Rose Hackman > Quotes

“While men are limited from childhood in the range of emotion they are expected to have the capacity of feeling, they are paradoxically given more space to be unfiltered in public. Women, treated like emotional thermostats whether they like it or not, not only must constantly manage their own feelings but they are also held responsible for the feelings of others. When women are told to "smile" by a stranger on the street, they are being reminded of this through harassment. When women going about their business are accused of having "resting bitch face," they are being reminded of their expected constant enthusiastic performance for the benefit of the world. A man not smiling while going about a task is never told he has "resting dick face." He's likely treated as busy and important, if his expression is noted at all.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Women, endlessly told to smile but also tasked with making other people smile, are held accountable not only for the expression of their own feelings but also for the feelings of others.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“I want the term gold digger to include dudes who look for a woman who will do tons of emotional labour for them.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Requiring this false high road of women at the same time as we require them to perform constant rituals of femininity, is hypocritical beyond belief and the opposite of progress. It also justifies and takes the side of patriarchal capitalism that pretends that withholding money from women using their bodies for market exploitation. After all, someone is going to be taking home that money the value the women are creating.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“That means no longer believing that women by virtue of being women owe anything to society --including something as seemingly innocuous as a smile.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“But to me this moment in history, rather than being a moment for debating what is inherently masculine versus inherently feminine, is an incredible opportunity to reexamine our value system and the evidence behind it.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Authenticity, at least in some circumstances, an entitlement afforded to some groups and not others,”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The consequences of looking how you feel can be deadly”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The norm for the last twelve thousand years-women were treated as assets exchanged between two male headed households.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Family has never been outside of power. I mean what's a dowry? families were arranged because they're meetings of power.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“It is incomprehensible to hold a child responsible for other people's sexual thoughts to the point that she is expected to manage them. Sex-related emotional labor started for me, as for many others, years before I had even formulated the existence, let alone the boundaries, of my own sexuality and sexual agency. Carrying the effects of other people's sexual desires on our bodies is taught to us before we get to define our sexuality for ourselves. Sexual emotional labor performed for others predates much of our own sexuality—to the extent that our sexuality is often shaped by it.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Historical accounts show that newly pregnant white women would sometimes orchestrate for enslaved black women to be raped a sanctioned assault ensuring that white woman and black woman would give birth within similar periods, one of the reasons white women did this was to avoid the inconvenience of themselves being "slaves" to their biological children.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“coercion. Physical, economic, social, and moral pressures are all used to induce people into performances based on what she called "status obligations, "which are often tied to gender and also compounded by race and class. In other words, people who have lower, gendered statuses, mothers, daughters, or wives, for instance.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Other nannies and caregivers I interviewed had similar stories. Large families relied on female family members to help including young girls and those girls grew up knowing how to take care of children, one black woman in Pennsylvania who had never been a formal nanny but had been handed extra children to take care of into middle age expressed in no uncertain terms the being good at something didn't alleviate the toll and magnitude of the work involved.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“An extraordinarily grim academic article from 2009 looked at the marital outcome of 515 patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, observing groups battling malignant primary brain tumors, other forms of cancer, and multiple sclerosis. The study, which monitored male and female patients who were in heterosexual marriages over the course of five years, found there was a significant difference in the rate of "abandonment" depending on the gender of the patient. When the patient was male, and the supporting spouse female, divorce happened in 2.9 percent of cases. When the patient was female and the supporting spouse was male, divorce happened in 20.8 percent of cases-it was seven times more likely to happen.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Darwin's observations seek to justify the white supremacist, patriarchal state of the world as inherently natural with no proof except the arrogance of his own belief systems.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Instead of people treating emotional labor as an extension of being sexed or gendered as female, emotional labor should be seen as a form of work demanding time, effort, and skill. Nor should emotional labor, in the same vein, be seen as a passive expression of an innate trait, say, an expression of possessing emotional intelligence. What we see as the expression of emotional intelligence is emotional labor in action, and we should acknowledge and reward it as such.