower socioeconomic status. Even women who are not mothers perform uncompensated care work. Other women will relate to this (!!!), and men should read this book so they can learn and understand exactly what women do for them. Thank you for the ARC, NetGalley!

I honestly think this book should be read by just about everyone. It's validating for women and others who take the role of managing their families and homes, in business settings and in general life. Although, unfortunately I think the people who could benefit most from reading on this topic will never pick up a book about it.

While I personally didn't learn anything I didn't already know, I think this book was extremely interesting on a crucial topic more people need to be sensitive to, especially those who are pushing the emotional labor on to others.

When’s the first time you heard the word “emotional labor”?

Was is the 2017 article for Harpers Bazaar by Gemma Hartley? Or Julie Beck’s 2018 article for The Atlantic?

Well Rose Hackman wrote the book on it, and it’s fantastic.

The term “emotional labor” has been on the rise, and likely, reached its zenith during the pandemic when parents were stretched to the limit and expected to carry the burden of their children’s existence at home.

Hackman looks at a long history of emotional labor across race and social class in the context of a patriarchal white supremacist society. It is not focused on middle class white women and their comfort but looks at a broad scope of women in a larger context.

I’ve done a lot of reading on intersectional feminism and the labor distribution of households and Emotional Labor is a great addition or primer for people looking to begin to learn. I wish it had existed years ago as I stitched together all the articles to try to make sense of things.

If you’re looking to read more on similar topics, I highly recommend Pay Up and The Pain Gap, both look at pandemic life and the burden placed on mothers in the US.

Emotional Labor

We need love, connection, and belonging to thrive. In fact, they're more important than food or shelter. And guess what? Women are the ones who do most of the emotional labor to provide those things.

Rose Hackman explores the world of ,emotional labor, work of managing our own emotions and the emotions of others. It's the work of being kind, compassionate, and understanding. It's the work of building relationships and creating a sense of community. Its's work that's often undervalued and unpaid.

Hackman shows how emotional labor is disproportionately done by women. She talks about how women are expected to be the caregivers, the nurturers, and the peacemakers. She talks about how women are penalized for expressing anger or other "negative" emotions. And she talks about how women's emotional labor is often invisible and taken for granted.

But Hackman doesn't just point out the problem. She also offers solutions. She argues that we need to pay women for the emotional labor they do, and explores the need to value emotional labor as much as other forms of work. And she argues that we need to create a society where everyone feels safe and supported, regardless of their gender.

I really enjoyed Hackman's book. It's well-written, informative, and thought-provoking. I especially appreciated her focus on the importance of emotional labor and the need to value it more.

Absolutely phenomenal. Even if you have read other books on the subject of emotional labor or have educated yourself before, Hackman has provided a concise, yet broad review of how emotional labor can be interpreted through a more intersectional lens. For anyone who hasn't encountered information on emotional labor before, this is a fantastic first read. I want to make everyone in my life read this.

I am very glad I was able to read this debut book by Rose Hackman. The concept of emotional labor was new to me over the past 5 years, and while I feel it quite often, I also didn’t realize just how much privilege I have. I was glad to read eye-opening intersectional analysis and anecdotes. Very thorough and careful writing, albeit a bit dry and repetitive at times. I would have enjoyed reading a few more anecdotes. This is an important book on an overlooked topic, and I highly recommend it. However, for those who don’t regularly read sociological books, I think it would be beneficial to just read a chapter a day in order to really absorb the dense information that is presented.
Thank you so much to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, and the author for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

I'm so glad that there are more discussions happening about the mental load and invisible labor. Women, especially mothers, are burnt out and looking for answers. This book is a great tool and I will be recommending it alongside "Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward" by Gemma Hartley which I have been recommending for years.

Emotional Labor is a well-researched, fascinating look into the excruciating, uncompensated work women do everyday. Rose Hackman does a great job at breaking down workload and strategies for leveling out the balance. Highly recommended!

