Emotional Labor Quotes

“Women, endlessly told to smile but also tasked with making other people smile, are held accountable not only for the expression of their own feelings but also for the feelings of others.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“While men are limited from childhood in the range of emotion they are expected to have the capacity of feeling, they are paradoxically given more space to be unfiltered in public. Women, treated like emotional thermostats whether they like it or not, not only must constantly manage their own feelings but they are also held responsible for the feelings of others. When women are told to "smile" by a stranger on the street, they are being reminded of this through harassment. When women going about their business are accused of having "resting bitch face," they are being reminded of their expected constant enthusiastic performance for the benefit of the world. A man not smiling while going about a task is never told he has "resting dick face." He's likely treated as busy and important, if his expression is noted at all.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“I want the term gold digger to include dudes who look for a woman who will do tons of emotional labour for them.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“That means no longer believing that women by virtue of being women owe anything to society --including something as seemingly innocuous as a smile.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“But to me this moment in history, rather than being a moment for debating what is inherently masculine versus inherently feminine, is an incredible opportunity to reexamine our value system and the evidence behind it.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Authenticity, at least in some circumstances, an entitlement afforded to some groups and not others,”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The consequences of looking how you feel can be deadly”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Family has never been outside of power. I mean what's a dowry? families were arranged because they're meetings of power.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The norm for the last twelve thousand years-women were treated as assets exchanged between two male headed households.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Requiring this false high road of women at the same time as we require them to perform constant rituals of femininity, is hypocritical beyond belief and the opposite of progress. It also justifies and takes the side of patriarchal capitalism that pretends that withholding money from women using their bodies for market exploitation. After all, someone is going to be taking home that money the value the women are creating.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“It is incomprehensible to hold a child responsible for other people's sexual thoughts to the point that she is expected to manage them. Sex-related emotional labor started for me, as for many others, years before I had even formulated the existence, let alone the boundaries, of my own sexuality and sexual agency. Carrying the effects of other people's sexual desires on our bodies is taught to us before we get to define our sexuality for ourselves. Sexual emotional labor performed for others predates much of our own sexuality—to the extent that our sexuality is often shaped by it.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“When women going about their business are accused of having "resting bitch face," they are being reminded of their expected constant enthusiastic performance for the benefit of the world. A man not smiling while going about a task is never told he has "resting dick face." He's likely treated as busy and important, if his expression is noted at all.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“If we really mean that all humans are equal, we cannot in good faith expect one group to serve another and one group to be made accountable for the feelings of another. This goes for women, as it goes for other subjugated groups, including racialized groups. No one is born with the inherent obligation - through their status as a gender or their status as part of a minority group - to serve the feelings of another group. No one is born with the inherent right to have their feelings served. The only way forward, if we want to redress inequalities, and if we want to enact an ethos in which all humans are equal, is to fight for a system of visible and open-ended reciprocity and abolish status obligations.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“We must question the way we have been taught to think of value. Emotional labor has to be seen to be shared. Only when it is marked as real can we unburden ourselves. When we bring it into the light it becomes easy to see it as an essential form of work supporting communities large and small and supporting our economy.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Emotional labor is in essence a vehicle for the collective good... or at least it could be. Societies benefit from prosocial etiquette, effort, and civility. But if only women or minorities have to do it, then authenticity becomes the entitled privilege of the few,' Chamorro-Premuzic wrote to me in an email as I was finishing this book.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Free speech sounds great on its own. But the problem with free speech that you refuse to contextualize is that sometimes, when you protect the free speech of some, you muzzle the rights, freedoms, and dignity of others-including their free speech.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“An extraordinarily grim academic article from 2009 looked at the marital outcome of 515 patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, observing groups battling malignant primary brain tumors, other forms of cancer, and multiple sclerosis. The study, which monitored male and female patients who were in heterosexual marriages over the course of five years, found there was a significant difference in the rate of "abandonment" depending on the gender of the patient. When the patient was male, and the supporting spouse female, divorce happened in 2.9 percent of cases. When the patient was female and the supporting spouse was male, divorce happened in 20.8 percent of cases-it was seven times more likely to happen.