Review:: Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward by Gemma Hartley

Goodreads Summary:From Gemma Hartley, the journalist who ignited a national conversation on emotional labor, comes Fed Up, a bold dive into the unpaid, invisible work women have shouldered for too long—and an impassioned vision for creating a better future for us all.
Day in, day out, women anticipate and manage the needs of others. In relationships, we initiate the hard conversations. At home, we shoulder the mental load required to keep our households running. At work, we moderate our tone, explaining patiently and speaking softly. In the world, we step gingerly to keep ourselves safe. We do this largely invisible, draining work whether we want to or not—and we never clock out. No wonder women everywhere are overtaxed, exhausted, and simply fed up.

In her ultra-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up,” shared by millions of readers, Gemma Hartley gave much-needed voice to the frustration and anger experienced by countless women. Now, in Fed Up, Hartley expands outward from the everyday frustrations of performing thankless emotional labor to illuminate how the expectation to do this work in all arenas—private and public—fuels gender inequality, limits our opportunities, steals our time, and adversely affects the quality of our lives.

More than just name the problem, though, Hartley teases apart the cultural messaging that has led us here and asks how we can shift the load. Rejecting easy solutions that don’t ultimately move the needle, Hartley offers a nuanced, insightful guide to striking real balance, for true partnership in every aspect of our lives. Reframing emotional labor not as a problem to be overcome, but as a genderless virtue men and women can all learn to channel in our quest to make a better, more egalitarian world, Fed Up is surprising, intelligent, and empathetic essential reading for every woman who has had enough with feeling fed up.

My Review:
I remember talking to girlfriends when "The Break-Up" with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn came out. We were discussing the scene where Aniston asks her man-child boyfriend Vaughn to help her do the dishes after they have hosted a dinner party (that she cooked and decorated for--but hey he got her 3 lemons!) When Aniston says that she wants him to want to do the dishes and he just can't wrap his mind around that concept, my mind was blown. I thought "YESSSS! This is where the disconnect is!" It's not that a partner won't help when asked but why should they have to be asked? Why are they not aware of the steps that come before an end result? For clothes to appear in a drawer cleaned, for food to appear on a table, for a dinner party to happen, there are massive amounts of tasks which need to be performed.

When I first learned there were terms to define what I couldn't quite put my finger on about relationships, parenting, and domestic equality, I was in two college classes titled "Gender and Work" and "The Commodification of Care." This is where I first learned the terms "second shift," "invisible labor," and "emotional labor". I was a 31-year-old mother and step-mother working a 40+ hour/week retail job and taking a full college course load. Crippling mental to-do lists and endless tasks were part of my daily life and it is not a stretch to say I did everything that related to domestic tasks and parenting in my home on top of being a student and worker. I remember specifically making a list of all the household/family tasks I did on a daily basis to show my husband and asked him to please take something off the list. He chose to pick up his own dry cleaning. Not a huge sacrifice on his part but I'd take it. It was a start. Then I would have to remind him to pick it up. I was still "in charge" of this task because I was the one who was having to remember when it needed done. Like a million other tiny tasks I decided to simply do the damn errand myself. If I asked my husband to do something, he had no problem doing it, but that's exactly the point. Why am I, and millions of (mostly) women, tasked with all of the invisible and emotional labor in a relationship and often in the workforce as well?

In Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, Gemma Hartley expands on her ultra-viral article "Women Aren't Nags--We're Just Fed Up" in Harper's Bazaar. (Read the article HERE) I was once again saying "YESSSS" because I felt like she was able to dive down to the root of the problem with her example of requesting a house cleaning service for Mother's Day. While she definitely wanted the results of a clean house, what she really wanted was for her husband to make the calls, do the comparisons, set up the appointments--all the invisible tasks the lead to the end result.

Betty Friedan brought attention to "the problem with no name" in The Feminine Mystique, but she fell short by not including several demographics, most importantly low-income women and women of color. Hartley does not make this same mistake with her research. She includes a variety of women and men of all income levels, backgrounds, and races. She offers a few examples of the division of emotional labor in non-heterosexual couples and lots of her own personal examples from her marriage. I found a few of the sections a bit repetitive but I think that may have been necessary for a lot of readers who may be coming to the book with no prior knowledge of the concepts discussed. As for recommendations, I started recommending this to everyone I know as soon as I read the first chapter. Married women immediately order it when I tell them what it's about, I tell younger single women to definitely read it to prepare themselves and learn how to explain the concept to their partners (an act of emotional labor in and of itself), I recommend it to men but so far I have yet to hear that any of them have done so.