Women's Work
Our tone becomes more positive the next week, for we study "Women's Work." This is something the students can feel proud of. Women may be limited and may not be rewarded well, but the nature and variety of women's work shines through as having great meaning. We read, first, about the "interaction work" women do—the work of making conversations succeed, providing the connective tissue in interpersonal relations, acknowledging others and asking them questions—work that women do for other women and for men, but that men usually do not do in return. In discussing conversations as interaction work, Pamela Fishman presents a sociological idea I find extremely useful for understanding gender, an idea also suggested in some of our other readings: that female characteristics are not the result of biological heredity, nor
of a cultural nature experienced passively, but are, rather, accomplishments. A woman works at being a woman. She learns how to "perform" a female act, often self-consciously and so deeply it seems to be natural. Says Fishman, "the activities involved in displaying femaleness are usually defined as part of what being a woman is, so the idea that it is work is obscured. The work is not seen as what women do, but as part of what they are."[19]
Pamela M. Fishman, "Interaction: The Work Women Do," in Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender and Society (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1983), pp. 89-101. Our other readings dealing with female gender as an "accomplishment" are Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, "Small Insults," see note 9 (and their "Doing Gender," Gender and Society 1:2 [1987]: 125-51); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart, see note 21; and Judith Shapiro, "Transsexualism," see note 27.
Women's language is one form of expressing women's work. Ursula Le Guin speaks of "the mother tongue," the language of housework and daily life in which one thing rushes into another and power and success are not meaningful words. The mother tongue is colloquial, banal, "repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women's work; earthbound, housebound. … It is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways. … Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting."[20]
Ursula LeGuin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address," in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), pp. 147-60.
Along with language, we read about what Arlie Hochschild has called the "emotion work" women do—the work not simply of displaying emotion, such as might occur on the surface in personal relations, but the work on the self behind an emotional display that makes an emotional display convincing. When a woman puts on a smile, acts sympathetically, or, more generally, "plays the woman," she often does deep acting and emotion work. Hochschild studied airline flight attendants and the emotion work they do, especially the work of "enhancing the status and well-being of others." She writes of how women flight attendants work on their emotions to produce the smiles and friendliness of airline service. Although the job description is the same for both genders, women flight attendants do different emotion work than men, both because they receive more abuse—they receive more rude and surly treatment, angry tirades, and blame—and because they have less protection against abuse, having lower status and less of a "status shield" than do men. The women attendants are expected to defer to others and to provide the traditional female services of "loving wife and mother" and "glamorous career woman." Male flight attendants, on the other hand, have more of an "authority shield" protecting them against abuse. A passenger, says Hochschild, may not move her luggage when
asked repeatedly by a woman, but will immediately do so when asked by a man.[21]
Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Gender, Status, and Feeling," in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 162-98.
As we read about the women flight attendants, I encourage the students to see Hochschild's discussion as not only about flight attendants, or about women in stereotypical female service occupations, but about all of us. Some of the students see my point, but many find it hard to identify with the flight attendants. As with Kanter's discussion of secretaries, I sense a wish on the students' parts to be different from these women. They wish to escape traditional definitions of female gender and not to be subservient, which gets in the way of their identifying with other women across status lines.
The economic organization of women's work contributes to the gender distinctions we see. We read next about the difference between "time discipline"—an approach of standardization, unit organization, and wage labor characteristic of industrialism—and "task orientation"—a preindustrial, or more primitive, approach to the organization of work that involves doing many things at once, or "what it takes" to get a job done.[22]
We read Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 58-62; Cott draws on E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-79.
In modern economies, time discipline is associated with men and men's work. A task orientation is more often associated with women and women's work, such as housework and raising children. Sometimes, a task orientation is labeled as superior, such as when men do it (Kanter describes the organization of men at the top as familistic and nonmodern), or when women praise women's work. Le Guin, for example, elevates women's work, referring to 'the art of making order where people live. Housekeeping is an art, so is cooking," she says.[23]Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation, p. 118; Le Guin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address," in Dancing, p. 154.