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“If we really mean that all humans are equal, we cannot in good faith expect one group to serve another and one group to be made accountable for the feelings of another. This goes for women, as it goes for other subjugated groups, including racialized groups. No one is born with the inherent obligation - through their status as a gender or their status as part of a minority group - to serve the feelings of another group. No one is born with the inherent right to have their feelings served. The only way forward, if we want to redress inequalities, and if we want to enact an ethos in which all humans are equal, is to fight for a system of visible and open-ended reciprocity and abolish status obligations.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“In this market-driven economic system, work becomes real through formal compensation, in other words, if you're not being paid, you're not working.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“this leaves a huge burden on parents during early stages of childcare, especially mothers, who are often the ones left to sacrifice for the group.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Free speech sounds great on its own. But the problem with free speech that you refuse to contextualize is that sometimes, when you protect the free speech of some, you muzzle the rights, freedoms, and dignity of others-including their free speech.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“And for goodness' sake, come on. These men, who were feigning shock and indignation, they knew. Why else would my male friend stop me from taking a bus at midnight when I was a student, and insist I take a cab, even if that would make a massive hole in my monthly budget? What about the basketball community I grew up with, which looked the other way when the elderly club owner kissed the children in the girls' teams a little too close? Why would the young coaches make sure nobody ever had to ride with the club owner in his car alone on the way to the games? Why did the bouncer and owner at the bar and restaurant I worked at make sure the female staff left quietly through the side door on nights the male clientele was getting too rowdy?
    Because they knew, that's why.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Feeling rules women are expected to abide by for example are often vastly different from those required of men.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“That changed once she had her first child and stepped into the lauded feminine role of being a mother, she had brought a whole human being into the world and was the primary parent; now the fruits of her literal labor were visible. "I felt a little bit more power back to me.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“In 2018 While white women earned an average of 81.5 percent of what white men earned, black women earned only 65 percent of it, and Hispanic women 61 percent. understanding this pay gap doesn't involve just looking at very real discriminations happening within fields where men and women of different races work side by side but also looking at the kinds of fields different groups of women go into and the typical pay and labor conditions within these.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Black women entering domestic servitude en masse under conditions that first person accounts form the time claim resembled slavery. The willing and comforting mammy narrative served the purpose of preserving white innocence and the social, political, and economic interests of white America as white people entered into a far more common exploitative domestic dynamic than was the case during slavery,
In the first half of the twentieth century, most middle-class white women adhering to views of white femineity that deemed them too fragile and precious to undertake arduous domestic chores, employed a domestic servant, in the south, middle class as well as working class white women employed black domestic servants. White women were able to perform their brand of delicate femineity only thanks to the underpaid labor of women of color and immigrant women who were judged particularly naturally suited for service. Just like when mammies were portrayed as dependent and unintelligent, racist and sexist benevolent justifications included the ideas that black and Mexican women were unable to look after themselves and the Asian women were inherently quiet, subservient, and used to poor living conditions already,”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“Emotional labor is in essence a vehicle for the collective good... or at least it could be. Societies benefit from prosocial etiquette, effort, and civility. But if only women or minorities have to do it, then authenticity becomes the entitled privilege of the few,' Chamorro-Premuzic wrote to me in an email as I was finishing this book.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“We are therefore presumably to believe, based on lobsters, that striving for equality, or disrupting systems of domination, goes against nature.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“The researchers tipped the participants off that they would be performing an interpersonal task, which would usually only have motivated women into exhibiting higher empathy levels, but this time they added an extra incentive: real cash money. For every answer that was somewhat emphatically accurate, participants were given $1, and for every fully emphatically accurate answer, they were given $2. The result? Performance shot through the roof for everyone, and men and women scored similarly high. Concluding their paper, the authors wrote: "This is an encouraging finding, suggesting that greater empathic accuracy can be achieved by virtually anyone who is given proper motivation. When all else fails, if you find yourself faced with someone who just cannot seem to understand your point of view, it might be worthwhile to offer him or her a dollar.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

“These scrutinizing and ridiculing moments of triage have one main end goal to deny ascendance or power by denying women full self-determination, specifically here economic self determination.”
― Rose Hackman, Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power