Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman, and My Most Popular Post

Lately I’ve been really lighting up about what I call reframes: Something I already know presented in a way that makes me say, “Ohhh! I get it now!” It gives me that feeling of an itchy spot finally being scratched.

Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman scratches that itch. It was written in 2023, and I suspect I added it to my TBR around that time then forgot why I added it and kept delaying reading it because I thought, based on the title, that it was a self-help book. Imagine my surprise when I finally wanted to read a self-help book about emotional labor, got the audiobook from the library, and found that it’s actually not a self-help book at all. Rather, it’s a well researched, journalistic book about emotional labor, the types of work that are largely considered “feminine” or “caring” and that frequently are underpaid (nursing assistants, social workers, teachers), unpaid (family caregivers to young children or elders), or unrecognized at all (managing the big emotions a supervisor has never been expected to manage on their own, anticipating another person’s reactions and preemptively modifying one’s behavior to avoid conflict or to deescalate a situation).

Hackman writes about how the feminism of the 70s and 80s, while it helped the culture move forward in terms of opportunities for women, also put us in a bit of a bind by pushing boundaries so women are able to incorporate more “masculine” traits, like assertiveness, aggression, ambition, competition, ruthlessness, into their gender expression while doing little to nothing to remove the overall stigma against “feminine” traits, like emotional intelligence, anticipating the needs of others, and emotional regulation in the service of maintaining relationships.

Let me pause here to clarify that I’ve put “masculine” and “feminine” in quotation marks because there is nothing fundamentally “masculine” or “feminine” about any of these traits, as supported by scientific research Hackman cites in her book. Those are simply the labels we place on these traits, and the gendered language of those labels, while inaccurate, is significant and useful because it highlights the misogyny that continues within our culture in the United States. Our culture still defines things that it deems “feminine” as lesser, which means that being a man who is perceived as too feminine because he displays too much emotional intelligence or expresses the full range of human emotions carries with it the risk of social consequences, including financial consequences, in the case of career options and mobility, and in some settings, even safety risks for a man seen as not being manly enough. (I would argue that, for this reason, homophobia is also rooted in misogyny, but that’s a conversation for another time.)

And that brings us to my most popular post: My Son’s First Sports Bra

I started this parenting gig with a commitment to helping my children’s generation move past restrictive definitions of gender roles. My feminism from college onward has centered around expanding gender definitions to include all kinds of outward gender expression without making the person themselves any less of the gender they are. In other words, a man can wear a dress and still be a man just as a woman can wear pants and still be a woman. So, when my young son wanted to wear my sports bra because one of the most important adults in his life wears them, or when he wanted to wear a pioneer dress and bonnet because they’re pretty, or when his favorite color was “light red” (i.e., pink), supporting him in doing this was consistent with my stated values. But the act of sending him out into the world wearing a dress wasn’t without fear of what he would encounter. He was quite young, and we lived in a very accepting area, so the worry was less than it might have been had he been older or had we lived in another part of the country or had a different social group, but it was still there.

I wasn’t worried that he wanted to be a girl. Not only is there nothing wrong with being a girl, he was under five years old for most of this and not really even aware of the cultural definitions of gender, so this, to me, was a non-issue. If it happened, it happened, but this was just a little kid experimenting with what it meant to be who he was. What I worried about was that, being a boy and doing “girl” things, he would catch flak from other people. To my relief, this didn’t happen. I watched people do a double-take a couple of times, but no one said anything negative to him (or to me, for that matter), for which I am so grateful.

Twelve years later, he doesn’t wear dresses anymore, and his favorite color has evolved from light red to purple to “I reject the idea of choosing one favorite color,” but he checks in with his friends to make sure he’s not gone too far with a joke or with how he expressed a strong opinion, and he gives great hugs. He’s still as much his own unique self as any of us can be as we navigate our responses to the culture we live in. I can only hope that, regardless of what he experiences outside our house, he still finds our home a safe place to be his full self. With any luck, he has more freedom to be fully himself than the men in his father’s and grandfathers’ generations.

One final note about Emotional Labor: I spent this post talking primarily about the parts of the book that address how our culture genders certain behaviors and assigns value to these behaviors based on stereotypes about gender and power dynamics. However, there is so much more to this book than that. Hackman makes a strong case for how awareness and revaluing of emotional labor can make our communities, our workplaces, and our economy stronger and more competitive. Since the publication of the book in 2023, there has been a shift in some segments of our culture towards more “manly” definitions of leadership and power and more restrictive definitions of femininity, which has been somewhat disheartening to me. However, my spouse reports that the Minnesota Vikings’s recent success and most recent win has been attributed to coach Kevin O’Connell’s ability to communicate and connect with his players emotionally. So, maybe we’re on the way to recognizing the value of emotional labor after all.