Customer Reviews

The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work

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Good books on work-family issues give us a window into the mind of the author, describe relevant issues in ways that make sense, and tell us what we can do to improve the world.  Great books do all of this, but also give us a glimpse into the author's soul, and leave us rethinking just about everything.  Arlie Hochschild's new book, "The Commercialization of Intimate Life," falls into the latter category.  That is does so is surprising: the book is a series of essays Arlie wrote over the span of three decades.  The key arguments from her most well-known books, The Managed Heart (1983), The Second Shift (1987), and The Time Bind (1997), all show up here, along with a piece on women, work and family in India, and her recent work on immigrant nannies and the children they leave behind in less-developed countries and those they raise in developed countries.  The toughest sledding are a couple of pieces that are critical of traditional sociology but help us see the grounding for Arlie's approach, and her relationship to traditional feminist thought as well.  That the word "approach" can be used in the singular for all of this work is amazing but accurate: the body of work is all marked by an understanding of work-family conflicts and their heavily gendered resolutions, along with a deep sense of caring about the adults and children involved.  The final essay, "The Clockwork of Male Careers," is one of the earliest, and a piece Joan Williams and I rediscovered with joy when working on our recent 'Half-Time Tenure Track' paper for "Change."  In the Clockwork piece, Arlie traces the dearth of women in academia to a male model of careers that leaves no room for family, but should.  As Arlie notes in an update at the end of the piece, the arguments unfortunately ring just as true now as they did when she originally wrote the piece in 1973.   I think that is accurate, but it is also true that far more of us are working today to make things better.  A must read!

This collection of essays begins with the revelation that when the author was a little girl she noticed her stay-at-home mom was depressed, but her work-a-day dad was happy, so she decided she wanted to be like her dad not like her mom. Her reasoning contained at least two errors: 1) her mom may have been depressed for other reasons, and 2) just because her dad was happy working outside the home, that doesn't mean his daughter would be happy doing that too. Faulty reasoning that many girls and women still make today.

The author goes on to describe how child care and domestic chores have become commercialized, and most importantly: undervalued. Traditional men placed more value on production and consumption than on relating to family and children, and now modern women have become more like men. Instead of making men more humane, feminism (co-opted by capitalism) has made women more like cowboys.

The best essay is: 14) Love and Gold. As more and more Western women have moved into the workforce outside the home, a growing number of Third World women have emigrated to Western countries to take care of our children. In some cases uneducated women who come from a rural culture are better at child care than Western mothers who are preoccupied with purchasing gadgets, stressed by their careers, and anxious about scholastic demands. Many of the immigrant care-givers are mothers themselves, leaving their own children abroad to come and work here, with some evidence that their abandoned children suffer rather than gain.

One irony is that child care is among the lowest-paid occupations. Just as important basic food crops are sold for low prices (compared to frivolous manufactured goods), the important job of early childhood education is considered cheap work compared to a simple massage that costs $50 for a quarter-hour. Another (unmentioned) irony is that men are often blamed for not sharing in child-care, while in reality men who show any serious interest in children are ostracized as suspected perverts.

The book also discusses discrimination against women in academia, citing statistics to show that women are under-represented in most faculties. But the author doesn't mention the glaring numbers that show discrimination against men in the wider teaching profession. It's clear that men who have helpful wives are at an advantage in academia, and the author acknowledges that househusbands would be useful to women aspiring to an academic career, but there is no admission that many women themselves are resistant to men playing the role of care-giver.