Yet even when a female orientation is praised, it is hard for me to escape feeling that women's skills are not really valued. In a larger system where advance, and advantage, are measured by conformity to a standardized norm and by time efficiency, women's ways, especially when attached to women, are not, in an economic sense, an advantage.On the other hand, in a different system, within the bounds of a women's world, for instance, there can be a different kind of economy, one with different goods and services and with its own richness. Marjorie DeVault suggests that difference in noting the nonpaid nature of women's work, and the violation of the character of that work that occurs when a dollar value is assigned it, when an attempt is made to translate
into the terms of wage labor the worth of women's "caring work." Women, she says in a study of feeding families, "certainly recognize that feeding a family requires time, effort, and skill. But it is different somehow from paid work." A woman she interviewed tells her, "'I think love has a lot to do with it.'"[24]
Marjorie L. DeVault, "Doing Housework: Feeding and Family Life," in Naomi Gerstel and Harriet Engel Gross, eds., Families and Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), pp. 178-91. A recent work on women's economies, including discussions of lesbian economies, is Loraine Edwalds and Midge Stocker, eds., The Woman-Centered Economy: Ideals, Reality, and the Space In Between (Chicago: Third Side Press, 1995). See also Barbara Brandt, Whole Life Economics: Revaluing Daily Life (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1995); and Sheila Lewenhak, The Revaluation of Women's Work (London: Earthscan Publications, 1992).
Women's leadership is also a form of women's work, as we see in a book titled Feminine Leadership, or How to Succeed in Business without Being One of the Boys . Although I hate the word "feminine" in this book's title and the way that the author views women as incomplete without men, I use Marilyn Loden's advice book because it gives legitimacy to a sense that the students have been feeling increasingly—that women have valuable, even superior, ways of doing things that should be sought after by organizations. For example, says Loden, women often encourage others, rather than trying to control them. Women have a more cooperative management style and teach basic positive values that bring out the best in people.[25]
Marilyn Loden, Feminine Leadership, or How to Succeed in Business without Being One of the Boys (New York: Times Books, 1985); I use especially "Teamwork," pp. 114-32. Similar themes appear in Sally Helgesen, The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1995). See also Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double-Bind: Women and Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) for a literature synthesis.
I find that the students like this advice book, for it talks about leadership (and they want to be leaders, not secretaries), and it makes them feel they can be valued as women in a male world without disrupting that world or changing themselves into men. It makes them feel they can succeed after all. Some of the students become irritated with me at this point, because having assigned a reading they liked, I then say there is something wrong with it.For their research project due at the end of the week, the students examine different types of women's work that interest them—for example, women preparing meals in a kitchen, women administrators working in an office, women on duty in a hospital emergency room, mothers and daughters talking with one another, women cleaning other women's houses, women taking care of other women's children and their own, women managers doing more work to complete a job than men would do because the women see more work as required. As an alternative, the students can study relationships between women, focusing on feelings at deeper emotional levels that are often not spoken of and that are difficult to describe.[26]
The art of studying women's experiences that are difficult to describe is the focus of Marjorie L. DeVault, "Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis," Social Problems 37:1 (1990): 96-116. See also her "Ethnicity and Expertise: Racial-Ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research," Gender and Society 9:5 (1995): 612-31.
To supplement their basic readings and research, the students select additional specialized readings. In one, DeVault discusses how the work women do in planning meals for a family is often invisible, like much
of women's work, because it is embedded in other activities. Hochschild, similarly, speaks of how work like housecleaning is not seen: when the work is done well, it is not noticed. We have several readings about sex work—prostitution, massage, and erotic dancing—that show how women face similar dilemmas in sex work as in other occupations. A massage worker, for instance, discusses the problem of losing a sense of herself because her work is other-oriented and requires denial of self. An erotic dancer discusses how her work provides her with a sense of power and self-esteem, yet it is still based on her subordination to men. Women's work often has that kind of double meaning—it is, at once, a show of strength and of deference, or subordinance. An article on transsexualism discusses the extensive work that goes into "passing" as a woman that is often taken for granted, arguing that gender—a cultural fact—is more fundamental than the biological fact of sex. Much that women do is cultural, yet because it is looked at as natural and biological, it is often underappreciated as work.[27]
The invisibility of women's work is discussed in Marjorie L. DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 56; and in Hochschild, The Managed Heart, p. 167. "Massage work" is discussed in Judy Edelstein, "In the Massage Parlor," in Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, eds., Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1987), pp. 62-69; erotic dancing is the subject of Judy Helfand, "Silence Again," also in Delacoste and Alexander, Sex Work, pp. 266-70. Transsexualism is examined in Judith Shapiro, "Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex," in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 248-79.
