Analytic/Ethics

Bartky (1990) Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and Disaffection in Women's Emotional Labor

Soyo_Kim 2024. 9. 15. 15:16

2024-2 Feminist Ethics

Bartky, S. L. (1990) Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and Disaffection in Women's Emotional Labor. in: Femininity and Domination, Routledge.

 

(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.
Shulamith Firestone

 

1

Connell Cowan and Melvyn Kinder: "What a man is attracted to most deeply in a woman, is a magical mixture of unadulterated [순수한, 완전한] power and tenderness [유연함, 다정함]-in equal measure." "Strength, forcefulness, and mastery can be gained," they assure us, "without giving up female tenderness and concern with relationships." This is good news indeed. But elsewhere Cowan and Kinder admit that "whatever men say, most of them still like to control the timing and frequency of lovemaking." Men do not want a sexually aggressive woman but "a woman who will be exquisitely [아주 아름답게, 절묘하게] responsive and passionate."

An alarm buzzer goes off in my head. "Whatever men say ...": Is this a warning or a confession? How can a woman have' 'unadulterated power" and yet be unable to control the timing and frequency of her own lovemaking? Nor are men attracted by the qualities that make for career success in women: "A woman who has worked hard at an education and career is not necessarily valued higher by men." Once more, "unadulterated power" does not in fact attract, for such power would have to include, would it not, the straight-out exercise of power in the public sphere that is oftentimes the reward of career success? I am perplexed: What does a man want? Some sort of power in a woman, but none of the ordinary sorts and, less mysteriously, tenderness, not tenderness simpliciter but "female tenderness."

Several dozen best-selling books in popular psychology have appeared in recent years that detail what one writer calls the "love crisis"-what is presumed by the authors of these books to be a crisis in the intimate relationships of men and women. These writers, mostly women, tell a depressing tale of female dependency and male misconduct, often gross misconduct. While their characterizations of the "love crisis" differ in some respects, these accounts converge in one respect: All agree that men supply their women with far less of what in popular psychology is called "positive stroking"-the provision of emotional sustenance [감정적 자양물의 공급]-than women supply in return, and all agree that this imbalance is a persistent source of female frustration.

Feminist theorists too have noted the gendered imbalance in the provision of emotional support. Ann Ferguson, for example, has maintained that men's appropriation [도용, 전용] of women's emotional labor is a species of exploitation akin in important respects to the exploitation of workers under capitalism. Ferguson posits a sphere of "sex-affective production," [성-감정적 생산] parallel in certain respects to commodity production in the waged sector [임금 노동 부문의 상품 생산]. Four goods are produced in this system: domestic maintenance, children, nurturance [양육] (of both men and children), and sexuality [이 시스템에서는 네 가지 재화가 생산된다: 가정의 유지, 어린이, 양육 (남성과 어린이 모두에 대한), 그리고 성].

According to Ferguson, economic domination of the household by men is analogous to capitalist ownership of the means of production. The relations of sex-affective production in a male-dominated society put women in a position of unequal exchange. Just as control of the means of production by capitalists allows them to appropriate "surplus value [잉여가치]" from workers, i. e. the difference between the total value of the workers' output and that fraction of value produced that workers get in return-so men's privileged position in the sphere of sex-affective production allows them to appropriate "surplus nurturance" from women. So, for example, the sexual division of labor whereby women are the primary childrearers requires a "'woman as nurturer' sex gender ideal." Girls learn "to find satisfaction in the satisfaction of others, and to place their needs second in the case of a conflict." Men, on the other hand, "learn such skills are women's work, learn to demand nurturance from women yet don't know how to nurture [양육하다] themselves." Women, like workers, are caught within a particular division of labor which requires that they produce more of a good-here, nurturance-than they receive in return.

There is a clear allegation of harm to women in Ferguson's account-the harm of exploitation. Joel Feinberg characterizes exploitation generally as an interpersonal relationship that "involves one party (A) profiting from his relation to another party (B) by somehow 'taking advantage' of some characteristic of B's, or some feature of B's circumstances." In most cases of exploitation, B's interests suffer or her rights are violated, but this need not be the case. Feinberg cites a number of examples in which A exploits B but "B is neither harmed nor benefited in the process." Harmless parasitism is a case in point: Consider the sponger [남에게 빌붙어 먹는 사람] who exploits the generosity of a rich and good-natured patron or the gossip columnist who panders to [~에 영합하다] the vulgar [저속한] curiosity of the public by reporting the daily activities of some celebrity. The patron may be so rich that he neither minds nor misses the handouts [거저 주는 것]; the celebrity may be utterly indifferent to the publicity.

Now the specific kind of exploitation for which Marxists indict [기소하다] capitalism, and Ferguson patriarchy, is exploitation ofthe first variety, i.e., a taking advantage in which A's profiting from his relation to B involves substantial damage to B's interests. It is important to understand that for the Marxist, capitalist exploitation involves more than the unequal transfer of value from worker to capitalist. Oftentimes we give more to others than they give us in return perhaps because we have more to give-without feeling ourselves aggrieved [피해를 입은] or naming ourselves exploited. Indeed, to require an exchange of equivalents in all our dealings with other people reduces the richness and variety of human relationship to the aridity [건조, 빈약] of mere contract.

But, so it is charged, the appropriation of surplus value under capitalism involves an unequal exchange that is not at all benign [상냥한], for the character of this exchange is such as to bring about the systematic disempowerment of one party to the exchange-the direct producers. The appropriation of surplus value is at the root of the workers' alienation, where by "alienation" is meant the loss of control both of the product of labor and of the productive process itself; the loss of autonomy in production brings with it a diminution [축소, 감소] in the workers' powers, for example, the atrophy [위축] of human capacity that attends a lifetime of repetitive or uncreative work. The appropriation of surplus value forms the basis, as well, of the social, political, and cultural preeminence [발군, 탁월] of the appropriating classes.

Ferguson's argument does not require that the two sets of relationships workers under capitalism, women in the contemporary household-be identical, as clearly they are not. Her claim, as I understand it, is that both are exploited in the same sense, i. e., that both are involved in relationships of unequal exchange in which the character of the exchange is itself disempowering.

