Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power (Flatiron Books, 2023, 272 pages).

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A new book explains how devaluing emotional labor—disproportionately done by women and other disadvantaged groups—perpetuates inequality.

A server smiles and soothes an angry customer who wasn’t happy with his meal. A mom gently coaxes her toddler out of a tantrum when dad can’t deal with it. A woman visits her ill father-in-law in the hospital because her partner can’t go there without feeling upset.

Each is an example of “emotional labor,” or putting another’s feelings and desires before your own. This kind of work is important, and essential—but, according to journalist Rose Hackman in her new book Emotional Labor, often invisible. First coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart, “emotional labor” was initially used to describe the “specific form of work expected of workers in the service industry,” Hackman says.

In the decades since, the term has expanded—and in 2015, “emotional labor” entered the mainstream to include all of the invisible work that happens at home and in communities, as well. “To me it didn’t make sense to separate out the two,” Hackman says. “If anything, it hurt the overall point. We don’t call physical labor in private something different than physical labor for a fee,” Hackman says. (Hochschild has supported this new view, and endorsed Hackman’s book).

HR: Emotional labor is part of the patriarchal system, but it’s also part of bigger structures of inequality, like white supremacy. How do these things converge?

A huge way in which this extraction of labor is extraordinarily beneficial to men and how patriarchy, at large, is able to continue, is that we refuse to accept that emotional labor is real in spite of all the evidence that exists that shows that obviously it’s extraordinarily valuable. In terms of white supremacy—that invisible extraction of labor means that corporations continue to turn a huge profit. That means that governments and societies continue to exist without really anyone holding them accountable for the extractive coercive labor that they’re forcing on to women and people of color. That’s happening, especially to people who lack power.