variety of exchanges between people in private and public life. I wanted to understand the general emotional language of which diplomats speak only one dialect.
My search soon led me to the works of Erving Goffman, to whom I am indebted for his keen sense of how we try to control our appearance even as we unconsciously observe rules about how we ought to appear to others. But again, something was missing. How does a person act on feeling—or stop acting on it, or even stop feeling? I wanted to discover what it is that we act upon. And so I decided to explore the idea that emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it. As I explain for specialists in Appendix A, I extend to all emotions the “signal function” that Freud reserved for the emotion of anxiety. Many emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. It is this signal function that is impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage.
These questions and ideas were developing, then, when I went out to try to get behind the eyes of flight attendants and bill collectors, female workers and male, as each moved through a day’s work. The more I listened, the more I came to appreciate how workers try to preserve a sense of self by circumventing the feeling rules of work, how they limit their emotional offerings to surface displays of the “right” feeling but suffer anyway from a sense of being “false” or mechanical. I came to understand, too, that the more deeply a commercial system carves into the private emotional “gift exchange,” the more receivers and givers alike take up the extra work of discounting what is impersonal in order to accept what is not. I think all this has helped me interpret the smiles I now see around me at eye level.
A. R. H.
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to those who helped: To Jeffrey and Judie Klein for their bracing but loving advice on a misty first draft; to Todd Gitlin for unfolding and hanging out my ideas with me; to Anne Machung for her support and wondrous line-by-line work in red ink; and to Ann Swidler who has shown me over the years the joys of an easy weave between personal friendship and intellectual life. To Mike Rogin, who over the years has probed my thinking and pointed to ellipses in it, even while mopping up spilt lemonade or tying children’s shoelaces at the zoo. To Neil Smelser, one-time teacher and long-time friend, for an enormously helpful twenty-page commentary on an early draft. To Rusty Simonds for incisive help, and to Metta Spencer, for her commitment to the ideas and her skill at playing the devil’s advocate. And thanks to Joanne Costello and Jezra Kaen for early research assistance, and to Steve Hetzler and Rachael Volberg for help later on. For careful typing, my thanks to Pat Fabrizio, Francisco Medina, and Sammie Lee.
My brother, Paul Russell, has taught me a great deal about emotion one way and another. I cherish his kindness and deep intellectual engagement. It continually amazes me that two people from the same family, both interested in emotion can have such different things to say about it. Yet, I have learned a great deal from his thinking—some of which is to be found in his papers listed in the Appendix. I’m also grateful to Aaron Cicourel and Lillian Rubin, who pushed for revisions when I thought I was finished but wasn’t. And what can I say about Gene Tanke? His editing was brilliant. My only regret is that we had to exclude that additional appendix he proposed of observations and quotes “that just wouldn’t fit.”
I feel very indebted to the many flight attendants and bill collectors who shared their time, their experience, their meetings, and their homes with me. I want to thank those in charge at Delta Airlines, who allowed me into their world in the faith that I meant well. In particular, I want to thank Mary Ruth Ralph, the head of Delta’s Stewardess Training Center; she may not agree with everything I have written, but this book is written in honor of her and those she trains. My special thanks also to Betsy Graham, for the late-night taping sessions, the network of friends she opened up for me, and the three boxes of notes and mementos, which still grace my closet floor.
I owe most to my husband Adam, who took to peering behind airline ticket counters to see what notices companies posted for their agents, who endlessly listened, and at each draft scoured my prose. Among his comments, my favorite is a picture he drew in the margin of an early draft, beside the phrase “shroud of salient ambiguity.” It showed a ghost (as ambiguity) in a hill of straw (as salience); a tiny figure sailing through this ghost-in-the-hill, labeled “salientee.” The phrase is gone, but the image of the “salientee” sailing across the page, the love and the laughs are with me still. My eleven-year old son David also read most of the typescript and tagged more than one elephantine phrase with the comment, “Sorry, Mom, I don’t speak Martian.” I love them and thank them both very much. And thanks to Gabriel, who can help next time.
PART ONE
Private Life
1
EXPLORING THE MANAGED HEART
The one area of her occupational life in which she might be “free to act,” the area of her own personality, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious instrument by which goods are distributed.
—C. Wright Mills
In a section in Das Kapital entitled “The Working Day,” Karl Marx examines depositions submitted in 1863 to the Children’s Employment Commission in England. One deposition was given by the mother of a child laborer in a wallpaper factory: “When he was seven years old I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day…. I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked, as a steam engine is fed coal and water, this child was “an instrument of labor.”1 Marx questioned how many hours a day it was fair to use a human being as an instrument, and how much pay for being an instrument was fair, considering the profits that factory owners made. But he was also concerned with something he thought more fundamental: the human cost of becoming an “instrument of labor” at all.
On another continent 117 years later, a twenty-year-old flight attendant trainee sat with 122 others listening to a pilot speak in the auditorium of the Delta Airlines Stewardess Training Center. Even by modern American standards, and certainly by standards for women’s work, she had landed an excellent job. The 1980 pay scale began at $850 a month for the first six months and would increase within seven years to about $20,000 a year. Health and accident insurance is provided, and the hours are good.*
The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her notepad, “Important to smile. Don’t forget smile.” The admonition came from the speaker in the front of the room, a crew-cut pilot in his early fifties, speaking in a Southern drawl: “Now girls, I want you to go out there and really smile. Your smile is your biggest asset. I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on?.”
The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset. But as novices like the one next to me move through training, the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition — its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance that departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return. Trainers take it as their job to attach to the trainee’s smile an attitude, a viewpoint, a rhythm of feeling that is, as they often say, “professional.” This deeper extension of the professional smile is not always easy to retract at the end of the workday, as one worker in her first year at World Airways noted: “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I can’t relax. I giggle a lot, I chatter, I call friends. It’s as if I can’t release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able