Now this claim is problematical. ① First, there is some question whether the imbalance in the provision of emotional sustenance is a relationship of unequal exchange at all. Does it, in other words, satisfy the Marxist's first condition for exploitation? Under capitalism, so Marxists claim, workers receive less of the same kind of thing-value-than they give. Moreover, since the value of the worker's wage can be calculated in the same terms as the value of the worker's product, the difference between the two can be quantified and the exploitative character of the relationship just displayed for all to see. Nor, according to Marxists, is there anything else, i. e., anything other than what can be calculated as "value" in Marxist theory that the capitalist gives the worker that might balance the books. Now in order for "surplus nurturance" to be parallel to "surplus value," the intimate exchanges of men and women will have to be shown not only to involve an imbalance in the provision of one kind of thing-here nurturance-but not to involve an exchange of equivalents of any sort. But this is just what conservatives deny. The emotional contributions of men and women to intimacy certainly differ, they admit, but their contributions to one another, looked at on a larger canvas, balance: He shows his love for her by bringing home the bacon, she by securing for him a certain quality of nurturance and concern. Might they be right?

② Second, even if women's provision of emotional care to men can be shown not to be embedded within a larger exchange of equivalents, is it clear that women are really harmed by providing such care? Are the men who take more than they give in return anything worse than Feinberg's mere harmless parasites whose exploitation fails to issue in any genuine damage? Differently put, does the situation of women in intimacy satisfy the Marxist's second condition for exploitation, i. e., that there be not only an unequal transfer of powers but a genuine disempowerment in consequence of this transfer? Many feminists have condemned the classic bargain [합의, 흥정] between man and woman (economic support in return for domestic labor and emotional caregiving) on the grounds that economic dependency itself is disempowering. But is it possible to argue that the unreciprocated provision of emotional sustenance-"female tenderness"-is disempowering in and of itself? And if it is, in what, precisely, does this disempowerment consist?

 

2

Let us fix with more precision the character of the emotional sustenance that women are said to provide more of to men than they receive in return. What is it, in the ideal case, to give someone "emotional support?" To support someone emotionally is to keep up his spirits, to keep him from sinking under the weight of burdens that are his to bear. To sink would be to fail to cope at all, to fall prey to paralysis or despair, in less extreme cases, to cope poorly. To give such support, then, is to tend to a person's state of mind in such a way as to make his sinking less likely; it is to offer him comfort, typically by the bandaging up of his emotional wounds or to offer him sustenance, typically by the feeding of his self-esteem.

 

The aim of this supporting and sustaining is to produce or to maintain in the one supported and sustained a conviction of the value and importance of his own chosen projects, hence of the value and importance of his own person. [102]

 

It is the particular quality of a caregiver's attention that can bolster the Other's confidence. This attention can take the form of speech, of praise, perhaps for the Other's character and accomplishments, or it can manifest itself in the articulation of a variety of verbal signals (sometimes called "conversational cheerleading") that incite him to continue speaking, hence reassuring [안심시키다] him of the importance of what he is saying. Or such attention can be expressed nonverbally, e.g., in the forward tilt [기울어짐] of the caregiver's body, the maintaining of eye contact, the cocking of her head to the side, the fixing of a smile upon her face.

Again, the work of emotional healing can be done verbally in a myriad of ways, from simple expressions of indignation [분개] at what the boss has said about him, to the construction of elaborate rationales that aim, by reconceptualizing them, to make his failures and disappointments less terrible; or nonverbally, in the compassionate [연민어린, 동정하는] squeezing [압착탈수] of a hand or in a hug, in the sympathetic furrowing [찡그림] of a brow [이마], or in a distressful sighing. The work of emotional repair-the tending of wounds [상처의 돌봄]-and the bolstering of confidence-the feeding of egos [자존감을 채워 줌]-overlap in many ways. A sustained sympathetic listening, as we have seen, conveys to the speaker the importance of what he is saying, hence the suggestion that he himself is important; beyond this, a willingness to listen in comforting, for hurts, if hurts there are, sting less when we can share them. To enter feelingly and without condescension [우월함] into another's distress-a balm [위안] to the spirit indeed is to affirm that person's worth, though an affirmation of someone's worth need not require any particular effort at emotional restoration. Affection is also a factor in the provision of emotional support. While emotional support might be forthcoming from some stranger on a train in whom I decide to confide [털어놓다], the forms of emotional caregiving as they have been described here are among the commonest ways we show affection, especially when the caregiving is underscored, as it is among intimates, by loving endearments [애정을 담은 말].

In our society, women in most social locations stand under an imperative to provide emotional service to men, and many chafe [짜증내다] at the failure of men to provide such service in return. Lillian Rubin's sensitive study of working-class marriage, Worlds of Pain (1976), reveals that issues of relationship and intimacy, once thought to be the province of the middle class, have now spread to other socioeconomic groups as well. The wives in Rubin's study complain of the emotional unavailability of their men in tones not very different than those sounded by the professional therapists who write popular psychology relationship manuals for a middle-class audience. Such complaints are strikingly absent from what was for years the landmark study of working-class couples, Mirra Komarovsky's Blue-Collar Marriage (1962). With increasing geographic mobility, the erosion of older working-class communities and of the networks of kin they once housed, working-class couples are thrown increasingly onto their own emotional resources; these circumstances, as well as the powerful cultural influence of middle-class values and styles of life, combine to bring forth new demands and, with them, new discontents [불만].

Black women have come under particular attack for an alleged deficiency of "female tenderness." Some black men have laid part of their troubles at the door of the black woman: She is too critical, too aggressive, too hard, a castrator [거세하는 사람] who not only fails to "stand behind her man" but actively undermines him. These charges, fueled by the relative economic independence of the black woman, became particularly virulent [매서운] during the emergence, in the late sixties, of the Black Power movement and of various black nationalist and separatist movements; this led to an extended and acrimonious [험악한] discussion among politically conscious black women and men. Though far poorer overall than white women, black women as a group tend to be less economically dependent on black men than white women are on white men and more likely to be heads of their own households. This absence of dependency often bespeaks [보여주다]] hardship [어려움], tied as it is to black men's poverty and to the material deprivation of whole communities, but it translates too into female self-assertion and a refusal to submit to domestic tyranny [압제, 독재].

