How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

and then...

> However, it’s not as easy as telling him that. My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way. Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character. If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the unending hell that is laundry—he would take it as me saying, “Look at everything I’m doing that you’re not. You’re a bad person for ignoring me and not pulling your weight.”

When I was a kid, I remember getting frustrated one day when after I decided-- for whatever reason-- that I wanted to "trade licks" with my older, bigger brother. (I.e., I could hit his arm as hard as I could with the understanding he would then be able to do the same to me.)

I distinctly remember both my brother and father-- who were watching this-- both smiling and taking about 30 seconds to carefully (and repeatedly) explain to me exactly what would happen to my arm if I entered into this contract (plus the lack of retribution for the suffering described). Needless to say I decided not to go through with it.

That's all to say-- there is some obvious miscommunication going on here. The author wanted a gift of "cleaning plus", and the husband tells her that a "cleaning basic" quote was too expensive. That is the moment to carefully explain the "plus" part, and how the true cost is at least equal to the cost of "cleaning basic" plus hiring a life-coach for the full duration of the gift to explicitly enumerate each "cleaning plus" task as it happens.

Plus-- since these are adults-- the contingency that if the husband is still so oblivious that he's convinced he can just wing his way through "cleaning plus," to refuse that gift and instead accept something off of Amazon.

1. Chaos muppet theory. In this article, the wife is the order muppet, and the husband is the chaos muppet. Is this gendered? I don't know. My sister and I are both order muppets and our spouses are chaos muppets. That means in my household, the man (me) takes on what the author calls 'emotional labor' but is more like 'management labor'. There are a large number of household things I take on because I feel like I must. This is not about my wife, it's about my own neuroses and desire for order. And it's not about division of labor, because we have a very ad-hoc system of who makes dinner, does the dishes, etc etc. That kind of stuff is more about who is busier and who has more free time. If I have to study for a test I try my best not to feel bad about just walking out after eating dinner and leaving the dishes, and just as often I start cleaning up while she reads an interesting article. I'm sure if you asked my wife and I separately, we would both say we take care of 60% of the work and the other does 40% :)

2. Responsibility for emotions. Is this gendered? The author makes a good argument for the expectations society has put on women to not be a burden or a nag, to manage emotions and expectations, and so on. I'm sure some men take this on more than their female partners, but I find it very plausible or likely that the author is correct that it's more frequently women doing this work. It's not the same about who is more emotional; it's entirely possible the man could be much more of an emotional person yet not take on the responsibility of managing others emotions (in fact, that might be what's happening in the article if the woman feels she needs to tip-toe around his feeling so much).

3. Actual household work. Flat out work. Child care, cooking, cleaning, picking up the dry cleaning, whatever. I'm sure many tomes have been written about the gendered roles and expectations and how these have changed over time and the work that remains to be done if one's desire is to equally partition these tasks.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/what_...