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4 The Girls’ Night Out: Social Time and Obligation
- Rutgers University Press
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88 The Girls’ Night Out social time and obligation c h a p t e r 4 The postcard that arrives in the mail, tucked between bills and sales flyers, invites us to a party “where fun, friends, and fragrance will surround and delight” us. The product message is secondary to the emphasis on “a good time with friends,” and we are promised “no pitch, no pressure—just a good time.” A handwritten note on the card reminds us of the benefits of attending: “meeting people, having fun, making friends, getting products, and drinking wine.” We have lost count of how many invitations we have received over the years, yet it was the mere appearance of the postcard, or more specifically our reaction to the postcard, that planted the seeds for this study. The postcard prompted an automatic thought: “Do we really have to go?” The postcard elicited an emotional response—ambivalence born of a mixture of obligation to buy something we didn’t want or need and relief at being able to spend time with friends and sidestep our second shift of meal preparation, homework duty, and bedtime rituals. Sure, it would be great to hang out with friends in the evening and sip a glass of wine while catching up, but in order to do that, we would have to listen to a sales pitch about kitchenware, skincare, baskets, candles, sex novelties (more interesting than a paring knife), or spices. The girls’ night out was a poorly disguised ruse for the far-reaching tentacles of capitalism. Bottom line: Both of us were ambivalent about these kinds of parties, yet most of the time we found ourselves ringing the doorbell, smiling, and enjoying the company of our friends and neighbors. The dilemma wasn’t about declining an invitation to purchase products that promise to repair our aging skin; the dilemma was about declining an invitation to participate in the interaction rituals that sustain relational ties among friends and family. Showing up and engaging in the interaction ritual of the sales party was about the feeling rules that govern neighborliness and friendship—essentially what it means to be nice and a good friend. The feeling that we should go alerted us to the emotion work at play in home sales and made us wonder about the nature of friendship, obligation, and direct home sales. In previous chapters, we discussed the temporal and emotional sides of emoting time for women engaged in DHS work, but the process of emoting time extends the girls’ night out 89 beyond the consultant. Guests play an important role in the emoting time dynamic. Unlike the unequal emotional exchange between service worker and customer , in which the customer does not have to follow the traffic rules of interaction (Bolton 2005), guests at home parties are usually friends or neighbors who feel obliged to follow the rules of friendship and keep the emotional exchange equitable . In this chapter, we discuss the dynamics of emoting time among guest, consultant , and hostess. Over the past thirty years, declines in social time have resulted in fewer opportunities for women to socialize or hang out with friends and neighbors . As we discuss, the desire for more social time with friends and the feeling rules of friendship create the temporal and emotional context for the home party. The Disappearance of Social Time As more women enter the labor force and as competing demands on time escalate, opportunities to hang out with friends have fallen prey to the demands of the hurry-up, more-is-better lifestyle. The barbeques, coffee klatches, and card games that used to be a common feature of community life are becoming the exception rather than the rule of social life. In the great time hierarchy of post-industrial American society, social time, an offspring of free time, gets trampled by the temporal heavyweights, family and work. With fixed work schedules and new standards for intensive mothering,1 finding time to hang out with friends is no easy feat. Middle-class mothers discover that when they are not at their jobs, they are carting kids to swim lessons and soccer games, baking cookies for a school fundraiser, or trying to squeeze in a workout at the gym. To engage in social time, there must be an empty slot within the family calendar, and for the typical middleclass family, it is difficult enough to coordinate children’s and adults’ schedules in a single week. Finding common...