Feelings and Work in Modern History: Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour

As the editors of this volume of short essays note in their introduction, Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labor” has experienced “concept creep” over the intervening four decades, much to Hochschild’s dismay (4). Her phrase was originally defined as the emotional management performed largely by women in public-facing jobs—for example, flight attendants putting on a smile as a requirement of the job. Arnold-Forster and Moulds’s book, which grew out of their emotional experiences as precariously employed postdoctoral workers, deliberately engages in concept spread. It explores the emotional experiences of twentieth-century workers: inside the home and outside, in the Global South and the Global North, from factory workers to CEOs. After their introduction, they divide twelve short chapters into three rather arbitrary subthemes: spaces, personal and social identities, and emotions and politics.Methodologically, most of the essays deploy extremely close reading of a small number of sources. Hannah Parker’s essay about the emotions involved in attempting to adhere to the high expectations of “Soviet womanhood” concentrates largely on a few letters from educational librarians to Lenin’s wife. Still, she supports the case that literate women, even those with little educational advantage over their peers, were encouraged to uplift other workers by guiding their reading. While the New Soviet Woman could thereby gain a feeling of pride, they also felt anxiety. No one knew who would be sanctioned next for having nonproletarian ancestors.Claire English’s main sources, as she writes about the current state of childcare in Britain and its associated emotions, are her own experiences and those of women who currently blog about childcare. Even so, her argument that emotional discourse distracts from the work of forging material solidarity between mothers and paid carers seems very plausible.Other instances of close reading are tantalizing but leave questions unanswered. Inez Perez uses the fascinating testimony given before Argentine Domestic Labor Tribunals to unpack the conflicts between wealthy urban families and their live-in, often unpaid help. Sometimes installed in strangers’ homes as children, all the domestic servants whose cases she chronicles were disadvantaged by class; some were also disadvantaged by rural origin and/or color. Perez shows that much of the testimony was performative; employers portrayed their own actions as compassionate and their unpaid servants as resentful and irrational. Unfortunately, the reader does not learn whether or to what extent these emotional ploys impacted the outcome of the cases.Sometimes the very-short-essay format does not allow the author to fully flesh out an argument. The political theorist James Brown argues that the guilt, fear, and shame experienced by NHS whistleblowers invert the entire proposed foundation of liberal democracy, but his central focus on the “case study” of one particularly terrified NHS doctor makes the argument appear insufficiently developed.The editors’ decision to include the experiences of doctors and professors, often excluded from labor history, is welcome, particularly in an age when the proletarianization of these so-called professions has become clear. As Agnes Arnold-Forster describes, mid-twentieth-century medical doctors (mostly male) had to live monastically in hospital quarters, away from their families, whom they might only see at intervals. Despite these hardships, doctors still experienced a loss over time, as the sociability of the clapped-out “doctors lounge” had provided the space for camaraderie and discussion of cases to develop. By contrast, modern hospitals sometimes provide no space for doctors pulling multiday shifts to rest before driving home.Sally Horrocks and Paul Merchant’s essay about the emotions of doing science at Cambridge, based on repurposed oral history interviews, reveals that academics are often plagued by self-doubt and that it manifests in a gendered way (a conclusion I found unsurprising). One female interviewee remained a research assistant for her entire decades-long career because she received no positive feedback encouraging a different career trajectory in a male-dominated field. Her decision to make herself indispensable by helping men to type up their scholarly articles and plan their departmental parties did not prevent her from being made redundant. By contrast, a male academic worried about the innovativeness of his scholarship compared with that of other men, but not at all about his place in the academy.A couple of the essays in the volume really sparkle. One standout, Chris Pearson’s excellent essay on vivisectionists and antivivisectionists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Britain, and the United States, illustrates the way emotions could be employed for political purposes across the controversial practice of experimentation on live animals. Women led antivivisection societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Like the antislavery movement, with its emotional appeal of “Am I not a man and a brother?,” their movement sought to expand the circle of those who qualified as subjects of Western concern. Hewing to a deontological perspective, antivivisectionists shied away from using animals capable of suffering—mostly dogs—as a mere means to an end. They rhetorically conjured up scenes of dogs who were loyal and loving and might even lick the hand of the experimenter before he plunged a knife into the dog’s unanesthetized body. By contrast, vivisectionists’ emotions and practices were gendered male and valorized as utilitarian; a little suffering in the present had the capacity to save many more human and animal lives in the future. Vivisectionists argued that women were silly dog lovers and inappropriately and hysterically squeamish. Thus, emotions were weaponized in a pitched political battle, the rhetoric of which still has the power to nauseate the reader.Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, Feelings and Work in Modern History provides a tasting menu, building on the work of historians of the emotions like Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy. It illustrates the vibrancy at the nexus of work and the emotions and will be of greatest interest to graduate students exploring this potentially fascinating subfield.