Care work is a hot potato job. Many husbands turn over care of the young and old to their wives. Wives, if they can afford to, often turn it over to childcare and eldercare workers. In turn, many immigrant nannies hire nannies back home to help care for the children that they have left behind, forming a care chain.16
Underlying this gender/class/national transfer is the devaluation of care. This is based on the idea that care work is “easy,” “natural,” and—like parenting—not quite real work. Part of what makes care work invisible is that the people the worker cares for—children, the elderly, the disabled—are themselves somewhat invisible.17 Strangers entering a room may tend to ignore or “talk over” the very young and old.
The childcare worker who loved to “jump in the sandbox” with her 3-year-old charges—and who had to comfort them when coworkers left for better-paying jobs—found that the value of her work was invisible even to her husband. As she explained, “My husband is a carpenter and has unsteady work. So some of the time we rely on my pay, which is low. One night he told me, ‘Honey, why don’t you quit childcare? The pay is lousy. We’ll have our own kids—you can give your love to them. You could get a real job.’”18
This all means that many emotional laborers face a great paradox. Though they may come to work hoping to take pride in a job well done, low pay, understaffing, rigid rules, and devaluation can set up circumstances which prevent that. Sadly, their main job becomes protecting patients from the harm of life in a broken, globalized, over-bureaucratized, or profit-hungry system. A tragic cycle is set in motion. The more broken the system, the more disheartened its emotional laborers. The more disheartened they become, the more detached they are from their work, the higher the turnover rates, and the more broken the system.
The alternative to accepting this is to fix the broken system. That starts with recognizing the extraordinary emotional labor it takes to maintain a thriving childcare center, nursing home, hospital, or family. It would also call for a bold nationwide care movement to improve the conditions of care workers. If these efforts were successful, people would work in systems that were themselves well tended. In such a world, jobs requiring emotional labor could still be tough, but they would be meaningful—and even fun.
THREEEmpathy Maps
The world is in a race, Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization. On the “good” team are all the forces pressing each of us to feel empathy for all other people—and indeed all living creatures—on earth.1 On the “bad” team are the forces that accelerate global warming and destabilize the ecosystem on which earthly life depends, causing strife, fear, and a search for enemies. Which team gets to the goal line first, he notes, is up to those alive today.
The market economy is a player in this race on both teams. On one hand, by setting up vast global networks of makers, sellers, and buyers, market growth encourages the development of a wide, thin layer of empathy—at least enough to ensure peace—in order to conduct business and increase wealth.2 In this way, the market is on the “good” empathy-enhancing team. On the other hand, economic overdevelopment—with its gas-belching industrial smoke stacks, toxic waste, and accumulation of discarded goods—proceeds headlong, heedless of the welfare of future generations.3 The market also creates gross inequalities both within nations and between them, inciting a sense of injustice, envy, and conflict.4 In these ways, the market is also on the “bad” team.
How could we win this race? By extending lines of empathy between American industrialists and the worried residents of sinking Maldivian islands in the rising tide of global warming. By drawing links between the prosperous London businessman and the impoverished Soweto street vendor. By encouraging a mother to stand in the shoes of her children on the upper east side of Manhattan and also in the shoes of her Mexican nanny’s children, left behind in Mexico when their mother left to work abroad. Empathy needs to go global, and perhaps even harder, it has to go local—three zip codes down the street, up or down the class ladder. It must cross the barriers of class, race, and gender.
HIDDEN EVIDENCE OF EMPATHY
To ground such sweeping talk of empathy in the daily lives of real people, though, we need to wonder about its complexity and explore the intricate hidden patterns it fits. We need to look at maps. But how?
Clues to patterns of empathy can be surprisingly indirect. For decades, researchers had been finding that more women than men said they were depressed, and two researchers, Ronald Kessler and Jane McLeod, wondered why.5 The prevailing theory in the 1980s was that women were more “vulnerable to life-event effects” because of their poor “coping strategies.”6 But if this were the case, the researchers wondered, why would women cope better than men—as they do—with financial bad news, a spouse’s death, or, after an initial period, with separation and divorce?7
Then the researchers found that when exposed to the same disturbing events in the lives of immediate family and friends—death, accident, illness, divorce or separation, or losses in love—women more than men talked about and responded strongly to these events. Although the men were just as aware of these events as the women, the researchers surmised, they did not discuss them as much or respond as strongly to them.
Women also participated in wider circles of support. More unhappy, lost, or ill people came to women than to men, and the women invited them to do so. When the respondents were asked to describe “who helped them during the last period in their life when they needed help with a serious problem . . . women [were] between 30 and 50 percent more likely than men to be mentioned as helpers.”8 More often than men, women reached out to others for support—usually to other women. So as friends and family sought out more women than men as confidants, especially in times of crisis, the women came to hold—to remain mindful of—more stories of distress.9 To some people, holding a story of distress signals a readiness to help, I think, while for others, sharing painful news was itself the help.
Men were as upset as women by such events as death, accidents, or illnesses that occurred to their spouses and children. Yet when such events occurred to those beyond spouse and children, men reported less distress.10 So women in this study of Americans of the 1980s were not just feeling down about their own bad news, or even their own husband’s and children’s bad news, but about the bad news of others in their larger circle of family and friends. There, they were the designated empathizers—the ones others relied on to stay tuned in.11 They held in mind the sad news of these others. They charted larger family-and-friend empathy maps.
But why did the news of others depress women? Maybe it is because people have a greater need to share bad news than good, and bad news is harder to hold, so women who get more of it, feel more blue because of it. Or maybe women’s depression has nothing to do with their wider circle of concern but with other matters—such as the possibility that everyone needs to feel mothered, and that many women feel less mothered by men than men feel by women. But whatever is going on with depression, the key discovery here is something else: the different shapes of men’s and women’s empathy maps.
A 2002 study of over 1,000 people—part of the General Social Survey, a large, nationally representative U.S. survey—casts a broader light on such maps. Compared with men, women more often described themselves as “soft-hearted,” and reported themselves feeling touched by events that they saw happen. They found themselves feeling “tender, concerned feelings” for people less fortunate than they.12 They also held more altruistic values than men, agreeing more strongly, for example, that “people should be willing to help others who are less fortunate.” Studies show that in close personal situations, women are much more likely to focus on emotion, to offer and seek emotional support, and to use “highly person-centered comforting messages” to help people feel better.13 The same was found in studies of young girls and boys.14 Women make up
