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61 Emotional connection and support have been considered essential, if not the essential, characteristics of marriage and family life since at least the midtwentieth century. Although the functionalist theory that produced the idea that women are primarily responsible for these expressive/emotional tasks while men are expected to perform instrumental/breadwinner ones has been broadly criticized , family scholars continue to confront the legacy of inequality signified by this initial description (Osmond and Thorne 1993). For example, this legacy remains evident in the well-established finding that women, even when they are employed full time, perform the bulk of routine housework and child care (Coltrane 2000; Fuwa 2004; Lincoln 2008; Shelton and John 1996). Researchers attempting to explain this persistent gendered effect have suggested that these patterns of household labor allocation are related to how men and women construct culturally appropriate gender identities (Berk 1985; Ferree 1990). This gender constructionist approach has drawn attention to the symbolic importance of family work (for example, the routine activities that feed, clothe, shelter, and care for both children and adults) and how people do gender, as well as to the potential for variation in the gendered meanings associated with doing each type of household task (Coltrane 2000, 1209; DeVault 1991; Garey 1999; Twiggs, McQuillan, and Ferree 1999; West and Zimmerman 1987). To date, however , this line of research has yet to fully examine how the emotional carework components of family work may advance social scientific understanding of the relationship between gender and the division of household labor. This study extends the analysis of gender and household labor by specifically examining the performance of emotional carework—that is, activities that are Emotional Carework, Gender, and the Division of Household Labor Rebecca J. Erickson c h a p t e r 4 v concerned with the enhancement of others’ emotional well-being and with the provision of emotional support (Erickson 1993).1 These activities require time, effort, and skill. They reflect “the warm and caring aspects of the construction and maintenance of interpersonal relations . . . what Arlie Hochschild (1979) calls the positive aspects of ‘emotion work’” (Daniels 1987, 409). Building on Erickson (1993), I show that expanding the traditional definition of family work (for example, housework and child care) to include emotional carework provides a unique avenue of support for the view that the division of household labor varies according to culturally based constructions of gender rather than on the basis of biological sex. The Case for “Emotion Work” George Levenger’s (1964) initial argument for including emotional behavior in studies of marriage was grounded in the social psychology of groups (Parsons and Bales 1955; Thibaut and Kelley 1959). From the standpoint of marital partners , emotional behaviors were different from more instrumental family tasks such as cooking and cleaning because they could not be delegated to persons outside the group. Levenger’s (1964) research provided evidence for the importance of emotional expressivity by showing that it was more strongly related to marital satisfaction than the performance of instrumental tasks. Few other researchers examined emotional behavior as a requisite task performed by marital partners. Instead, its performance, along with that of housework and child care, came to be seen as a natural expression of women’s love for their husbands and children. As the women’s movement gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, assumptions about women’s roles began to break down and their marital and familial behaviors began to be reconceptualized and analyzed as work. In her classic essay on “invisible work,” Arlene Daniels (1987) explained that applying the concept of work only to those activities for which people are paid renders much of women’s activities invisible. Although Anne Oakley (1974) and others had made this case for housework and child care over a decade earlier, Daniels was among the first to make such a claim for the performance of emotion work in the family. Daniels argued that because the work people perform provides a clue to their status in society, it constitutes a central pathway to identity . She further illustrated how the recognition of an activity as work tends to infuse it with a certain level of “moral force and dignity” (Daniels 1987, 404). In that women perform more family work than men, failing to characterize these activities as work serves to invalidate women’s essential contributions to social and community life and, in this way, contributes to the reproduction of gender inequality. Today, Daniels’s...

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