Feelings and Work in Modern History

Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour

Agnes Arnold-Forster, Alison Moulds, Agnes Arnold-Forster, Alison Moulds

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350197510
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350197206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Work in all its guises is a fundamental part of the human experience, and yet it is a setting where emotions rarely take centre stage. This edited collection interrogates the troubled relationship between emotion and work to shed light on the feelings and meanings of both paid and unpaid labour from the late 19th to the 21st century.

Central to this book is a reappraisal of 'emotional labour', now associated with the household and 'life admin' work largely undertaken by women and which reflects and perpetuates gender inequalities. Critiquing this term, and the history of how work has made us feel, Feelings and Work in Modern History explores the changing values we have ascribed to our labour, examines the methods deployed by workplaces to manage or 'administrate' our emotions, and traces feelings through 19th, 20th and 21st century Europe, Asia and South America.

Exploring the damages wrought to physical and emotional health by certain workplaces and practices, critiquing the pathologisation of some emotional responses to work, and acknowledging the joy and meaning people derive from their labour, this book appraises the notion of 'work-life balance', explores the changing notions of professionalism and critically engages with the history of capitalism and neo-liberalism. In doing so, it interrogates the lasting impact of some of these histories on the current and future emotional landscape of labour.

1

Introduction

Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds

This collection was, in part, inspired by our own postdoctoral experiences. The juncture or gulf between attaining a PhD and permanent academic employment – familiar to so many early career researchers in early-twenty-first-century Britain and beyond – is characterized by emotional vicissitudes. There is the excitement of new research ideas and prospective collaborations, the pleasures of first publications coming to fruition, mingled with the disappointments and frustrations of endless job applications and rejections. Professional identities formed during the doctoral years seem to both flourish and be thwarted, while early career scholars question how far their occupational aspirations are compatible with the aims and expectations of their personal lives.

It was in this emotional crucible that we came together to reflect on the relationship between feelings and work. How did we, as precariously employed researchers, feel about our academic labours? This self-questioning was also shaped by our historical and literary research interests. When we began collaborating on this project, Agnes Arnold-Forster was researching the emotional landscape of contemporary healthcare practice, while Alison Moulds was looking into the affective lives of retail workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We were both drawn to questions concerning the emotional regimes and communities that underpinned these different types of work, the entanglement between occupational and personal identities and the spaces of labour and leisure available to these divergent groups.

With these shared interests in mind, we formulated a plan for an interdisciplinary workshop on Emotions and Work, which took place on 1 November 2019 at the Art Workers’ Guild in central London.¹ The workshop brought together many of the contributors featured here and sparked a longer-term collaboration between ourselves which led to us co-editing this collection. In turn, our plans for this volume also attracted new collaborators. What underlay both the conference and this collection was an urge to (re)appraise the concept of ‘emotional labour’, which was becoming so ubiquitous in modern parlance.² We wanted to interrogate and move beyond this foundational concept to think more broadly about the complex relationship between feelings and work. Our efforts resulted in this critically and politically engaged collection of essays, which invites readers to think capaciously about the spectrum of emotions which underpins different forms of work across cultural contexts in different countries and at different moments in time.

The history of emotions

Often described as an emerging field of study, the history of emotions has now cohered as a well-regarded and widely investigated subject, appealing to scholars across (and beyond) humanities disciplines. Few historians would now disagree that ‘human emotions have contours that vary with time and place’ and have played ‘a significant role’ in historical social change.³ And yet, what precisely historians of emotions study varies from scholar to scholar. Some are interested in the shifting ways that passions, feelings and emotions have been thought about, studied or conceptualized.⁴ Who were the natural historians or scientists of emotions and what methods did they employ to better understand the internal lives of the people around them or their experimental subjects, for instance? Others take specific feelings or emotions and track their histories through time.⁵ The most sophisticated of these studies remain attuned to the fact that the manifestation, representation and experience of different feelings alter according to social, cultural, linguistic and historical context. Some historians are compelled by what people in the past felt and experienced, how they articulated those feelings and how those senses and emotions drove them to think, act or behave in certain ways.⁶ Others are interested in how people have sought to manage, manipulate or ameliorate people’s emotional states.⁷

This edited collection attends to a lacuna within history of emotions scholarship, one which has begun to attract academic attention. In a 2016 article, Claire Langhamer observed that ‘while historians have developed new concepts for understanding emotions in the past [. . .] there has been little attempt, as yet, to use emotion as a category of analysis within the history of work’.⁸ Traditionally, histories of work and labour have focused on, for example, attempts by legislation to regulate working conditions or the development of trade union movements. Social historians have illuminated the lived experience of different forms of work, while historians of gender have delineated the interrelationship between labour practices and ideas about femininity and masculinity. This volume explores, as Langhamer suggests, feelings ‘about’ work, the ‘impact of work’ on emotional health and well-being and the ‘management of feelings’ in the workplace.⁹ Work – whether paid or unpaid – is an almost ubiquitous human experience and it provokes a range of strong and often contradictory feelings. The history of work and the history of emotions have, therefore, obvious points of intersection, and questions pertaining to feelings and work are politically timely and theoretically pressing.

