This is the transcript of Regina F. Lark’s TEDx Talk titled ‘EMOTIONAL LABOR AND THE MYTH OF “WOMEN’S WORK”’ at TEDxFolsom conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Regina F. Lark – Author
‘A man can work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.’ This poem is 125 years old. And for me, it brings up questions like, what is women’s work? Why the heck is it never done? And who decided work has a gender?
Say the phrase “men’s work,” did you think vacuuming? But all we have to do is say “women’s work,” and bam, instant global understanding. My client Sylvia put it another way when I asked, “Sylvia, what are you thinking about right now?”
Right now, I’m thinking I have to bake cupcakes with my five-year-old, schedule a play date, pick up my dad’s medications, remember to put ketchup on the grocery list. She never remembers because she doesn’t use it. Take down Christmas, finish a PowerPoint for work, oh yeah, and remember, figure out time to organize our messy house, which doesn’t bother my husband, so it’s all on me.
I’ve worked with many professional, successful cisgender women who tell me they feel like failures at home, unable to fulfill the basic duties that should come naturally to them, you know, like tackling that long, long to-do list we call women’s work. And what permeates women’s work is the mental load of emotional labor. And emotional labor is mostly invisible. It’s the remembering, reminding, planning, noticing, anticipating. All invaluable, right? Invaluable but also invisible.
Now you may be new at living with someone or a mid-career woman with a few years’ experience with kids, extended family members, juggling multiple calendars, trying to do it all. The pain comes when we find that we can’t do all of these things perfectly. Who can? Or that we just don’t measure up to cultural expectations of what it means to be a woman.
In this moment, I want you to give yourself permission to be curious about why the heck you’re doing so much all the darn time. Because here’s what I’ve discovered. As there’s nothing inherently feminine about a menstrual pad, there’s nothing inherently womanly about women’s work. The work is the work, whether you do it at home or in the paid office.
I passionately want to end the tendency of calling the work of household management women’s work. It’s time to reimagine all of it. The mythology is that women are just better at the work in the home, organically, like it’s part of their DNA or because they have a particular body part that confers such powers on them. I’ll give you that in birthing and nursing a baby, a woman clearly has the edge over a man. But beyond that, the work of homemaking, it’s all up for grabs.
Now sure, there are some men who do this work, but child-free or a house filled with kids, the work of homemaking tends to be a lifelong endeavor for all women, regardless of most anything else.
There are two components to the work of household management: the physical work and the mental load of emotional labor, defined here as the invisible, unnoticed, unwritten, and unwaged work women do in the home and in the paid workplace. It’s the thinking about what’s coming up, what needs to happen, how to look into the future to anticipate, birthdays, school permission slips, family meals, holiday dinners, do we have enough toilet paper, you’re out of ketchup again?
Now granted, these little tasks, each one, are easy to do. Taken as a whole, they’re supremely important to the functioning of a well-ordered home and to family happiness. Emotional labor is why the work is never done. At home, it requires loving, caring actions with invisible mental load dimensions and zillions of concrete tasks.
Back to Sylvia. One day she said, “Regina, from the outside, my life looks amazing, really well put together. But at the end of the day, I feel so bad about myself. I look around at my messy house and I just can’t do it all. My husband, my kids, they make fun of me. I am a lousy housekeeper. I can’t keep up with the laundry. And I don’t know why it’s my job to always remember to get the ketchup. I don’t even use it.”
So I turned to her and said, “Sylvia, listen, just because you have a vagina doesn’t mean it’s all your job.” Betty Friedan, the author of the 1964 best-selling book, “The Feminine Mystique,” might have called Sylvia’s lament, “The Problem With No Name.” But after listening to Sylvia and so many others, I am convinced that the 21st-century problem with no name has a name, and the name is emotional labor.
So what do we do about this? What if we stopped labeling, judging, and resenting ourselves? What if we replaced that narrative with a new one? How would we do this?
Well, first, we want to understand the requirements needed to perform the work of household management, which includes the physical work and the mental load of emotional labor. You know, everything that women and some men do in the home to keep those around them comfortable and happy.
To get all the work done in the paid workplace requires a nearly identical skill set to getting all the work done at home. Simply put, it requires access to your executive functions, the part of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex. Our brain’s executive functions are what got us here on time today, allows us to manage our emotions, gives us the ability to plan, process, and prioritize.
Consequently, the very same skills required to have a successful business are also required to run a successful home. So when it comes to the work of the home, it looks like we’ve been referencing the wrong body parts. And yet, the cultural expectation is that the work of the home will fall to women. And it is because of the historical myth that women are better at this work.