It's not ‘emotional labour’

call it by its real name: kin work (or: f'kin work)

I’ve just come back from a seasonal gathering where it was obvious – as it is obvious every year – that the women in the heterosexual couples had done a far larger amount of work than their partners. We had initiated the idea of gathering, had clung on through the tedious months of back and forth to find a time and place, had planned the food, researched, brought, and wrapped the presents. We had done this alongside our own full-time jobs, and the million other requirements of the season, sometimes inwardly raging against a system that can make women feel powerless to do anything other than comply.

Finnish actor Regina Linnanheimo with Christmas presents by Valokuvaamo Tenhovaara - Finnish Heritage Agency, Finland. https://www.europeana.eu/item/2021009/_ed079305_ef31_4e73_bebc_d66574230097

People often call this work of arranging gatherings, preparing seasonal meals and giving gifts ‘emotional labour’. But as a historian who specialises in emotions, I bristle when I hear it described this way. Not because I am a nit-picky academic (though I am). I want you to know we are using the term ‘emotional labour’ wrong because I think it is useful to call this labour out by using its proper name: ‘kin work’. Or, as my older brother once aptly dubbed it, ‘f’kin work’.

The term ‘emotional labour’ was invented by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her groundbreaking 1983 book The Managed Heart. Hochschild showed how some employees in customer-facing roles were explicitly trained to ‘induce or suppress’ emotions as part of their jobs. One of her case studies were flight attendants, who were taught to always be smiling, enthusiastic, ‘nicer than natural’, to their airborne customers, to foster an atmosphere of luxury and safety. The benefits to keeping up this ‘emotional tone road show’ as Hochschild calls it, was obvious to their profit-seeking corporate employers. But the costs to the employees themselves were more hidden. Their emotional labour, according to Hochschild, was leaving employees dangerously alienated from their own feelings and perilously at risk of burn out. In the early 1980s, Hochschild estimated that a third of jobs made ‘substantial demands for emotional labour’; today she thinks that figure is more like half. Perhaps the most notorious example recently is the ‘enforced happiness’ at coffee chain Pret A Manger, which requires its servers to have rapport with one another, and enthusiasm for their (low-paid) jobs.

Over the years the term ‘emotional labour’ has drifted, so that we often hear it applied to work done in the home, particularly work like remembering birthdays, buying presents or organising gatherings. Certainly, a lot of that work involves explicitly mandated emotional labour, keeping up an ‘emotional tone road show’. During the festive season, women in particular know that they are supposed to be uncomplaining, delightful and delighted, as we unload the dishwasher, or present a plate of mince pies fresh from the oven or produce some other Insta-worthy celebratory moment. Hochschild’s flight attendants risked the sack when they failed to deliver emotionally. Likewise, most women also recognise there is a cost when they mis-perform their emotions at home, even if that cost is only to themselves. No one wants to be the person slamming Christmas dinner down in an exhausted fury. And after a while, being the Feminist Killjoy, pointing out, with each sparkling advert, that the ‘magic’ of the season is created not by magic at all, but by sheer hard work, also starts to take its toll. So yes, Christmas absolutely entails a lot of emotional self-management, and alienation, a high-stakes tightrope walk which we perform either well or (in my case) frequently badly. But this work is not exclusively emotional labour. It also involves other work: the maintanence work of cleaning, the nourishment-work of cooking, and what I want to talk about here, kin (f’kin) work.

Sociologists came up with the term ‘kin work’ to describe the time-consuming, invisible labour involved in maintaining family and cross-household and intergenerational ties. One of the earliest uses of the term appears in the anthropologist Micaela Di Leonardo’s 1987 paper ‘The female world of cards and holidays’. ‘The creation and maintenance of kin and quasi-kin networks in advanced industrial societies is work’ she wrote. ‘Moreover, it largely women’s work’. From remembering birthdays to organising the Secret Santa, this kin work required effortful micro-management, communication and other tasks, yet was often seen as easy, instinctive and done for leisure or pleasure, or out of generous spirited feeling.