 

The common and continuing complaints about black female assertion suggest that once again, the style and values of the white middle class are trend setting for American society as a whole. The fact that her behavior was condemned for its alleged failure to conform to the norms of the oppressor was an irony not lost on the black woman. [104]

Emotional caregiving can be done as an expression of love or friendship. It can also be done for pay as part of one's job. Either way, it involves the same two elements-the feeding of egos and the nursing of wounds. But commercial caregiving can differ significantly from the deeper connections between intimates. In a detailed study of the emotional work done by flight attendants, Arlie Hochschild has given a fine account of the "commercialization of human feeling." These mostly female workers are paid to generate commercial affection for passengers: to smile steadily and to lay down around themselves an atmosphere of warmth, cheerfulness, and friendly attention. A relentless cheerfulness would be difficult enough to sustain under any circumstances, but it has become even harder with the speed-up associated with airline deregulation [규제해제]. Not only must the attendant's emotional care be expended on many more passengers per flight, but the passengers themselves are often stressed, feeling the effects of longer lines, lost baggage, and late flights.

Attendants must manage not only their passengers' feelings, but their own as well: They must work to "induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.'" Work it is too, for "to show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly." A commercial logic penetrates "deeper and deeper into what we used to think of as a private, psychological, sacred part of a person's self and soul. " What often results is a flight attendant's feeling of falseness or emptiness, an estrangement [별거, 소원] from her own feeling self, even a confusion as to what or whether she is feeling anything at all. The flight attendant's sense of inauthenticity, worsened by the physical and psychological effects of speed-up generally, can contribute to depression, insomnia, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Under such conditions, the provision of emotional service can be disempowering indeed.

But the emotional sustenance women give men in relationships of intimacy resembles commercial caregiving only very superficially. True, the flight attendant, like the good wife, must feed egos and heal wounds; she is supposed to make every passenger feel wanted and important and to deal with whatever distress is occasioned by the stresses of travel. But the one relationship is casual and brief, the other more enduring and profound. Intimate relationships require more complex sensitivities and engage more aspects of the self. The woman in intimacy feels deep affection for the one she supports; she is sincere and heartfelt in providing what she provides; she loses herself, so to speak, in her work. Of course, caregiving in intimate relationships can sometimes come to feel just as mechanical as it does for the flight attendant in speed-up, a performance from which the woman herself feels increasingly remote. But intimate relationships in which this happens are surely in trouble; indeed, any relationship in which this occurs consistently hardly qualifies as an intimate relationship at all. Now one can well understand how the routine emotion work offlight attendants may become disempowering, leading as it often does to self-estrangement, an inability to identify one's own emotional states, even to drug abuse or alcoholism. But how can the provision of affectionate regard and the sympathetic tending of psychic wounds-activities that require the exercise of such virtues as loving kindness and compassion-be disempowering too? Surely, the opportunity to attend to the Other in these ways must be morally empowering for it gives us the chance not merely to be good by doing good, but to become morally better through the cultivation and exercise of important moral qualities. And are we not privileged, too, in being allowed entree into the deepest psychological recesses of another, in being released, if only temporarily, from the burden of isolation and loneliness that each of us must bear? The claim that women in intimacy are disempowered in their provision of emotional support to men may begin to seem not merely mistaken, but perverse [비뚤어진]. But let us look more closely.

 

3

A number of feminist theorists have treated women's unequal provision of emotional caregiving to men as a zero-sum game: Men, they assume are empowered and women disempowered in proportion to the immediate emotional benefits-the feeding of egos, the tending of wounds-that men gain from an emotional service they do not fully reciprocate. Metaphors of filling and emptying are often used to describe this state of affairs: Women fill men with our energies; this filling strengthens men and depletes [대폭 감소시키다] ourselves. Moreover, the psychic benefits men gain from women's caregiving make them fitter to rule; in dispensing these benefits, women only make themselves fitter to obey. There is no quarreling with the claim that men as a group receive direct psychological benefits from women's emotional sustenance: This seems obvious. But in my view, this standard view errs [실수를 범하다] on two counts.

① First, I suspect that many feminist thinkers overestimate the efficacy of female nurturance. I shall pursue the question of the extent and effect of female emotional support in the balance of this section.

② Second, I believe that the standard view underestimates the subjectively disempowering effects of unreciprocated caregiving on women themselves, quite apart from the question how and to what extent men may be psychologically empowered by receiving it. It may be the case that women's nurturance is not a zero-sum game, i. e., that, in many circumstances, women may disempower themselves more in the giving of emotional support than men are empowered in the getting of it. I shall examine the question of women's subjective disempowerment in Sections IV and V below.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is "the safety valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up [강화하다, 떠받치다] the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions' it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self-sufficient, in command at all times.

Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptably high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another.

 

Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally. [106]

 

Does this theory, the "safety-valve" theory of female nurturance, pinpoint what is chiefly disempowering about the unbalanced provision of emotional sustenance? How persuasive is it anyhow?

 Hegel says that no man may be a hero to his valet. Surely, though, many men are heroes to their wives. But consider the following: ① While it is good to have one's importance affirmed, even by an underling [아랫사람], how valuable is it, in the last analysis, when such affirmation issues from one's social inferior? "Praise from Caesar is praise indeed"-but she isn't Caesar. Women, after all, are out of the action: Typically, we lack standing in the world. We have too little prestige ourselves to be a source of much prestige for men. Most men look to other men for the determination of their status and for an affirmation of personal worth that really counts. When such affirmation is not forthcoming, the tender concern of women must offer some consolation [위안], but how much?

Moreover, we must remember that ② men are able to do without the emotional support of women for long periods of time, in prison, for example, or in the army. In an absorbing study of the current social and psychological dimensions of friendship, Lillian Rubin claims that even though men's relationships with other men do not typically exhibit the marks of intimacy-for her, verbal disclosure of feeling and significant emotional display-men are able nonetheless to bond with other men and that this bonding, in its own way, can become a significant source of emotional support. Men, she says,

can live quite robustly without intimacy-an emotional connection that ties two people together in important and powerful ways. At the most general level, the shared experience of maleness-o fknowing its differences from femaleness, of affirming those differences through an intuitive understanding of each other that needs no words-undoubtedly creates a bond between men. It's often a primitive bond, a sense of brotherhood that may be dimly [어둑하게] understood, one that lives side by side with the more easily observable competitive strain that exists in their relations as well.

Competition among men may not only not be a source of male emotional distress that requires female caregiving to "bind" its potentially destabilizing effects, but may itself be a powerful impetus to male bonding and a profound source of male self-esteem. One of her respondents has this to say about competition: "It's not that I don't feel comfortable with women, but I enjoy men in a special way. I enjoy competing with men. I don't like to compete with women: there's no fun in it." When Rubin asks him what precisely he enjoys about competition, here is his reply:

(Laughing) Only a woman would ask that. (Then more seriously) It's hard to put into words. I can strut my stuff, let myself go all the way. I really get off on that; its exciting. It doesn't make much difference whether it's some sport or getting an account, I'm playing to win. I can show offjust how good I am.

I am concerned in this paper with men who are capable of accepting emotional sustenance from women but who do not return what they are given. Now the best-sellers I referred to earlier complain, to be sure, of inequalities in the provision of emotional suport, but they are much more exercized about men's emotional anemia-men's inexpressiveness and fear of self-disclosure, in a word, their refusal even to accept sustenance from their women. And this makes sense: Tough guys, confined since childhood to a narrow range of acceptable masculine emotion, cannot easily become emotionally expressive-even with a woman. But perhaps this way of formulating the situation is misleading, suggesting as it does a dualism of appearance and reality-the appearance of invulnerability without, the reality of a rich, suffering, and needy emotional life within. It is likelier that a taboo on the display of some emotion acts in effect as a refusal of permission to oneself even to feel it. ③ Thus, there appear to be psychological mechanisms in men that tend, quite independently of female emotional nurturance, to "cool out" such potentially destabilizing emotions as resentment, grief, or frustration. Even if we assume that such emotions have not been anaesthetized [마비], but are only simmering below the surface of a man incapable of sharing them with a woman, there is no evidence that emotionally inexpressive men are more rebellious than their less repressed counterparts. All kinds of men are rebels, the expressive and the inexpressive alike, men who take emotional sustenance from women without recompense [보상], even the minority of men who know how to return what they are given. Nor is there evidence that in periods of political ferment [소요], widespread resistance on the part of men to given conditions is correlated in any way with a breakdown or diminution in the provision of female nurturance-a correlation that the "safety-valve" theory would seem to suggest.

The better mental and physical health of married men is often cited as evidence that men receive very significant benefits from women's emotional care giving. It has been assumed that the emotional support men receive from their wives may explain why married men live longer than single men and why they score lower on standard indices of psychopathology. But even here, some scepticism may be in order. The greater longevity of married men, for example, may be due as much to better physical care (regular meals, better nutrition, more urging from the wife to seek medical help) as to wives' provision of emotional care. Moreover, it isn't clear whether the superior mental health of married men is due to female emotional caretaking or whether marriage as an institution selects men who are sufficiently stable to receive these benefits in the first place. And even in relationships of some duration, there are tragic cases in which every resource of a woman's loving attention is ineffective against what are arguably the effects of the stressful circumstances ofher man's life-alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, or suicide. Contemplation of the scale on which these tragedies are repeated may generate, again, some scepticism as to the efficacy of female emotional sustenance.

All these considerations, I think, tell somewhat against the "safety-valve" theory of female caregiving. While there is no doubt that men receive benefits from women's provision of emotional sustenance, and while it is conceivable that this sustenance may to some extent keep the lid [뚜껑] on male discontent, these effects may be neither as extensive nor as significant as the safety-valve theory suggests.

I think it unlikely that women's disempowerment stands in any very direct proportion either to the concrete emotional benefits that men receive from our emotional labor, or to whatever stabilization men's psychological repair may lend to an oppressive political and economic system. I suggest instead that we look for a disempowerment that is more subtle and oblique, one that is rooted in the subjective and deeply interiorized [내면화된] effects upon women ourselves both of the emotional care we give and of the care we fail to get in return. [108-109]

 

4

Love, affection, and the affectionate dispensing of emotional sustenance may seem to be purely private transactions [거래] that have nothing to do with the macrosocial domain of status. But this is false. Sociologist Theodore Kemper maintains that "a love relationship is one in which at least one actor gives (or is prepared to give) extremely high status to another actor." "Status accord" he defines as "the voluntary compliance with the needs, wishes or interests of the other." Now insofar as women's provision of emotional sustenance is a species of compliance with the needs, wishes and interests of men, such provision can be understood as a conferral of status, a paying of homage [경의] by the female to the male. Consider once again the bodily displays that are typical of women's intimate caregiving: the sympathetic cocking of the head; the forward inclination of the body; the frequent smiling; the urging, through appropriate vocalizations, that the man continue his recital [장황한 설명], hence, that he may continue to commandeer [징발하다] the woman's time and attention. I find it suggestive that these behaviors are identical to common forms of deference [존중] display in hierarchies of status. But status is not accorded mutually: Insofar as the emotional exchanges in question are contained within a gendered division of emotional labor that does not require of men what it requires of women, our caregiving, in effect, is a collective genuflection [무릎꿇기] by women to men, an affirmation of male importance that is unreciprocated. The consistent giving of what we don't get in return is a performative acknowledgement of male supremacy and thus a contribution to our own social demotion [좌천, 강등, 격하]. The implications of this collective bending of the knee, however, rarely enter consciousness. The very sincerity and quality of heartfelt concern that the woman brings to her man's emotional needs serves to reinforce in her own mind the importance of his little dramas of daily life. But he receives her attention as a kind of entitlement; by failing to attend to her in the same way she attends to him, he confirms for her and, just as importantly, for himself, her inferior position in the hierarchy of gender.

Women do not expect mutual recognition from the children we nurture, especially when these children are very young, but given the companionate ideal that now holds sway, we yearn [갈망하다, 동경하다] for such recognition from the men with whom we are intimate. Its withholding is painful, especially so since in the larger society it is men and not women who have the power to give or to withhold social recognition generally. Wishing that he would notice; waiting for him to ask: how familiar this is to women, how like waiting for a sovereign to notice a subject, or a rich man, a beggar. Indeed, we sometimes find our selves begging for his attention-and few things are as disempowering as having to beg.

Women have responded in a number of ways to men's refusal of recognition. A woman may merge with her man psychologically to such an extent that she just claims as her own the joys and sorrows he narrates on occasions of caretaking. She now no longer needs to resent his indifference to her doings, for his doings have just become her doings. After eight years of seeing it, we recall the picture easily: Ronald Reagan at the podium, Nancy, a bit behind her husband, fixing upon him a trancelike gaze of total admiration and utter absorption. Here is the perfect visual icon of the attempt to merge one's consciousness with the consciousness ofthe Other.

Psychologists such as Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein have maintained that the relational style of women in matters of feeling and our more "permeable ego boundaries" are due to the fact that girls, unlike boys, are not required to sever [자르다] in the same way their original identification with the maternal caretaker. If this is true, the phenomenon that I am describing may be "overdetermined" by psychological factors. Nevertheless, it is worth asking to what extent the merging of the consciousness of the woman with the object of her emotional care may be a strategy adopted in adult life to avoid anger and the disruption of relationship, effects that might otherwise follow upon the refusal of recognition. Moreover, the successful provision of intimate caregiving itself requires a certain loss of oneself in the Other, whatever the infantile [어린애같은] determinants of such merger and whatever the utility such merging may have in the management of anger or resentment. I shall return to this point later.

Women sometimes demand the performance of ritualized gestures of concern from men-the remembering of a birthday or anniversary, a Valentine's Day card-as signs of a male caring that appears to be absent from the transactions of everyday life. The ferocity [흉포함] with which women insist on these ritual observances is a measure, I believe, of our sense of deprivation. If the man forgets, and his forgetting issues in the absence of some object-a present, a Valentine that cultural rituals have defined as visible and material symbols of esteem, a lack felt privately may be turned into a public affront [모욕]. Women's preoccupation with such things, in the absence of an understanding of what this preoccupation means, has gained us a reputation for capriciousness and superficiality, a reputation that in itselfis disempowering. "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" sings the exasperated Prof. Henry Higgins. "If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss? / ... Why can't a woman be like us?"

Neither of these strategies-minimalism or merger-really works. The woman who accepts a ritualized gesture, performed at most a few times a year and often very perfunctorily [아무렇게나, 형식적으로], in exchange for the devoted caregiving she provides her man all the time, has made a bad bargain indeed, while the psychological overidentification I describe here is grounded in a self-deceived attempt to deny pain and to avoid the consequences of anger. To attempt such merger is to practice magic or to have a try at self hypnosis. A woman who is economically dependent on a man may find it natural to identify with his interests; in addition to the kind of merging I have described, such dependency itsel ffeeds a tendency to overidentification. But given the generally fragile character of relationships today, the frequency of divorce, and the conflicts that arise even within ongoing relationships, prudence [신중함] requires that a woman regard the coincidence of her interests with those of her partner as if they were merely temporary.

 

5

 

In this section, I shall argue that women run a risk that our unreciprocated caregiving may become both epistemically and ethically disempowering. In the course of her caretaking, a woman may be tempted to adopt morally questionable attitudes and standards of behavior or she may ② fall prey to a number of false beliefs that tend to mystify [혼란스럽게 만들다] her circumstances. [111]

 

First of all, there is the epistemic risk, i. e., the risk that the woman will accept uncritically "the world according to him" and that she will have corresponding difficulty in the construction of the world according to herself. How does this happen? To support and succor [구조하다] a person is, typically, to enter feelingly into that person's world; it is to see things from his point ofview, to enter imaginatively into what he takes to be real and true. Nel Noddings expresses it well: To adopt a caring attitude toward another is to become "engrossed [몰두한]" in that other: it is "a displacement of interest from my own reality to the reality of the other," whereby "I set aside [한쪽으로 치워두다] my temptation to analyze and to plan. I do not project; I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other." Hence, caring "involves stepping out of one's own personal frame of reference into the other's." Here is merger of another sort, one not motivated by a failure of recognition but by the very character of emotional caregiving itself.

Now a woman need not merge epistemically with the man she is sustaining on every occasion of caregiving; there are times when she will reject his version of things, either to his face or to herself. But if a caregiver begins consistently to question the values and beliefs of the one to whom she is supposed to be offering sustenance, her caregiving will suffer.

She is caught in the following paradox: If she keeps her doubts to herself, she runs the risk of developing that sense of distance and falseness that, as we saw earlier, is a major mark of alienated caregiving in commercial settings.

If she articulates her doubts, again consistently, likely as not she will be seen as rejecting or even disloyal. Either way, her relationship will suffer.

Professional therapists are required to develop a "hermeneutic of suspicion"; our intimates are not. We have the eminently reasonable expectation that our friends and intimates will support our struggles and share our allegiances [충성도], rejoice [크게 기뻐하다] in our victories and mourn our defeats, in a word, that they will see things-at least the big things in our lives-as we see them. And so, an "epistemic lean" in the direction of the object of her solicitude [배려] is part of the caregiver's job-of any caregiver's job-it comes, so to speak, with the territory.

"The world according to him": This is that ensemble [총체] of meanings that reflect a man's more privileged location in the social totality. Now the antagonism [적대감] between men and women is only part of the complex system of antagonisms that structure the social order. Hence, there will be many occasions on which his version of things will be the same as her own best version, his picture of things as much a reflection of her interests as his own. For example, black women and men who struggle in common against racism must share, in large measure, an understanding of the society in which their struggle takes place. But unless we posit a general identity of interest between men and women, there will be occasions, indeed countless occasions, on which a man's version of what is real and true will reflect his more privileged social location, not hers.