One means of countering the devaluation of women's work is through women's workplace networks. A study of Chicana cannery workers by Patricia Zavella describes the informal self-help ties that enable cannery women both to learn skills on the job and to help each other emotionally. However, although the cannery women's networks serve the women, they also serve the cannery company. Says Zavella, "Ironically, women's solidarity sometimes encourages women to bear the negative aspects of their jobs. Women's criticism of work conditions are blunted, for they see work friendships as a way to create a 'family' at work and thus the whole situation seems better."[28]
Patricia Zavella, "'Abnormal Intimacy': The Varying Networks of Chicana Cannery Workers," Feminist Studies 11:3 (1985): 541-57.
When we read about the cannery women's networks, I think of faculty women's networks at universities. These informal networks enable faculty women to help each other and to join in feminist efforts. Yet what Zavella says of the cannery women would also apply—the faculty women's networks bolster the university by making its environment feel more tolerable, at the same time as they support women within it. Even those more independent women's networks considered radical or feminist are, in part, I think, similarly conservative.With completion of the women's work section, we come to the end of the first half of the course. The next week, we will read about women
in the Army, after that about female separatism, feminist processes, and lesbians. I will soon touch on many fears. But, for now, our basic work is done. The students have learned to see women's subordinate status in organizations and to look at how social interactions are affected by gender. I have learned to be sensitive to the students' feelings about what they are studying. When first planning this course, I approached each topic in an intellectual fashion. In teaching it, I have had to realize the highly emotional nature of the subject matter. The students have strong feelings about each topic we discuss, and so do I, and there is often a great difference between our views.
It is frequently said that feminist teaching is preaching to the already convinced. I have not found that to be so. As with any good teaching, feminist teaching seeks to jog and change the mind.[29]
For other works discussing feminist teaching, please see chapter 10, note 9.
In a feminist course, the students are often greatly resistant to learning about gender and the situation of women, indeed far more resistant than they are to learning principles of chemistry. A feminist course, in addition, often seems to have no content, and the teacher to have no expertise, when quite the opposite is true. The content is so vast as to be hard to isolate and the expertise of the teacher lies in combining, at least in my case, a dogmatic stubbornness about the importance of seeing gender with a high sensitivity to the emotional needs of the students. Most courses do not require as much emotional sensitivity, but in a feminist course, both the teacher and the students assume it is extremely important.The students expect the teacher to be careful of their feelings, not to do anything they do not like, and to be an absolutely wonderful person who has triumphed over the difficulties facing women. I have found this a more than challenging task. I have found it is often lonely to be a teacher in a feminist classroom. It requires a great deal of invisible women's work in class sessions in order both to push the students and to care about their fears, for they often feel very strongly that what they are being taught will be the death of them. While I am teaching this course, I try to increase my understanding of my subject, to improve my sense of how to relate to the students' emotions, and to increase my ability to deal with the problem that, given what I am doing, the students will often look at me with suspicion. They will feel that I am not adequately taking care of them, that I am not a good enough mother.
Because such criticism is hurtful and can be undermining, teaching a course like this requires a continuing belief in one's purposes. I have had to sustain such belief during many weeks when the students feel their old moorings failing and, at the same time, grasp for new insights that will help them in the future.
One of the most impressive things for me has been to see how much the students come to my course—as they do to feminist courses generally—wanting a valuable experience, not a throwaway class, and how pleased they can be with themselves, in the end, to find that they now believe much that is the opposite of what they believed before. They truly do wish to learn, although they often object in the process. At this point in the course, the greatest challenge, separatism, is yet to come. But if we were to stop right now, I think that the students would have begun a fundamental process of change in their views.