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Both men and women were equally as good at filling needs and making decisions, the two elements of cognitive labor most associated with decision-making and therefore power and influence. But women were disproportionately the ones who took on the two activities least associated with decision-making-the more painstaking, less tangible tasks of anticipating needs and monitoring progress.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Instead of people treating emotional labor as an extension of being sexed or gendered as female, emotional labor should be seen as a form of work demanding time, effort, and skill. Nor should emotional labor, in the same vein, be seen as a passive expression of an innate trait, say, an expression of possessing emotional intelligence. What we see as the expression of emotional intelligence is emotional labor in action, and we should acknowledge and reward it as such.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Homicide stands as the fourth leading cause of death for girls and women one to nineteen years old, and the fifth leading cause of death for women twenty to forty-four. Unlike male victims of homicide, who are mostly killed by members of the same sex, 98 percent of killers of women are men.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Studies over the last few decades in heterosexual settings have found that men losing their spouses suffer greater risk of mortality than women losing theirs. These kinds of findings reveal that in a society where men still tend to support their partners more financially and women tend to support their partners more emotionally, the more important of the exchanges for survival is emotional labor, not money.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“One 2014 study found that men whose wives died unexpectedly were at a 70 percent higher risk of dying than men whose wives died with warning. There was no equivalent impact on the opposite scenario: whether or not a husband was expected to die had no differentiating effect on women's survival.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“We can fight for a world where women can step into their power in ways that are not just through the use of their body - but as we do that, we cannot deny the value of women who want to step into their power with the instrumental use of their body. The point is to destroy the virgin-whore binary, not to pick one side of it. The point is to denounce the disciplining of women's behavior - and see it for what it is: a way to disincentivize women from stepping out and finding power.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“When you assess your surroundings and modulate your emotional display, or even your actual emotions, to suit and interact the context, you are performing emotional labor. In sociology, tweaking your internal feelings to match the situation is referred to as deep acting, and tweaking the display of them is surface acting. Both are emotional labor.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“In a seminal article from 1985, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Sara Snodgrass sought to test the validity of the idea of "women's intuition." Snodgrass grouped men and women into pairs and randomly assigned one person the "leader" position and the other the "subordinate" position. The study found that those designated as "subordinate"- whether male or female - were consistently more attentive and perceptive to the feelings of leaders, and that once given either a subordinate or a leader role gender stopped having any effect. The paper concludes that women's intuition might be better described as "subordinates' intuition.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The core skills of emotional labor, including the ability to identify other people's emotions, are skills we all have. Only some of us care to deploy them, though. Some of us - women - have trained to do emotional labor because of a legitimate fear of backlash. This training is often internalized into a personality trait, and our performance is very rarely attached to a dollar bill. Others are not so much devoid of skill as devoid of motivation. They just can't be bothered. The world gets a bit darker when you realize this.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The researchers tipped the participants off that they would be performing an interpersonal task, which would usually only have motivated women into exhibiting higher empathy levels, but this time they added an extra incentive: real cash money. For every answer that was somewhat emphatically accurate, participants were given $1, and for every fully emphatically accurate answer, they were given $2. The result? Performance shot through the roof for everyone, and men and women scored similarly high. Concluding their paper, the authors wrote: "This is an encouraging finding, suggesting that greater empathic accuracy can be achieved by virtually anyone who is given proper motivation. When all else fails, if you find yourself faced with someone who just cannot seem to understand your point of view, it might be worthwhile to offer him or her a dollar.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Men and women are perfectly able to perform emotional labor, but the expectations placed on women are far greater than those placed on men, resulting in a notable penalty-versus-credit gulf. Tim would likely get credit where Anita wouldn't.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Emotional labor, as a specific form of feminized work, also remains derided and unseen because it is unfathomable to many that tasks and duties tied to love, care, the family, and women could have anything to do with real work. Instead of seeing it as work, we have cast emotional labor as a passive expression of the supposed purest essence of femininity. Insisting it is an effort or anything but a mystical manifestation of women-at-rest is tarnishing, we are taught, to the point of disempowerment.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“This book in being critical of capitalism as it currently works, is not rejecting it wholesale; it is calling for consequential reform. It is not saying private businesses and profits are bad; it is arguing for real value of emotional laborers to be recognized, so that fair profits can go to them too, it is arguing for an end to exploitative practices; it is arguing for bias- sensitive regulation, oversight, and nondiscriminatory worker rights, it is arguing for an end to abusive belief systems around women and minorities and their work.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power