We know from a variety of sources that women in our society lack epistemic authority. The lack has many causes, not the least of which is the historic male monopoly of the means of social interpretation and communication, a monopoly that has only recently been challenged.

 

We typically construe women's assimilation of masculinist ideology in too mechanical and intellectualist a fashion: My stified and distorted ideas, we think, are transmitted from one location-say, the church or school-and received in another, the woman's mind. What is absent from this picture is women's own active role in the assimilation of men's ideas, our empathic, imaginative, and affective interiorization of a masculine perspective. Since we are dealing, once again, with a clear sexual division of labor, there is no corresponding affirmation, in intimacy, of the world according to her.

 

There is then, a risk for women's epistemic development in our unreciprocated caregiving. What are its risks for our ethical life? Hegel claimed that women's ethical perfectability lay in the family, a position that has been echoed by recent conservative Christian writers. With more perspicacity [통찰력], John Stuart Mill pointed to the patriarchal family as a source of moral corruption for both men and women: He saw lying, hypocrisy, and self-abasement [실추, 굴욕] as the principal dangers for women. Mill's discussion of these dangers is unsurpassed. But I point to another danger still, one that involves neither lying nor self-abasement, one that arises from the sort of heartfelt and committed caregiving that is situated at the farthest reach from hypocrisy.

To affirm a man's sense of reality is at the same time to affirm his values. "Stand by your man": What else can this mean? Recall that male psychologists Cowan and Kinder (Smart Women, Foolish Choices) did not ask for high ethical principles in a woman, much less for ethical strenuousness [분투], but for "female tenderness." Tenderness requires compassion and forgiveness, clearly virtues under some circumstances and certainly excellences in a caregiver. But there are situations in which virtues such as forgiveness lead to moral blindness or outright complicity [완전한 공모]:

Behind every great man is a woman, we say, but behind every monster there is a woman too, behind each of those countless men who stood astride [양쪽으로 다리를 벌리고] their narrow worlds and crushed other human beings, causing them hideous [흉측한] suffering and pain. There she is in the shadows, a vague female silhouette, tenderly wiping blood from their hands.

This is vividly expressed, understandingly so, since it appears in a discussion of Teresa Stangl, wife of Fritz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka. Teresa, anti Nazi and a devout Catholic, was appalled by [끔찍해하는] what she knew of her husband's work; nevertheless, she maintained home and hearth as a safe harbor to which he returned when he could; she "stood behind her man." Few of us would take female tenderness to these lengths, but many of us, I suspect, have been morally silenced or morally compromised in small ways because we thought it more important to provide emotional support than to keep faith with our own principles. In such a situation, there is still a felt tension between our own commitments and what we find it prudent to express. More corrosive is a danger that inheres in the very nature of intimate caregiving-the danger of an "ethical lean" that, like the epistemic lean I mentioned earlier, may rob the caregiver herself of a place to stand.

The emotional caregiving provided by the "good wife" or her equivalent is similar in some ways to that furnished by the "goodmother." But it is importantly different as well. Insofar as a mother is interested in the preservation, growth, and social acceptability of her child, she must be attentive [주의를 기울이는] to the child's moral development; she must, on occasion, show herself capable of "shaping a child according to moral restraints [억제법]." But a woman's adult partner is not a child, no matter how childishly he may behave; she will be judged by society more for her loyalty than for his morality. A husband-or lover-does not want and will not easily tolerate ethical training from his wife; what he wants instead is her approval and acceptance. William James expressed it most candidly: What the "average American" wants is a wife who will provide him with a tranquil [고요한, 평온한] spot where he shall be valid absolutely and once for all; where, having been accepted, he is secure from further criticism, and where his good aspirations [열망] may be respected no less than if they were accomplished realities.

Women as well as men seek succor and repair in the sphere of intimacy, a "haven in a heartless world" where the damage that has been sustained else where can be repaired. But here, as elsewhere, men's needs are not only likelier to be satisfied than women's needs but satisfied at women's expense.

 

The epistemic and ethical dangers that, if I am correct, inhere in the heartfelt and success ful provision of emotional sustenance in intimacy are borne disproportionately by women. Men get the benefits; women run the risks. [113]

 

6

Disempowerment, then, may be inscribed in the more prominent features of women's unreciprocated caregiving: in the accord of status and the paying of homage [경의]; in the scarcely perceptible ethical and epistemic "leaning" into the reality of one who stands higher in the hierarchy of gender. But this is only part of the story. In this section I want to identify some countertendencies, ways in which women's provision of emotional sustenance to men may feel empowering and hence contradict, on a purely phenomenal level, what may be its objectively disempowering character.

Tending to wounds: this is a large part of what it is to provide someone with emotional support. But this means that in one standard scenario of heterosexual intimacy, the man appears to his female caregiver as vulnerable and injured. Fear and insecurity: for many men, these are the offstage companions of competitive displays of masculinity, and they are aspects of men's lives that women know well. To the woman who tends him, this fellow is not only no colossus [거인] who bestrides [다리를 벌리고 앉다] the world, but he may bear little resemblance to the patriarchal oppressor of feminist theory. The man may indeed belong to a more powerful caste [카스트]; no matter, this isn't what he seems to her at the moment. One imagines Frau Stangl's tender clucks of sympathy as the harried Fritz rehearses, greatly edited, the trials and tribulations [갖가지 고난] of his day at work: How put upon he is from above and below, how he suffers!

Why isn't every woman a feminist? (See Chapter 5 above.) Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is abstract, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is concrete: His hurts are real, his fears palpable [감지할 수 있는, 손에 만져질듯한]. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has "false consciousness," but because this is what the work requires. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir [저장고] of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is a further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: In such a such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude [공모하다] in her own ill-treatment.

