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Why do women feel it’s our job to appease men like Angry Dad?

Call it ‘emotional labour’, the ‘economy of feelings’ or the ‘mental load’, women are expected to be especially good at it

A few hours in, our back row was the last to get their inflight meal and my seatmate’s charm had worn thin. He started muttering darkly about the service and shifting angrily in his seat. Photograph: CEF/Tim Pannell/Agency Stock
A few hours in, our back row was the last to get their inflight meal and my seatmate’s charm had worn thin. He started muttering darkly about the service and shifting angrily in his seat. Photograph: CEF/Tim Pannell/Agency Stock
Rachel O'Dwyer
Sun Sept 08 2024 - 07:00

I was on a Qatar Airways flight recently, in a window seat at the back of the plane. Beside me was a husband whose wife and toddler were seated in the row in front. As the flight prepared to take off, he was almost aggressively charming, introducing himself to the strangers on either side, giving us his life story: Italian, Oxford educated, a two-year-old son, his wife expecting their second, on their way to a family wedding.

I hated him on sight. Maybe it was the way he let his wife wrestle their squirming toddler into a onesie while he sat in the back, holding forth. Or maybe it was the proprietary way he kept touching her. (Is it just me who is suspicious of men who are demonstratively affectionate with their partners in public?)

A few hours in, our back row was the last to get their in-flight meal and my seatmate’s charm had worn thin. He started muttering darkly about the service and shifting angrily in his seat. As the other rows had their trays cleared and were served a drink, he lost control.

“Where the hell is our food?” he yelled at a passing air steward. Or he pitched this cry in her direction like an angry toddler throwing a toy. After that, there wasn’t really any pretending that Italian Dad was a nice person. The steward was deferential. She didn’t quite make eye contact as she gave him, not one, but two beers. I found myself trying to be extra nice to her, to make up for how not nice he was. I glimpsed his wife’s strained posture, her pinched face in half profile.

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Angry Dad comes back to me when I read Arlie Russell Hochschild. Hochschild was a sociologist who coined the term “emotional labour”. She scribbled these two words on a notepad at the back of a training session for Delta Air Lines stewards as they were told to “smile like they really mean it”, while passengers like Angry Dad are hurling abuse at them from the aisle seat.

Their job is to serve food and drinks and save lives in an emergency, but it’s also to manage and absorb other people’s bad feelings. It’s work that is largely done by women and people of colour. Where marginalised groups have less economic resources, they make a resource of feeling – they bring emotions to the market.

Hochschild also coined the idea of an “economy of emotion”. Both terms hinge on the sense that feelings, like money, are a currency or medium of exchange. Our relationships with others are built on this invisible economy of feelings. We have an intuitive sense of what feelings are owed or owing: gratitude, love, anger, guilt.

“In social interactions,” Hochschild writes, “we pay, overpay, underpay, play with paying, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay and concede what is emotionally due another person.”

In the past, women tended to make a resource out of their feelings and offer them to men because they didn’t have the same economic clout. We’re all familiar, for example, with the idea of “feminine wiles” – making use of a pout or a certain sway of the hips when direct access to power was blocked. That women have more of this emotional currency doesn’t give them more power, sadly, because a woman usually has to subordinate her feelings to someone else. (To be female, as Andrea Long Chu observes, is to let somebody else do your desiring for you).

One of the ways that women historically compensated for a lack of economic independence was often by taking on not only housework but emotional toil. Social media has dubbed the cognitive and emotional graft involved in maintaining family life, from remembering to buy new school shoes and book doctor’s appointments, to boosting family morale and absorbing hurt feelings after a hard day at the office, “the mental load”.

Hochschild was interested in what happened when the emotional labour that usually takes place in a domestic setting entered a commercial setting

Somewhere along the way, all that work became confused with what’s natural to a womanly disposition. Some women do it so well that, like the dirty washing you only notice when it piles up at the end of the day, it seems invisible. Hochschild was interested in what happened when the emotional labour that usually takes place in a domestic setting (Italian Dad’s poor wife having to put up with his outbursts) entered a commercial setting (Qatar Airways staff meting out free drinks and fake smiles).

But what happens to the economy of feeling today in a two-income household, when women have entered the workplace and are earning money of their own? Are they still bound by the old rules that expect them to shoulder other people’s bad feelings – to carry the mental load?

In romantic (and especially heterosexual) partnerships, trouble often rears its head when there’s an imbalance in the economy of feeling. A man who helps around the house might feel he’s owed gratitude because he does comparatively more than his father did, while his partner feels he’s owed less kudos for his half-arsed vacuuming because she still does the lion’s share of the housework herself. What he understands as his “gift” to her has been sadly mis-received.

In the same invisible economy, a husband who earns more money than his wife may feel that he has earned the right to contribute less to the upkeep of their home. By the same token, when Hochschild was conducting research in the 1980s and 1990s, some women who earned more money than their male partners felt obliged to do even more around the home, to put more into the coffer of feeling to compensate for a sense that they had somehow emasculated their men.

Would the same hold true today, I wonder? Women have evolved into a cash economy but are still bound to the older rules of an economy of feeling. They carry an unfair debt, a mental load that echoes as a gender lag at home and in work. And something has to give.

Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and a lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin