Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Aliya Hamid Rao |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12385 |
A H R University of Pennsylvania
Stand By Your Man: Wives’ Emotion Work During
Men’s Unemployment
Recent research on unemployment has not
sufciently acknowledged how unemployment
reverberates within families, particularly emo-
tionally. This article uses data from more than
50 in-depth interviews to illuminate the emo-
tional demands that men’s unemployment makes
beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that
wives of unemployed men do two types of emo-
tion work—self-focused and other-focused—and
both are aimed toward facilitating husbands’
success in the emotionally arduous white-collar
job-search process.This article extends research
on emotion work by suggesting that participants
perceive wives’ emotion work as a resource
with potential economic benets in the form of
unemployed men’s reemployment. The ndings
furthermore suggest that as a resource, wives’
emotion work is shaped by the demands of the
labor market that their husbands encounter.
How do unemployed men, in current times of
ubiquitous layoffs, downsizings, and mergers,
experience their unemployment? How do their
wives support them through this challenging
time? Since the Industrial Revolution, unem-
ployment has been its unwelcome byproduct
in societies. Indeed, unemployment, includ-
ing white-collar unemployment, appears to be
becoming a permanent feature of the American
Department of Sociology, Universityof Pennsylvania, 113
McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA
19104 (aliyarao@sas.upenn.edu).
Key Words: dual earner, emotion work, qualitative research,
unemployment.
economic landscape. Social scientists have
focused on the devastating emotional impact
unemployment can have on unemployedindivid-
uals (Ehrenreich, 2005; Norris, 2016; Sharone,
2014; Smith, 2001), how it shapes the identity
of unemployed individuals (Norris, 2016), and
how the material hardships of unemployment
inuence marital dynamics (Conger et al.,
1990; Komarovsky, 1940; Newman, 1988),
particularly unequal gendered dynamics, for
example, by being positively associated with
abusive behavior, including men’s controlling
behavior toward wives (Schneider, Harknett, &
McLanahan, 2016). Despite a wealth of studies
on unemployment, we have surprisingly little
information on the contemporary emotional
experience of unemployment within marriages
and families, particularly in terms of shaping
gendered marital dynamics. This omission
means an incomplete understanding of how
unemployment now shapes, and is shaped by,
marital life.
This article therefore approaches the question
of unemployment and gender in marriages by
examining emotion work. Emotion work is
the emotional effort of aligning reality with
expectations, and within marriages it frequently
serves to maintain normative ideals of gender.
It is “the management of feeling to create a
publicly observable facial and bodily display”
(Hochschild, 2003b, p. 7). Research on emo-
tion work in marriages has shown that spouses
often step in during “unsettled times” (Swidler,
1986), of which unemployment is one, to do
emotion work designed to help their partners
get through emotionally tumultuous periods,
636 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (June 2017): 636–656
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12385
Wives’ Emotion Work During Men’s Unemployment 637
such as gender and sexual transitions (Pfeffer,
2010), physical ill health (Thomeer, Reczek,
& Umberson, 2015), depression (Thomeer,
Umberson, & Pudrovska, 2013), and times of
economic uncertainty (Cooper, 2014). These
studies asserted the importance of gender in
shaping the conguration of emotion work
within families in times of crisis, nding that
wives do much more of the emotion work
during pivotal times than husbands. Never-
theless, we do not yet know the connection
between the experience of unemployment and
emotion work.
Using data collected from 25 middle-class
and upper-middle-class families, this article
extends the concept of emotion work to explain
how wives’ emotion work also frequently func-
tions as a resource with potential economic
benets for husbands. Wives’ emotion work
here is primarily guided by the urge to help their
husbands manage the expectations of the Amer-
ican white-collar job market, which values a
cheerful, condent, and positive presentation of
self (Ehrenreich, 2005; Sharone, 2014; Smith,
2001). As such, these ndings elaborate on
previous research on the increased intrusion of
the marketplace into intimate life (Hochschild,
2003a, 2012) by explaining how the marketplace
shapes marital dynamics around emotion work
during men’s unemployment.
Developing our understanding of the
emotional implications of unemployment is
important because involuntary unemployment
appears to be an enduring aspect of the Ameri-
can economic landscape that a large proportion
of the American population of workers is likely
to experience at least once in their life (Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 2016). Surprising casualties
of these structural economic shifts have been
college-educated, white-collar workers who
are nding out that their educational degrees
no longer afford them the security they pre-
viously enjoyed (Mendenhall, Kalil, Spindel,
& Hart, 2008). College-educated workers now
are more likely than their counterparts in pre-
vious decades to lose jobs (Newman, 2008).
When they do so, they tend to be pushed into
long-term unemployment lasting 27 weeks
or longer (Ilg, 2010) and face steep nancial
penalties, with many earning far less in a job
after unemployment (Newman, 2008).
Starting with the case of male workers
and their wives is important because previous
research suggests that emotion work at home
is gendered (Erickson, 2005), with wives doing
much more emotion work for husbands than
vice versa. Most prior research suggests that
husbands do not do much emotion work for their
wives (Thomeer et al., 2013, 2015), although
others disagree (Minotte, Stevens, Minnotte, &
Kiger, 2007). Starting with unemployed men
is thus likely more fruitful for understanding
emotion work during unemployment.
L R
Unemployment and Emotion Work in Marriages
Recent studies of unemployment have tended
to focus on the impact of unemployment on
individuals and have paid insufcient atten-
tion to how unemployment reverberates within
families, especially in terms of managing
the emotional dimension of unemployment.
Research has found that unemployment is asso-
ciated with a detrimental impact on individual
well-being, particularly for those in the middle
classes (Anderson, 2009), which lasts for several
years even after reemployment (Young, 2012),
and depression, especially for men (Thoits,
1986). In addition, men may also feel anxious
about their masculinity because providing for
their families continues to be framed as partic-
ularly important for men (Conroy-Bass, 2015;
Legerski & Cornwall, 2010; Michniewicz,
Vendello, & Bosson, 2014; Townsend, 2002),
although others disagree (see Lane, 2011).
This is despite a rise of female breadwinners,
stay-at-home dads, and other trends in paid and
unpaid work (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie,
2006; Chesley, 2011; Pew, 2013).
Recent research has suggested that a key
factor that makes unemployment an emotionally
fraught experience for American white-collar
workers is the peculiarity of job searching in the
United States today. The American job-search
process makes extensive emotional demands
on unemployed workers (Ehrenreich, 2005;
Sharone, 2014; Smith, 2001). Unemployed
American, white-collar job seekers strive to
present themselves as friendly, cheerful, and
condent in addition to having the right skills
for the job for which they are applying, even
as they deal with myriad daily professional
rejections (for details on the emotional labor
of the white-collar job-search process in the
United States, see Ehrenreich, 2005, Sharone,
2014, and Smith, 2001). They are advised by
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