After being (one of) the people tasked with keeping things running smoothly my entire life, in the workplace, and in all of the other places where you need some emotional labor to keep things going (read as: everywhere), this book provided me with more insight than I'd expected on the world I live in and why I am this way. I highly recommend it and have suggested it to others in people-facing jobs. I am not totally sure if emotional labor truly can be taught, but I am definitely going to give it a try on some of the people in my life.

3.5

The subject matter was very interesting, and I think Rose Hackman brought up very good examples and points. However, I did find the writing to be a bit dry and also repetitive. It felt longer than it needed to be, and the time spent on potential solutions seemed minimal / simplistic.

Received a free copy from Netgalley.

"Research from the last four decades has consistently found that, as humans, our existence is primarily reliant on our emotional needs being met....One analysis that looked at results from 148 studies with over 300,000 participants showed that poor social relationships was a more detrimental factor to human survival than physical inactivity or obesity and was at least as impactful on health as smoking or drinking alcohol." p104

Rose Hackman's EMOTIONAL LABOR is the comprehensive discussion this important subject has been needing for a long time. With a topic like emotional labor, it can be easy for writers who seek to tackle it to retreat into the somewhat circular territory of defining the issue and diagnosing the problem and for goodness's sake distinguishing between the two, even though they are both (for sure) emotional labor.

Hackman doesn't have any problem juggling the complexity of this issue, or defining the symptoms of the problem emotional labor has always been. Perhaps most importantly, she suggests a staggeringly simple solution--pay those performing emotional labor a competitive wage. Such a solution would likely turn out to be terrifyingly effective. Terrifyingly? Well...it might topple the established order, might it not? "Economists call 'feminization of labor' the refusal to recognize and fully compensate feminine fields of work— such as care, service, and attention work— that are becoming the bulk of the economy. Government helps the power holders in private feminized industries, including the service sector, by not requiring employers to provide the same basic labor rights to their workers that has been common in masculine industries, such as manufacturing, since the 1930s. This economic arrangement is heavily reliant on the belief that feminized emotional labor is an expression of diminished status that deserves little in exchange for its performance." p112

One of the most important aspects of Hackman's book is its concern with the many different communities that have historically been and still are exploited for emotional labor: black women and women of color, trans women, men, and nonbinary individuals, immigrants, and queer women. Hackman didn't extend her argument to a group of individuals who must perform a grave duty of emotional labor every day, at least in the US, and that's disabled individuals and mentally ill individuals. To me, this lack was palpable, but it leaves room for further research on the subject.

In the end, Hackman's conclusion was clear and smart. Pay women for the work they already do, that you already benefit from. Why? Because they love you when no one else does.

"Love, a sense of connection, and belonging could not be more valuable to human thriving— more so than the food that we eat or the roof over our head." p104

The prose was clear and engaging, and the voice at times became passionate. I think rarely Hackman even almost-cursed or used muddy colloquialisms to show her own emotional investment in the topic. Though the book is dense (550 pp without the 200 pp of endnotes, I don't care what Goodreads says!), I made steady progress because of the good writing. *Read the endnotes.* There's treasure there.

Taking off a half star because of absolutely *no* mention of disabled activism and other forms of disabled emotional labor.

Rating 4.5 stars
Finished October 2022
Recommended for readers of feminist theory, intersectional theory, queer theory, social theory, capitalist theory, psychology

Thank you NetGalley, Rose Hackman, and MacMillan USA for an ARC of this fantastic book. Can't wait to buy a print copy!

This is such an important book that all of us (men and women) should read. I hope it gets tons of attention when it's released next year. It puts words to the experience so many women have--performing emotional labor both at home and out in the world, in service to the people in their lives (and to the patriarchy at large). I will be spreading the word on this one!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: 4/5 | Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman

Thank you, @flatiron_books, for the ARC on Netgalley 💕

In this debut, journalist Rose Hackman dives into the concept of “emotional labor:” the act of identifying or anticipating other people’s emotions, adapting yours in consequence, and then managing to affect other people’s emotions positively.