Foucault has claimed that the practice of confession is disempowering to the one who confesses. Confession, as it is practiced in psychoanalysis or religion, is designed to lead the one confessing into the heart of a presumed "true" or "real" self, which he is ever after obligated to claim as his own. But there is no such self: The idea of such a self, says Foucault, is an illusion, a mere device whereby norms are inscribed in the one confessing that secure his subordination to the locus of power represented by the confessor. But here is a counterexample to Foucault's claim: In the case of heterosexual intimacy, confession is disempowering not to the man who confesses but to the woman who hears this confession. How so? The woman is not the agent of any institutional power. She has no authority either to exact penance [속죄] or to interpret the situation according to norms that could, in effect, increase the prestige of the institution she represents, hence her own prestige. Indeed, the exigencies [긴급사태] of female tenderness are such as virtually to guarantee the man's absolution [면죄] by the woman-not on her terms, but on his. Moreover, the man's confession of fear or failure tends to mystify the woman's understanding not only of the power dimensions ofthe relationship between herself and this particular man, but of the relations of power between men and women in general.

An apparent reversal has taken place: The man, her superior in the hierarchy of gender, now appears before the woman as the weaker before the stronger, the patient before his nurse. A source within the woman has been tapped and she feels flowing outward from herself a great power of healing and making whole. She imagines herself to be a great reservoir of restorative [원기를 회복하는] power. This feeling of power gives her a sense of agency and of personal efficacy that she may get nowhere else. We read that one of Kafka's mistresses, Milena Jesenka, "believed she could cure Kafka of all his ills and give him a sense of well being simply by her presence-ifonly he wanted it.'

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the u.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand-"the power of love"-is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person.

Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some ways and diminished in others (see Chapter 6, p. 94), this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emo tional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substan tially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her the feeling that a mighty power resides within her being.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is riot thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished [포기되다]. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude [서고] in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place ofthe effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.

Finally, a footnote to this discussion of the subjective gratifications [기대효용] of care giving: In the tending of wounds, is there sometimes an unacknowledged Schadenfreude-a pleasure in the contemplation of another's distress-in the sight of the master laid so low? It may or may not be this man to whom she is forced to submit, but his vulnerability and dependency may in some sense represent for her the demotion of all men and she may find this symbolic demotion gratifying. Since there is no requirement that our emotional lives exhibit consistency, a mild, quite compensatory Schadenfreude may coexist with the most beneficent of motives. But the pleasures of revenge, like the pleasures of merger and self-loss, need to be foregone.

In the provision of emotional sustenance, then, as in the processes of narcissistic self-intoxication, conventional femininity reveals itself as profoundly seductive. (See Chapter 3 above.) Here, as in other aspects of our lives, we are offered real and gratifying feminine satisfactions in return for what this same femininity requires that we renounce. Until alternative sources of gratification can be found, such pleasures may be indeed difficult to renounce.

 

7

Some concluding observations are now in order. We may think of relationships of emotional support as lying along a continuum. At one end are the perfunctory [형식적인] and routinized relationships of commercial caregiving in which the caregiver feels no genuine concern for the object of her attention and where, in the worst case, the doing of her job requires that she manipulate, suppress and falsify her own feeling life. At the other end of the continuum lies the caregiving of absolute sincerity; here there is neither an awareness of ulterior [이면의, 숨은] motive on the part of the caregiver nor any inner reservation that might compromise the total partisanship and wholehearted acceptance she directs toward the object of her solicitude. Most provisions of emotional support fall somewhere in between.

I have chosen to focus on caregiving of the latter kind because I think that its risks have not been fully appreciated and because in most kinds of noncommercial caregiving we take this kind as a norm; we measure ourselves by it and blame ourselves when we fall short. It is sobering to consider the extent to which the Victorian ideal of woman as "angel in the house" has survived even into the era of so-called postfeminism. The dispensing of "female tenderness"-by no means coupled with "unadulterated power"-is still seen, even by writers who declare themselves sympathetic to the aims of the women's movement, as crucial to the manifestation and enactment of femininity.

In regard to the dispensing of female tenderness, the claims of feminist theorists such as Ferguson have been vindicated. Women run real risks of exploitation in the transactions of heterosexual caregiving, indeed, of exploitation in the Marxist sense that Ferguson intends.

 

All too frequently, women's caregiving involves an unequal exchange in which one party to this exchange is disempowered by the particular inequalities that characterize the exchange itself. This disempowerment, I have argued, lies in women's active and affective assimilation of the world according to men; it lies too in certain satisfactions of care giving that serve to mystify our situation still further. Such disempowerment, like the disempowerment ofthe wage worker, may be described as a species of alienation, i.e., as a prohibition on the development and exercise of capacities, the exercise of which is thought essential to a fully human existence (see Chapter 3). [117]

 

The capacity most at risk here is not, as in the traditional Marxist theory of alienation, the capacity for creative labor; rather, it is the capacity, free from the subtle manipulation of consent, to construct an ethical and epistemic stand point of one's own. Hence, Marxist categories of analysis-categories that have to do with exploitation, alienation, and the organization of the labor process are by no means irrelevant to women's experience or, as some postmodernist feminists have maintained, do they invariably distort the nature of this experience. Quite the contrary: Marxist questions, if we know how to follow out their answers, can lead us into the heart of female subjectivity.

Many feminist theorists have characterized this disempowerment in metaphors of filling and emptying: Women fill men with their energies, thereby strengthening them and depleting ourselves. I have argued not that there is no depletion, but that this depletion is to be measured not only in an increase of male energies, or-as the safety-valve theory maintains-in a reduction in male tensions, but in subtle affective and ideational [관념적인] changes in women ourselves that, taken in toto [완전히, 모두 포함해서], tend to keep us in a position of subservience [복종].

Conservatives argue, in essence, that women's caregiving may be properly exchanged for men's economic support. This view is not defensible. The classic bargain so lauded by conservatives-economic support in return for domestic and emotional labor-has broken down under the weight of economic necessity. Many millions of women must work outside the home. The continuing need of these women for men's economic patronage is a measure of the undervaluation of women's labor in the waged sector. To their superexploitation at work is added a disproportionate share of domestic labor, childcare, and emotional labor; women in this situation are quadruply exploited. Nor should we forget the growing number of single women, some single mothers as well, who give emotional support to men in relationships of shorter or longer duration, but receive absolutely no economic recompense at all. But even in the dwindling number of cases in which men are willing and able to offer economic patronage to women, it would be difficult to show how such support could compensate a woman for the epistemic decentering, ethical damage, and general mystification that put us at risk in unreciprocated caregiving.

Recently, conservatives have been joined by a number of feminist theorists in the celebration of female nurturance. The motives of these thinkers differ:

① Conservatives extol traditional female virtues in the context of a larger defense of the sexual status quo [현재의 상황];

② feminist theorists, especially those who are drawn to the idea of an "ethics of care" based on women's traditional nurturant activities, want to raise women's status by properly valuing our emotional work and to see this quality of caring extended to the formal domains of commerce and politics. I applaud these aims. However, many feminist thinkers who extol women's nurturance, like most conservatives, have just ignored the possibility that women may suffer moral damage in the doing of emotional labor. Clearly, the development of any ethics of care needs to be augmented by a careful analysis of the pitfalls [위험] and temptations of caregiving itself.

It may be true as feminist object relations theorists claim, that in the course of individuation, women have less need than men to sever our primary attachment to the maternal caretaker; this may account for our more "permeable" ego-boundaries and the relatively greater importance of attachment and relationship in our lives. But this is only part of the story. The exigencies of female psychological development alone are not responsible for our greater propensity to offer succor and support. Feminist object-relations theory, like a feminist ethics of care, stands in need of an analysis of the subjective effects of the labor we perform on a daily basis-including our emotional labor-and of the ways in which this labor structures the subjectivity both of those who perform it and of those whom it serves.

Female subjectivity is constructed through a continuous process, a personal ,'engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world": A case in point is the discourse and practice ofcaregiving in heterosexual intimacy and the institu tion of domesticity (or its equivalent) that contains it. Insofar as we want to change ourselves and our lives, it is far easier to imagine, indeed, to enact changes in the way we accord status and in the kind oflabor we perform on a daily basis than to undertake the restructuring ofour basic patterns ofpsycholog ical response. I am not suggesting that such a restructuring is impossible or that we should not support radical changes in the organization of early infant care, such as coparenting, that might help to develop similar patterns of relationality in men and women.  My point is a familiar one: In order to develop an effective politics of everyday life, we need to understand better than we do now not only the processes of personality development, but the "micropolitics" of our most ordinary transactions, the ways in which we inscribe and reinscribe our subjection in the fabric [기본구조] of the ordinary. The most prominent features and many of the subjective effects of this inscription can be grasped independently of any particular theory of personality formation. We need to locate our subordination not only in the hidden recesses of the psyche but in the duties we are happy to perform and in what we thought were the innocent pleasures of everyday life.

 

See the epigram by Firestone, a central figure in radical feminism and second-wave feminism.

"Our caregiving, in effect, is a collective genuflection by women to men, an affirmation of male importance that is unreciprocated. The consistent giving of what we don't get in a return is a performative acknowledgement of male supremacy and thus a contribution to our own social demotion." (109)
"Status accord": the voluntary compliance with needs, wishes or interests of the other Sociologist Theodore Kemper, in Bartky 1990 [109]
Bartky identifies women's emotional caregiving with conferring status.

which women?
the style and values of the white middle class are trend setting for American society as a whole (104)
Emotional caregiving consists in feeding egos and tending wounds
1. Feeding egos: conversational cheerleeding
2. Tending of wounds: emotional healing
Ann Ferguson's view:

Sex-affective production paralles commodity production. Women's emotional labor is a form of exploitation. A's profiting from his relation to B involves substantial damage to B's interests [101]

Women produce more of a good than they receive in return. Their exploitation is analogous to the exploitation Marxists identity. In addition to an unequal exchange, capitalists exploit workers becuase the arrangement is meant to bring about the systematic disempowerment of the worker.

Sex-affective production yields four goods:
1. Domestic maintenance
2. children
3. nurturance
4. sexuality
Joel Feinberg on exploitation: "an interpersonal relationship that involves one party profiting from his relation to another party by somehow taking advantage of some characteristic of B's or some feature of B's circumstances" (100) B's interests need no be harmed E.g. harmless parasitism

According to Feinberg's account of exploitation, it need not be the case that interests are harmed or rights are violated. He includes harmelss parasitism as a form of exploitation.
Two Challenges to Ferguson's claim that women's emotional labor is a form of exploitation: 

1. Conservatives reject it. They say there is an exchange of equivalent value in a traditional division of labor. He brings home the money.
a. Bartky's response is on [117]: the view is not defensible because so many women work outside the home.

2. Even if it is unequal, are women really harmed? Maybe attending to another person is an opportunity to cultivate one's morality, particularly when you truly care about that person [105]
Bartky is skeptical that worker exploitation is parallel to the exploitation of women in the family because it would require showing that there is no exchange of some compensatory good.
Bartky's main question: Is the unreciprocated provision of emotional sustenance-female tenderness...disempowering in and of itself?

Popular psychology in the 90s argued that men provide women with less postive stroking as the provision of emotional sustenance [100]

Man do receive direct psychological benefits from women's unreciprocated emotional caregiving, but (a) a lot of female nurturance is not effective, and (b) it is subjectively disempowering to woman themselves, regardless of what men gain [105]
Status accord: gender as deference displays

The consistent giving of what we don't get in return is a performative acknowledgement of male supremacy and thus a contribution to our own social demotion [109]

The man receives her attention as a kind of entitlement. 
Epistemic lean: 

the main problem: disempowerment that is rooted in the subjective and deeply interiorized effects upon women ourselves, from the emotional care we give and the care we fail to get in return. It is ethically and epistemically disempowering.

An epistemic lean is part of a caregiver's job but it is disempowering.
Safety valve theory: contempory patriarchal society does violence to men, and women's care is a safety valve for the release of emotional tensions.

Physical care and emotional care are separate froms of care [108] Mabye married men live longer because of the physical care, and not due to the emotional care.
Bartky's normative recommendation is to aim for an effective politics of everyday life.

"In order to develop an effective politics of everyday life, we need to understand better than we do now not only the processes of personality development, but the 'micropolitics' of our most ordinary transactions, the ways in which we inscribe and reinscribe our subjection in the fabric of the ordinary." [118-119]