The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (review)

"The second shift," "the stalled revolution," "the time bind," "the care gap": these concepts coined by Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild have become the ruling paradigms of the interdisciplinary field of work and family. Historians of women's work have relied upon her pioneering study of emotional labor, The Managed Heart, and now find in her writing on the global deficit in carework an affirmation of our expanded definition of labor that includes the unpaid as well as the low-wage services mostly performed by women for families, in the home, and on the body. The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work collects seventeen of Hochschild's essays written over some three decades, all of which revolve around aspects of care and most of which are firmly anchored in the sociology of emotions. Historians of sexuality will find little direct comment on their field's major concerns, although discussions of gender codes and feeling rules offer an approach transferable to topics more associated with the erotic aspects of intimate life. In this book the concept of "intimate life" remains abstract or attached to the familial rather than the sexual. Nonetheless, Hochschild provides a compelling context for understanding shifting sexual mores during the last quarter century through connecting tensions within the heterosexual couple to the rising participation of mothers in the labor force.

Hochschild reflects on the origins of her own inquiries "in the colonial arrangement between the 'metropolis' of my father's world and the native village of my mother's. Just as the low price of sugar rips off the Third World farmer who produces it while benefiting the First World consumer," she notes, "so the undervalued labors of the homemaker enable her husband to have his more highly valued career" (5). As unable as most children to make her mother happy even vicariously through her own success, Hochschild turned to the intellectual task of revaluing care. Her equation of the unpaid labor of the white middle-class wife with that of workers of color in the global South is debatable, however powerful this analogy may be in expressing the exploitative exchange relation in the traditional marriage. Nonetheless, Hochschild raises big and important questions when she interrogates the changing location of care and love, "as when, in the United States today, family bonds grow lighter or shift, the state withdraws support for the poor, companies cut benefits and reduce job security, or the care sector of the economy expands, recruiting from across the globe" (1).

Despite new expectations that white middle-class women would join their working-class and African American counterparts in the labor market, albeit in the professions and at higher wages, men—when cohabiting—have rarely taken up the slack at home. Care remains women's work, though women in this discourse too often appear unmarked by other social attributes. This gendered division of labor has led women with resources to hire other women to do their jobs of keeping up the house and tending to children, the elderly, and the incapacitated.

The essays in part 1, "A Culture of Psychic Divestment," consider the commodification of attachment. Always the astute observer, Hochschild deconstructs advice books, advertisements, and everyday appearances to chart the consequences of women's quest for equality and autonomy on personal relations, especially the labor of care. She applies the theories of other sociologists like Max Weber, Neil Smelser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Erving Goffman to the relationship between home and work. The analogy between Protestantism's role in the rise of capitalism and feminism's contribution to commercialized intimate life might be too facile, but Hochschild's larger point bears consideration. Many advice books encourage emotional detachment, an ideal of liberation that takes a norm associated with men and makes it women's own so that "instead of humanizing men, we are capitalizing women" (29). Two contradictory trends have developed: an "outsourcing...