Fed Up Quotes

“I had been conditioned my whole life to think one step ahead, to anticipate the needs of those around me and care about them deeply. Emotional labor was a skill set I had been trained in since childhood. My husband, on the other hand, hadn’t received that same education. He is a caring person, but he is not a skilled carer.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“He restated that all I ever needed to do was ask him for help, but therein lies the problem. I don’t want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“While women have spent the past few decades being encouraged to reach for the masculine ideal of success, being told they can become anything their hearts desire in the professional realm, they have not been relieved of any of the emotional labor that waits for them when they return home.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Even when my days appeared uneventful, I was in my head all the time but rarely thinking about myself in that bigger, deeper way that used to make my life feel meaningful. What consumed most of my mental effort had minimal emotional rewards. It simply left me feeling drained. I finally understood why so many women said they lost themselves after becoming mothers. I no longer had the mental and emotional capacity to tend to my interior life, my creative life, my meaning-driven life. At the end of the day, I had nothing left in my mind to give.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Women are fed up because we’ve realized we can’t clock out. Emotional labor is expected from us no matter where we turn. We are fed up with the ongoing demand to be the primary providers of emotional labor in all arenas of life because it is taxing, it is time consuming, and it is holding us back.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Emotional labor, as I define it, is emotion management and life management combined. It is the unpaid, invisible work we do to keep those around us comfortable and happy.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Men often have a slower timeline or lower standard when it comes to domestic work, so women take it on themselves, choosing to delegate work only when it’s most desperately needed. This may be in part because women tend to associate a clean home with their personal success, whereas men’s success is tied strictly to their work outside the home.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“The men who pay for sex feel entitled to women’s time and emotional labor, to such an extent that it doesn’t occur to them that they’ve paid for what amounts to a therapy session with a side of blow job. Much of the work, as Petro describes it, is sympathetically listening to men bitch about their ex-girlfriends. “I love to dance, and that part was enjoyable. The physical work of prostitution wasn’t particularly different than nonpaid sexual encounters. It was the emotional labor that was really taxing.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Perhaps because same-sex or gender-nonconforming partners have already confronted so many gender norms by virtue of their existence, rethinking their roles at home is simply not that big a deal. They don’t subscribe to the gender roles dictating that one person should take on all the emotional labor, so they can challenge the imbalance without challenging their very identity.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“symptom of larger cultural inequality. “An equalitarian couple in a society that as a whole subordinates women cannot, at the basic level of emotional exchanges, be equal. For example, a woman lawyer who earns as much money and respect as her husband, and whose husband accepts these facts about her, may still find that she owes him gratitude for his liberal views and his equal participation in housework. Her claims are seen as unusually high, his as unusually low. The larger market in alternate partners offers him free household labor, which it does not offer her. In light of the larger social context, she is lucky to have him. And it is usually more her burden to manage indignation at having to feel grateful.”3 We’re lucky to get help at all. Men are entitled to it.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“She ends her observation with the statement “I can do it all, but all of it is not mine to do.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Tiffany Dufu writes in Drop the Ball, “Until the contributions that women make at work are seen as just as valuable as the contributions women make at home, the contributions that men make at home will never be considered as valuable as the contributions men make at work. Just as women need affirmation on both fronts, so do men.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“She finds herself worrying about being "too much work," a problem she says stems from internalized ableism. She knows she lives in a world that isn't set up to accommodate her or even be accessible to her, and she relies on her advanced emotional labor skills to do so.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“This was the perfect moment for women to own that emotional labor isn't just a wellspring of frustrating domestic gripes, but rather a primary source of systematic issues that touch every arena of our lives, in damaging ways that make clear the pervasive sexism in our culture. The deep social expectation that women will shoulder the exhausting mental and emotional work at home--a type of labor that goes largely unnoticed by those it benefits the most--has made it all too easy for such insidious expectations to follow us into the world, as we step gingerly through a culture that has left us little choice in the matter. We alter our speech, our appearance, our mannerisms, our own internal expectations to constantly keep the peace. We have been feeling the toll this work takes, in ways that are too often invisible.