The purpose of this volume is not to create a new subfield within the history of emotions but to use this as a methodological framework or lens through which to rethink histories of work and labour and of wider social and cultural life. This reflects the aspirations of leading scholars within the discipline. In their interviews with Jan Plamper, when asked about future directions for scholarship, Barbara Rosenwein declared that ‘[t]he ideal history [. . .] will not be a history of the emotions but rather an integration of the history of emotions into “regular” history’, while Peter Stearns spoke of the need for more ‘comparative’ approaches and for ‘build[ing] interdisciplinary bridges’.¹⁰ This volume seeks to further those ambitions, by scrutinizing the interrelated histories of emotions and work through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens.

Emotional labour

When confronted with the terms ‘feelings’ and ‘work’, many of us would immediately think of ‘emotional labour’, a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart.¹¹ Emotional labour, as she conceived it, referred to the work of managing one’s own emotions required by certain occupations. History of emotions scholarship has highlighted similar themes. Through William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional regimes’, for instance, the spaces of work can be understood as sites which require or promote certain emotional expressions and experiences while suppressing others.¹² In a framework reminiscent of Hochschild’s, Reddy contends that the lack of ‘emotional liberty’ under such regimes causes ‘emotional suffering’ for those who do not ‘respond well to the normative emotions’.¹³

The popularity of the term ‘emotional labour’ has mushroomed in recent years; Google searches have increased,¹⁴ and the concept has gained currency (perhaps ubiquity) in academic and public discourse. In a 2017 article for Harper’s Bazaar magazine, journalist Gemma Hartley used the term to describe the household management and life admin undertaken largely by women, which she argued reflected and perpetuated gender inequalities. She defined emotional labour as being the ‘manager of the household’.¹⁵ Hartley was not being called upon to do the work of managing her own emotions; she was protesting being made to do the work of managing her home. In an interview published in The Atlantic in 2018, Hochschild lamented the ‘concept creep’ of emotional labour. The journalist Julie Beck summarized these concerns as follows: ‘[T]he umbrella of emotional labor has grown so large that it’s starting to cover things that make no sense at all, such as regular household chores, which are not emotional so much as they are labor, full stop.’¹⁶

This volume is bookended by chapters which offer a critical reappraisal of ‘emotional labour’, illuminating this ‘concept creep’. Opening the collection, Grace Whorrall-Campbell looks at waitresses at Lyons Corner Houses in the early and mid-twentieth century. Challenging assumptions that the emotional labour of service workers is necessarily a negative or alienating experience, Whorrall-Campbell instead highlights how this group of workers, nicknamed ‘Nippies’, derived meaning and identity from the (gendered, classed and sexualized) emotional performance expected of them. At the collection’s close, Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal revisits Hochschild directly, highlighting her (mis)use of the theatrical metaphor in crafting ideas about ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ acting. Misinterpretations about the practices of Russian theatre director Constantin Stanislavski led Hochschild to overlook the role of actors as workers, to neglect how ideas of authentic emotion are constructed, and to foreground individual rather than collective processes of performance and emotional management, Blackwell-Pal argues. Meanwhile, in the volume’s final chapter, Claire English similarly reappraises individualistic and collectivist approaches to emotional labour but with a focus on contemporary childcare. English contends that ‘feeling alone’ is part of the tapestry of British neoliberalism and calls for a different frame of reference to bring together parents, carers, nursery workers and nannies in response to the current crisis of expensive but underpaid childcare. In doing so, she powerfully conveys how emotional labour bridges the political, the personal and the professional.

Management of feelings

Following Hochschild’s cue, employers, academics, activists and policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to the harmful effects work can have on people’s emotional and mental health.¹⁷ Many of us, to a lesser or greater extent, feel the tensions associated with vocation, professionalism and working conditions and rights, experiences which are shaped by wider structural privileges and inequalities. Should we ‘live to work’ or ‘work to live’? And all of us in paid and voluntary employment must navigate the social lives, unspoken codes of conduct, the emotional regimes and the built environments of our jobs. The deleterious effects labour can have on workers’ autonomy, sense of self and emotional well-being are illuminated by a number of chapters in this volume, including ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Spaces of labour
• Part II Professional and personal identities
• Part III Emotions, politics and power
• Afterword
• Index
• Copyright