How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
Describing cleaning as emotional labour is weird to me. I&#x27;m fully on board with the &quot;many women do lots of emotional labour that goes unnoticed&quot; logic but to me cleaning is labour and that&#x27;s that. It&#x27;s a job, and it should be talked about as hard labour, not some mysterious emotional nebula that men avoid because of gendered conditioning.<p>I think the danger here is that by conflating emotional labour and cleaning, we obfuscate the true depth of what emotional labour is. Emotional labour what goes into having a mentally ill spouse, a child dying of cancer, a colleague or friend fighting through divorce or depression, the strain of a job that expects a positive mood when you&#x27;re all wore out inside.<p>Cleaning is fixed by labour. Having a husband who doesn&#x27;t clean, gets defensive, can&#x27;t communicate, can&#x27;t remember his fucking kids birthdays, etc. is fixed by emotional labour (or divorce). To me that sounds like the author married a person who&#x27;s not accountable, doesn&#x27;t share her standards about how labour should be divided, harbors gendered conceptions of how a household should be run, doesn&#x27;t share her standards of cleanliness, doesn&#x27;t share her standards for communication skills, etc.<p>So my response, in a nutshell, is that while this woman is right to push back against gendered standards of who does household work, it has nothing to do with emotional labor, per se. It has everything to do with the fact that she apparently picked a husband who is really hard to live with, or at least hard enough to live with that she&#x27;s forced to write a tangential thinkpiece about it