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

This book concerns corporate capitalism's encroachment on personal life, especially caring within the family. This is not a good mix. For example, the time crunch of work increasingly forces us to pay others for the personal services once conducted by mothers and fathers. These services include birthday party planners, kiddy taxi services, holiday decorating, technologies for spying on baby sitters. "As the family becomes more minimal it turns to the market to add what it needs and by doing so becomes yet more minimal." The author's reminder that love and caring are nonetheless the "very basis of any social life" underscores the urgency of this encroachment.

This is not the usual edited volume. It is a collection of self-contained works published over the past 25 years by the author. Since the chapters are self-sufficient, the author recommends browsing them piecemeal, which explains some admitted redundancies. Since they were not originally published with an integrated book in mind, the essays sometimes fit only loosely within the parts. Taken individually, the collections are unusually well written, insightful contributions to sociology. This is first-rate work.

These essays will be of interest to working women committed to succeeding in a man's world of business and maintaining a family at home. They should also be relevant to feminists and to those interested in globalization, policy making and social problems. Hochschild's essays consistently answer C. Wright Mill's call to translate private ills up to their sources in broader social arrangements.

In part 1, "The Culture of Divestment," self-help books are used as a barometer of cultural shifts paralleling the ironical changes from Protestantism to Capitalism described by Max Weber. He traced how religious ideas "jumped the churchyard fence to land in the market place." Hochschild suggests that the popularized version of feminism in self-books has jumped a similarly ironical fence from a social movement humanizing women to one buttressing a commercial dehumanizing of intimate life. Cultural prescriptions for "taking care of number one" focus more on the emotional dangers of love than its benefits. A "no-needs" me relates to a "no-needs" you. Women are advised to spend their nurturance in the spirit of a shrewd market councilor getting the most for ones guarded expenditure. To the author this amounts to an abduction of feminism. "Instead of humanizing men we are capitalizing women." Thoughout the book Hochschild shows how equalitarian women are becoming more like men. Care and nurturance fall into a black hole.

Hochschild borrows from cultural historians to show how women have adapted the myth of the self-reliant, uncommitted cowboy, free to ride where ever he wanted. For women this "range" has been replaced by the simulated open space of commodities.

The essays in part 2 originally broke ground for a sociology of emotion that recognizes affect's critical contribution to rational thought as well as their responsiveness to a degree of human manipulation through "deep acting." Shared "feeling rules" concerning how we ought to feel guide the personal management of emotions ("emotion work") pulling them into some degree of normative conformity.

In "The Economy of Gratitude," Hochschild describes how increases in female employment and the unchanging male role result in marital conflict. The author focuses on intimate "gifts from the heart." A gift is something extra. But an invisible cultural "exchange rate" exists determining that the powerful have to do less than others to receive the same gratitude. The male thinks he is doing "extra" by helping out some with "women's work" and the wife thinks he is not doing enough. (He is not.) The husband expects gratitude and the exhausted woman cannot feel it. This classic chapter formed the kernel for her internationally acclaimed book, The Second Shift (1989).

Part 3, "The Referred Pains of a Troubled Society," has most to do with larger structural changes in corporate capitalism. Essays deal with the human...