So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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Reading about such decorous ritual moments while tear gas canisters were flying outside seemed a little like walking in on Elizabeth Bennett having tea in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, while Tom Paine pounded on the front door, the American Revolution astir behind him. Part of me wanted to march out the door behind Tom Paine, the other part wanted to hang out in the parlor with Austen, curious to see what was really going on there. I wanted to climb inside the mind of the protocol officer who penned that advice, the mannerly world of the diplomat, the confining place of women in that world, and perhaps, above all, the dilemma of my mother who had spent thirty years quietly trapped in it. I wanted to find a magic key to unlock her gilded cage, it occurs to me now, and I was scouring sociology in search of it. I could not find that particular key, it turned out, but I collected other great magic keys along the way.2 And my search began to link the public trends astir at that time to the more private world of the family. Some keys unlocked the injustices that so stubbornly remained long after the parades had passed and the marchers gone home. Other keys helped me into the lives of time-stretched working families, online daters, migrant nannies, commercial surrogate mothers, and others, as I report in this book, a sequel to my 2003 collection of essays The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work.
Some essays reflect a historical approach. In chapter 7, Sarah Garrett and I explore the shifting cultural meaning of terms such as “brand” appearing in the pages of the New York Times in the periods 1899–1901, 1969–71, and 2003–2005. At the beginning of the twentieth century, “brand” was used mainly to refer to animals and slaves and was spoken of as a neutral or bad thing. By the end of the century, “brand” was used to describe colleges, museums, and human beings, often to make them seem good. Other essays reflect a cross-national approach. In chapter 4, for example, I compare the wealth gap in the United States to that within Sweden, Japan, and other democracies, and in chapters 10, 11, and 12, I describe nannies and surrogates caught in the great divide between the rich and poor nations of the world.
In all these essays, I use the term “family” broadly to refer to all who feel like family—heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual couples, married or unmarried, with and without children. For I think of families as our most precious and emotionally powerful form of mutual commitment. Also, although I have tried hard to limit repetition across essays, and between these essays and my books, some remains. In some cases, I have drawn passages from my books (listed at the beginning of this one) to pursue new points. In other cases, I sketch a context in one essay in the way I do in another, so a reader can understand one without having to read the other. Revising these essays, I have felt as if I were crisscrossing the same mountain, so to speak, binoculars in hand, telling of streambed dwellers on one expedition, and mountain top dwellers on another, always bearing in mind the whole habitat.
EMOTION AND THE AMERICAN SELF
Varied though they are, all these essays derive from my deepest belief that it is through emotion that we know the world.3 Without emotion, the world loses color and meaning. This might seem an obvious thing to say if it did not fly in the face of our usual American understanding of self. For many of us hold to the idea that a rational self is an emotion-free self, and that emotion gets in the way of rational understanding.4 But the more fundamentally we understand emotion, our own and that of others, the better we know the world around us, and the closer we come to being reasonable people; and the better we get at detecting fake rationality. For many deeply irrational events—conduct in the Nazi camps, the Soviet show trials, the Cambodian killing fields, the torture of political prisoners around the world—are achieved through apparently emotionless, orderly, mechanical acts by people who claim to be rational.
In addition to valuing a non-emotional self, Americans have historically revered the independent self. Being self-reliant, self-controlling, start-from-the-bottom, non-dependent—we admire these things. They tour history as a democratic, immigrant-based, entrepreneurial culture, proudly free of feudal or totalitarian rule. Psychologists who study “locus of control” find American students more likely to endorse such statements as “My life is determined by my own actions” or “When I get what I want, it is usually because I worked hard for it” than their counterparts in East Asia, Central America, Europe, or Canada.5 Male business students born in America had higher ratings on locus of control than male business students born in Mexico.6
But every “I” comes with a “we.” We depend on others and stand ready to be depended upon. The idea of the independent self, separated from history and circumstance, is a fiction. I often remember a student’s remark: “It sure takes a lot of people—parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, specialists, strangers—to make one independent self.” Indeed, if my essays could speak in chorus, they would say, “Through what we imagine and do, we are forever relating to others, and often more dependent on them than we’d like.” As the Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges noted in Brodie’s Report—a story focusing on one person named Brodie—“in every story there are thousands of protagonists, visible and invisible, alive and dead.”7
Not only do we depend on other people, we are also creatures of larger circumstance—a widening class gap, a crashing job market, a warming and more volatile climate that leads to such things as rising food prices, and new anxieties. One circumstance we do not control is the very culture of the era into which we are born, and its tacit rules of emotional control. As the German sociologist Norbert Elias has argued in The History of Manners, modern society obliges us to cultivate a modern—and more emotionally controlled—self. As clans became fief-doms and fiefdoms became nations, he pointed out, people developed wider networks of social interdependence.8 To sustain those needed relationships, people learned greater emotional self-control. We moderns mind our manners and manage our emotions far better, Elias said, than our counterparts in medieval times did, when quarrels more often flared into murder and the sight of flesh led to acts of rape.9 As we come to appreciate the importance of emotion management, we will become a more civilized people.
So what is an emotion? Is it a matter of pure biology and thus pretty much the same for everyone? Or do aspects of emotion—sadness, joy, jealousy—vary from one culture to another? One premise underlying all these essays is that culture has found its way into emotion. For one thing, various cultures provide special inventories of prototypic feelings. Like differently tuned keys on a piano, each cultural prototype guides us in the act of discerning different inner notes. As I have written, the Tahitians have one word—sick—for what people in other cultures might call ennui, depression, grief, or sadness. According to the novelist Milan Kundera, the Czech word litost refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief, a term with no equivalent in any other language.10
We listen for feelings in different ways. A man I met on a recent trip to Rovaniemi, Finland, a town by the Arctic Circle, described walking alone in the snow: “You walk along in whiteness. Suddenly there is a startling flutter of wings, and you see a white snowbird, its two black eyes staring at you. After that, you listen to the snow differently.” Many people listen to—and listen for—feelings the way this man listens to the snow. Perhaps the more inexpressive the culture, the more one tunes an ear to ever-so-slight shifts in tone.
We have ideas about what feelings should be. We say, “You should be thrilled at winning the prize,” or “You should be furious at his insult.” We appraise the fit between a feeling and a context in light of what I call “feeling rules.” By these rules, we try to manage our feelings—to feel happy at a party or grief-stricken at a funeral.
When paid to do a job, we are often asked to abide by certain feeling rules; thus, the company edict that “the customer is always right” means we do not have the “right” to feel mad at a customer, even if we are. So we find ourselves doing emotional labor—the effort to seem to feel and to try to feel the right feeling for the job, and to try to induce the right feeling in certain others. A flight attendant, as I described in The Managed Heart, is trained to manage fear during turbulence, exasperation with cranky passengers, or anger at abusive ones.11 A bill collector is often trained to inhibit compassion for debtors. A wedding planner may coax a once-divorced groom to “get excited”