Hackman looks explicitly at this form of regulating, modulating, and manipulating one’s feelings, specifically as performed by women. She examines all the ways women of varying races, backgrounds, and privileges do emotive work, whether it's in their homes, with their husbands, children, and extended family, at work with their bosses and coworkers, and how it can be used as a mechanism to avoid negative emotions, being seen as difficult, or even as a means of survival in violent relationships.
She argues that this work is, for the most part, invisible because it is seen as a form of “feminized work,” mainly because men see women as masters of emotions and believe that being emotional is a natural part of a women’s self-regulation, if they even consider it as work at all. She also explores how men experience self-censoring and suppression to appeal to notions of masculinity and, therefore, how they do emotional work.

Approaching the research with a combination of existing literature and personal accounts from people she interviewed, she, from an intersectional lens, examines the conditions that have exacerbated emotional labor in our society, both in the current and historical landscape. Her comprehensive coverage effectively explores the who, what, when, where, and why of emotional labor and how its implications are deeply embedded in the heart and minds of women and the bones of our society.

…


▪️As I imagine was the point, Hackman adequately demonstrates how pervasive emotional labor is. But in doing this, she also, underscores how unavoidable it is. While I found most of her takes on how to combat emotional labor to be creative and honorable, I found them less practical, if I’m honest.

▪️Women of color and people of marginalized groups KNOW emotional labor. Arguably better than most. As a WOC, I have been performing emotional labor in multiple arenas most of my life, AND it is exhausting. However, in emotional labor’s more benign forms, self-censorship and not centering ourselves at the expense of others is the backbone of empathy and, thereby, effective social relations. I think the concept of HOW we as humans perform emotional labor and WHEN we choose to perform it or WHEN we have to perform it, whether subconsciously or unconsciously, was not explored, and I feel like it was a missed opportunity. Different lifestyles require different emotive work. Arguably, POCs have to employ emotional labor more frequently in multiple areas. And more often than not, their performance is life and death. Privileged women may employ emotional labor in their homes to deal with their husbands and children. Still, those same women do not have to engage in emotional labor in their interactions with police, for example. Also, would those same privileged women ever find themselves in a situation where they couldn’t center themselves and thereby have to employ benign emotional labor? This would have been an interesting angle, especially in the context of emotional labor and intersectionality. I feel that a comparative metric may have been productive and would have imparted some relativity to this topic.

▪️I didn’t feel that there was a good balance of literature and personal stories. I didn’t feel that there were enough personal accounts, and because of this, in some chapters, the literature overpowered the personal accounts. This was such a deeply researched work, with so much literature, but I think it needed more personal stories to round out the breadth of literature.

I wasn't exactly sure what to expect when I received this book, but the catchy title caught my eye, and I had to pick up this book.

In Emotional Labor, author Rose Hackman provides a thoroughly researched and intersectional approach to the emotional labor that individuals experience in their daily lives, and how this impacts people from many different groups.

Hackman begins with a brief history of the term 'Emotional Labor', and then provides readers with examples and anecdotes of how this has shaped the people around them.

Hackman highlights the importance of Emotional Labor as performance, and how this performance impacts people daily. Importance of self care in response to the burnout of emotional labor is also brought up, and provides an alternative where combatting the patriarchy which enables emotional labor to persist can be achieved.

I've read a number of emotional labor and distribution of labor books in recent years. Most of them, though, have centered primarily around the household dynamic. Hackman approaches this topic with context and breadth that adds incredible impact. Each chapter take a macro and a micro approach--providing personal case studies, and also presenting the historical and social web that has created today's burdensome disparities. Hackman goes beyond labeling emotional labor as a nuisance. She outlines the coercion, the power, the violence wielded to create and uphold these systems. Hackman also carefully examines intersectionality, and the outsized impact emotional labor and care-work have among the most disenfranchised Americans-- working class BIPOC women. More than anything, I walk away from reading this book emboldened to engage with emotional justice--in my home, and in our society.