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice,” Zimmerman writes. “How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as ‘an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.’”9”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Hochschild used the term emotional labor to designate the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display that has exchange value and is sold as a commodity, while she used the terms emotion work and emotion management to refer to emotional labor done in a private setting.7 Her study focused on the deep acting and surface acting required of flight attendants to not simply appear warm and friendly on the job but become warm and friendly in order to better manage the emotions and expectations of customers in flight.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“In general, we gender emotions in our society by continuing to reinforce the false idea that women are always, naturally and biologically able to feel, express, and manage our emotions better than men,”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Women are still spending double the time men do on both domestic labor and caring for children.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“emotional labor isn’t just a wellspring of frustrating domestic gripes, but rather a primary source of systemic issues that touch every arena of our lives, in damaging ways that make clear the pervasive sexism in our culture. The deep social expectation that women will shoulder the exhausting mental and emotional work at home—a type of labor that goes largely unnoticed by those it benefits most—has made it all too easy for such insidious expectations to follow us into the world, as we step gingerly through a culture that has left us little choice in the matter.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“This constant dialogue of What should I do to keep everyone happy? drains a lot of mental energy that could otherwise be used in more productive or creative ways. For years I wondered what had happened to me after college, when I had my first child. Why was it that I could no longer muster up the ability to write fiction, even when I had the free time? Why was I choosing to plop down in front of the TV at the end of the day, wasting my evenings watching reruns of The Office instead of feeding my soul with creative work? I wasn’t even doing that much. When friends asked me what I was up to, I never had an answer. I was at home, deciding what to do with my baby—what the best choice of clothing and food and activities was for us. Worrying over whether he was gaining enough weight, or whether he had died from SIDS every time he was down for a nap. Do I take him to the store or go out later, after my husband gets home? Will the baby be unhappy if I take him out? (Will he poop up the back of his onesie? Almost definitely.) Will my husband feel neglected if I steal off to the store during our precious alone time? Should I breastfeed now or should I try to pump? Should I put the baby in a cute outfit or keep him comfy in pajamas? Even when my days appeared uneventful, I was in my head all the time but rarely thinking about myself in that bigger, deeper way that used to make my life feel meaningful. What consumed most of my mental effort had minimal emotional rewards. It simply left me feeling drained. I finally understood why so many women said they lost themselves after becoming mothers. I no longer had the mental and emotional capacity to tend to my interior life, my creative life, my meaning-driven life. At the end of the day, I had nothing left in my mind to give.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“We fill our mental space with the minutiae of household details and use our time disproportionately for the benefit of others.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“We need to stop modeling martyrdom and start modeling boundaries”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“coasting barely above the crap heap of mediocre dudes doesn’t make you a feminist hero.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“I’m angry not only because he isn’t caught up in the minutiae, but because I cannot seem to free myself from it even when I want to. I can’t sit on the couch and read while there is a pile of laundry to be folded. I struggle to feel like I’ve had an accomplished day at work if the house is a mess.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“We are approaching the conversation from two fundamentally different places: intimate knowledge on one side, unintentional ignorance on the other.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Talking about emotional labor takes emotional labor, but the only other option is keeping things the way they are now.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Women tend to fall into a vicious circle when it comes to talking about emotional labor. We get overwhelmed and finally bring it up by asking for help. Then we get tired of asking, because delegating is a managerial job that requires a lot of brainpower. And we must also pay close attention to how we ask for help, always keeping a sunny disposition and taking into account the emotional state of the person we are interacting with; it’s often easier to just do things ourselves. So we start taking on everything until we reach the next breaking point, and then we have another frustrating fight over emotional labor—somehow never reaching the root of the problem. Ad nauseam.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“Having the conversation is frustrating. Not having the conversation is frustrating. It comes down to choosing your poison.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“The truth is that my constant meddling and unintentional undercutting were exactly the things holding Rob back from taking on emotional labor with confidence. He knew I didn’t have full faith in him, and that mistrust led to self-doubt.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

“What made these men so different, so much more capable than my husband? Maybe it was as simple as not being married to me. They didn’t have anyone looking over their shoulder, waiting for them to fail. They had the time and space to develop competency in emotional labor, something I had been withholding from Rob without a second thought.”
― Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward