So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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market economy is a player in this race on both teams. On one hand, by setting up vast global networks of makers, sellers, and buyers, market growth encourages the development of a wide, thin layer of empathy—at least enough to ensure peace—in order to conduct business and increase wealth.2 In this way, the market is on the “good” empathy-enhancing team. On the other hand, economic overdevelopment—with its gas-belching industrial smoke stacks, toxic waste, and accumulation of discarded goods—proceeds headlong, heedless of the welfare of future generations.3 The market also creates gross inequalities both within nations and between them, inciting a sense of injustice, envy, and conflict.4 In these ways, the market is also on the “bad” team.
How could we win this race? By extending lines of empathy between American industrialists and the worried residents of sinking Maldivian islands in the rising tide of global warming. By drawing links between the prosperous London businessman and the impoverished Soweto street vendor. By encouraging a mother to stand in the shoes of her children on the upper east side of Manhattan and also in the shoes of her Mexican nanny’s children, left behind in Mexico when their mother left to work abroad. Empathy needs to go global, and perhaps even harder, it has to go local—three zip codes down the street, up or down the class ladder. It must cross the barriers of class, race, and gender.
HIDDEN EVIDENCE OF EMPATHY
To ground such sweeping talk of empathy in the daily lives of real people, though, we need to wonder about its complexity and explore the intricate hidden patterns it fits. We need to look at maps. But how?
Clues to patterns of empathy can be surprisingly indirect. For decades, researchers had been finding that more women than men said they were depressed, and two researchers, Ronald Kessler and Jane McLeod, wondered why.5 The prevailing theory in the 1980s was that women were more “vulnerable to life-event effects” because of their poor “coping strategies.”6 But if this were the case, the researchers wondered, why would women cope better than men—as they do—with financial bad news, a spouse’s death, or, after an initial period, with separation and divorce?7
Then the researchers found that when exposed to the same disturbing events in the lives of immediate family and friends—death, accident, illness, divorce or separation, or losses in love—women more than men talked about and responded strongly to these events. Although the men were just as aware of these events as the women, the researchers surmised, they did not discuss them as much or respond as strongly to them.
Women also participated in wider circles of support. More unhappy, lost, or ill people came to women than to men, and the women invited them to do so. When the respondents were asked to describe “who helped them during the last period in their life when they needed help with a serious problem . . . women [were] between 30 and 50 percent more likely than men to be mentioned as helpers.”8 More often than men, women reached out to others for support—usually to other women. So as friends and family sought out more women than men as confidants, especially in times of crisis, the women came to hold—to remain mindful of—more stories of distress.9 To some people, holding a story of distress signals a readiness to help, I think, while for others, sharing painful news was itself the help.
Men were as upset as women by such events as death, accidents, or illnesses that occurred to their spouses and children. Yet when such events occurred to those beyond spouse and children, men reported less distress.10 So women in this study of Americans of the 1980s were not just feeling down about their own bad news, or even their own husband’s and children’s bad news, but about the bad news of others in their larger circle of family and friends. There, they were the designated empathizers—the ones others relied on to stay tuned in.11 They held in mind the sad news of these others. They charted larger family-and-friend empathy maps.
But why did the news of others depress women? Maybe it is because people have a greater need to share bad news than good, and bad news is harder to hold, so women who get more of it, feel more blue because of it. Or maybe women’s depression has nothing to do with their wider circle of concern but with other matters—such as the possibility that everyone needs to feel mothered, and that many women feel less mothered by men than men feel by women. But whatever is going on with depression, the key discovery here is something else: the different shapes of men’s and women’s empathy maps.
A 2002 study of over 1,000 people—part of the General Social Survey, a large, nationally representative U.S. survey—casts a broader light on such maps. Compared with men, women more often described themselves as “soft-hearted,” and reported themselves feeling touched by events that they saw happen. They found themselves feeling “tender, concerned feelings” for people less fortunate than they.12 They also held more altruistic values than men, agreeing more strongly, for example, that “people should be willing to help others who are less fortunate.” Studies show that in close personal situations, women are much more likely to focus on emotion, to offer and seek emotional support, and to use “highly person-centered comforting messages” to help people feel better.13 The same was found in studies of young girls and boys.14 Women make up some three-quarters of caregivers for older relatives and friends, and two-thirds of those caring for grandchildren. Women are somewhat more likely than men to donate their kidneys (58 percent of living donors versus men’s 42 percent).15 The Yad Vashem archive of data on non-Jews honored for rescuing Jews shows that although men and women helped in equal numbers, among unmarried people, more women helped.16 At work, women predominate in the caring professions: they make up 98 percent of kindergarten teachers, 79 percent of social workers, and 92 percent of registered nurses.17 Maybe because women can have babies, evolution gives them an empathy advantage, or maybe it is because the culture encourages empathy more in girls than boys, or maybe both.
But that does not mean men do not help other people. In fact, many other studies concluded that, without being asked, men perform more public altruistic acts than women.18 They offer directions to the lost, give up their seats in the bus, and give money to strangers for the subway. Men received 91 percent of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awards given between 1904 and 2008, and 87 percent of the Medal of Bravery awards given out by the Canadian government.19 So while men are not the biggest empathizers, they often save the day.
WORDS, MEANINGS, CAUSES OF EMPATHY
We say we “stand in another’s shoes,” but what are we doing, feeling, and thinking when we stand this way? We see through another’s eyes. We feel interested. We come to feel as they do. We say to ourselves, “What has happened to you could happen to me.” And as we imagine this, we are often doing such things as looking someone in the eyes and listening closely. We feel curious. Or we come to feel empathy for certain categories of stranger that we learn about by word of mouth or by newspaper, television, a film, a play, or a book.
Empathy differs from feeling, or being held as, responsible for another.20 A nephew might pay a dutiful visit to a grumpy uncle but lack empathy for him. In All Our Kin, Carol Stack describes “kinscription,” whereby some members of poor black families were delegated to care for others.21 The child of an ill parent may be sent to live with a childless aunt. A neighborhood orphan is taken in by his grandmother’s friend from church. A family looks after a lonely neighbor. One accepts the continual possibility of a kin assignment and empathy is expected to follow.
But empathy does not always follow, nor does it always lead to, rescue or care. A 27-year-old, single photographer I interviewed described his feelings upon learning that his dear friend had received a diagnosis of cancer. He was grief-stricken but did not feel it was his role to help. “I wasn’t the first person Steven called,” the photographer remembered. “That was his sister, and then a female friend of his, and then the two women competed over who could take the best care of him, and called on their families to help. I wasn’t part of that.” Maybe he would have done something if others had not, but as things stood he felt empathy, but no call to action.
So empathy is related to doing things, but it is not the doing of those things. We console a bereaved colleague. We talk over the day with a partner. We pet a dog tied up outside a coffee shop. We leave coins