Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“white bourgeois women took on the spiritual and emotional guidance of men and children. This spiritual work has always been more highly valued. It contributes to the ambiguous status of motherhood, which is simultaneously devalued and glorified. The spiritual duty of mothers has been used as a way of claiming rights and status for white bourgeois women, as a reward for their work of raising virtuous citizens.”

“Sharon Hays writes that the 19th century ideal of white bourgeois motherhood was centred around raising virtuous future citizens of the nation. The bourgeois nation was also a white nation, linking the spiritual reproduction of children to racial ideals... and classed division of labour within social reproduction, where black, brown, working-class, and immigrant women were relegated to menial tasks...”

“White bourgeois mothering in particular involves demands for 'spiritual' work... moral guidance and education of the child's needs and desires. Dorothy Roberts writes that white women's bonds with their children are seen as unique and exclusive even when the children spend more time with a nanny or at daycare. This stems from an understanding of femininity and family as our haven in the heartless world of capital.”

“Parents are made to invest more and more time in the emotional guidance of children as well as pay for expensive services that will educate their child to be able to compete on the job market. Intensive mothering is a way of translating the logic of the market within the family. ”

“middle-class parents prime their children for high-status professions by focusing on developing a capacity for decision-making. Middle- and upper-class parenting also involves encouraging children to experience themselves as affective individuals with their own unique emotional lives. This prepares children for success in their future careers, ensuring the preservation or improvement of the family's class advantage”

“While we tend to associate reproductive work with the reproduction of people, class distinctions themselves need to be continually reproduced. The emotional conditioning of children is a fundamental aspect of reproducing capitalist class relations. Bourgeois mothering is responsive to the naturalised and individualised emotional needs of children, and therefore teaches them that those needs are important.”

“Emotional reproduction in childhood is constructed as the foundation of successful reproduction more broadly. Social problems are blamed on the supposed failure of women to love their children enough.”

“literature aimed at mothers which emphasised the need for a primary caregiver. Children's emotional needs were thus constructed in a way that meant only one person could satisfy them. Even with the rise of 'working mothers' and daycare centres, where more people were involved in childcare, this notion of individualised parenting was retained or even intensified. Mothers are constructed as primary parents...”

“In the modern period, there has been a shift in parenting methods, as physical discipline was de-emphasised at the same time as love came to appear as the primary tool for socialising children. Displays of parental love could be used to reward children, and withdrawal of these displays became the primary means for punishing a child for bad behaviour. Love has become a disciplinary force.”

“As Viviana Zelizer writes, because children are no longer expected to work and contribute to the family income, they are increasingly seen as economically worthless but emotionally priceless. Childhood is constructed as a period of emotional intensity, and mothers especially are made responsible for meeting the varying emotional needs of their children.”

“Together with the ideology of romance, having children of your own is seen as a key source of emotional satisfaction, particularly for women. In contemporary capitalist society, children's emotional needs are often afforded great social importance. ... Children are now seen as innocent and unsullied by the supposedly cold and unfeeling logic of capitalism.”

“Being perceived as emotionally generous, and watching loved ones flourish emotionally, is key to a feminised ideal of the good life. Failing to have happy relationships, on the other hand, becomes a sign of failing to be a good woman.”

“Even in supposedly egalitarian heterosexual couples, the wider context of gender inequality posits that women owe men gratitude for such relative equality, This situation fixes standards for emotional exchange while contributing to the reproduction of gender within intimate relationships.”

“According to bourgeois ideology, emotional needs can only be fully satisfied within the family, which might make it seem risky to opt out of even unfulfilling family arrangements. The family has monopolised care in a way that makes it more difficult to build alternative forms of caring relationships... gender inequality deepens women! emotional debt, thus making it more difficult not to fulfil family obligations.”

“Most forms of emotional labour make the subject understand itself as emotionally generous and giving. Silvia Federici notes that emotional investment in the object of caring work can entail emotions of responsibility and pride, thus preventing the worker from cutting those attachments, even when they are exploitative.”

“Hochschild notes that we can feel guilty for failing to feel the right thing, or for feeling what is owed to the other. Guilt tethers people to intimate work relations, ensuring that the work owed in that relationship is carried out.”

“The point is precisely the entanglement of work and feeling. Love places limits on the refusal of emotional and reproductive labour — as Dalla Costa writes, it can be difficult to stage a slowdown or a strike when it affects loved ones, Love can thus be used to extract an ongoing, infinite amount of labour — a work relationship that may stretch over a whole lifetime.”

“Emotional reproduction often ensures that not only do acts of reproductive labour serve to satisfy the needs of individuals, they can also affirm the status of the recipient of care as a unique individual. It therefore participates in the construction of individualism. This can include seemingly insignificant acts of reproductive labour, such as cooking a meal in a way that attends to the specific preferences...”

“Other forms of care are constructed as being worthy or good work and therefore inherently rewarding. The work of nurses involves many of the same emotional structures that bind people to their unwaged work in the home. But we tend to understand our intimate relationships as more genuine — as expressions of our true feelings.”

“The difficulty of measuring emotional labour, a challenge for those who seek to commodify it, has always been an integral and crucial aspect of this work, especially when it is performed unwaged and out of love. It becomes a way of extracting an unlimited amount of reproductive labour.... love is seen as a reward for reproductive labour... It is also a feeling that hides the effort and skill that goes into caring.”

“But this supposedly infinite and unconditional nature of love does not lead to an equal division of love's labour. For women, this understanding of love entails an expectation of being constantly available to meet the emotional needs of people they love. Love's work is never done, and you can always do more to show your affection.”

“These intense emotional relationships also involve heightened emotional expectations. We are supposed to be able to meet all the emotional needs of those we love. Intimate relationships contain a potentially infinite number of tasks, as they are intended to respond to individualised and unique needs.”

“The ideology of romance tells us we could be happy if we could just find true love. Under capitalism, love is a highly privatised resource. Love is seen as an intensive emotion but also something that is restricted to a limited sphere. This is related to a conception of emotion as a zero-sum game in which emotional bonds owe their intensity to their exclusivity.”

“Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them. Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. All over the world people are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources. While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter.”

“I once asked a rich man, who had only recently attained his status, what he liked most about his new wealth. He said that he liked seeing what money could make people do, how it could make them shift and violate their values. He personified the culture of greed. His pleasure in being wealthy was grounded in the desire to not only have more than others but to use that power to degrade and humiliate them.”

“Williamson makes this insightful point: "The backlash against welfare in America today is not really a backlash against welfare abuse, so much as it is a backlash against compassion in the public sphere. While America is full of people who would police our private morals, there is far too little questioning of our public morals.”

“Lately, I have sat around dinner tables, with fancy food and drink, dismayed as I listen to reformed radicals joke that they would have never imagined years ago that they would become "social liberals and fiscal conservatives," people who want to end welfare and supporting big business.”

“Young progressives committed to social justice who had found it easy to maintain radical politics when they were living on edge, on the outside, did not want to do the hard work of changing and reorganizing our existing system in a way that would affirm the values of peace and love, democracy and justice. They fell into despair. And that...made capitulation to the exiting social order the only place of comfort.”

“The worship of money leads to a hardening of the heart. And it can lead us to condone, actively or passively, the exploitation and dehumanization of ourselves and others.”

“I've been astonished by hearing individuals who inherited wealth in childhood warn against sharing resources because people needing help should work for money in order to appreciate its value. Inherited wealth or substantial material resources are rarely talked about in the mass media because those who receive it do not wish to validate the idea that money received that is not a reward for hard work is beneficial”