I don’t need to point out that kin work is hard: we all know it is. But sometimes we forget that it also has a purpose beyond servicing the endless merry-go-round of heightened expectations. Kinwork is to humans what foraging for food or building a shelter is. Humans have always known we cannot survive alone, and that to protect ourselves, we need to persuade others to care about us. We cultivate trusting reciprocal pacts with other people – blood relatives, but also friends and neighbours - through which reassure ourselves we can both care and be cared for, if the necessity strikes. These ties can have powerful feelings attached, but ultimately, they are about our collective survival. Your kin are the people who will drive forty miles to pick you up when the car has been impounded and your wallet stolen, feed your cat, or give you somewhere to stay during your divorce. The necessity of cultivating kin networks becomes even more obvious when children are born. As the anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy described in her landmark 2009 book Mothers and Others, human parents are ingenious in cultivating ‘future caretaking prospects’ for children, whether relatives or god-parents and ‘aunties’, because we know we need others to help care for our children, and to step in if we die.

Building the trust required to sustain such relationships is not a one-hit job. Trust needs to be maintained and carefully nourished. We need to remind one another of our pledge and significance to each other, and doing so has always involved, among other things, exchanging gifts, remembering important dates and celebrating together. And obviously, this is not work that needs to be performed by one gender or another.

All humans cultures at all times, have done the critical work of building kin networks: our species could not have survived without it. But as patterns of work and domestic life began to change in 17^th century Europe, kin work became specifically identified as a female task. One of the people who cultivated this new ideal of womanhood was the English advice-writer Hannah Woolley, a best-selling author in her time. In her 17^th century prescriptive guidebooks, she instructed women in their duties as housewives, neighbours and friends. Among her recipes for medicines and marmalade, are descriptions of the gifts that should be sent to commemorate weddings and births, and templates for letters that should be written on occasions of illness or deaths. The task of keeping up kin connections was becoming increasingly codified and modern, and in this deeply interconnected world where networks were essential to a household’s survival, it was a task no woman risked neglecting. Over time, the gendered requirements became ever-more elaborate (though Woolley’s instructions are pretty elaborate, tbh) and ever more devalued as mere women’s work.

I’ll say it again: kin work definitely does not need to be carried out by any particular gender. It is just work. But when we call kin work ‘emotional labour’, I wonder if we blur its edges. Kin work does carry a large amount of emotional labour with it, especially in today’s Christmas Industrial Complex where advertising creates an explicit set of emotional rules, intimately tied to lining corporate pockets. But kin work is not exclusively the work of emotional self-management. ‘Emotional labour’ risks sounding fuzzy and vague, as if its primary purpose is to make everyone feel good. It can also suggest the work itself is emotional in nature, and therefore introduces the idea that some, more sensitive, empathetic or emotionally skilled people are simply better at it, and women have long – and falsely – been held to be experts in this area, a topic for another day.

But one of the things that troubles me about calling kinwork ‘emotional labour’ is the subtle notion that this work could be – ought to be - dispensable. But kin work is not dispensable, not really. As Rachel Hewitt wrote in this excellent essay on Substack, the advice given to women (at this time of year especially) to just ‘drop the ball’, is not always realistic. Could I just be that aunt who never gives her nieces and nephews presents? my friend wonders, knowing her husband would not even notice if there were no presents to exchange. It’s true, some years, I have been that aunt (in my heterosexual household, my husband buys for his family, and I buy for mine; but even then, I don’t always manage it). But it feels to both my friend and I that the cost of dropping that particular ball is too high. It’s not just our sense of female self-esteem that is being damaged, or that we have been socialised into not wanting to disappoint people. We also recognise that our kin connections are important to keep up. We want to honour them, to remind ourselves that these people matter to us, and show the people we care about that they are in our minds. And though this work is sometimes presented as something only women are good at or invested in, everyone benefits from being secured within kin networks, and so everyone can – and should – do the work of maintaining them.

There are always going to be people who believe they don’t really need to depend on others, or want others to depend on them. And capitalism has produced more and more ways we can use money, rather than relationships, to solve our problems. It’s easier and easier to employ a courier, a therapist, a zero-hours contracted task-doer, rather than ask a friend, neighbour or family member to help us out. But we are also living through a loneliness epidemic, where the costs of not building trusting connections is becoming increasingly clear. There has never been a more urgent moment to recognise the commitment and value of kin work – or f’kin work, as it does admittedly sometimes feel like.