Arlie Russell Hochschild

Since 1971, eminent feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has been on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD and is now professor emerita. Hochschild’s father was the United States ambassador to Ghana, Tunisia, and New Zealand, and she grew up in a house where, as she puts it in her essay collection The Commercialization of Intimate Life, “my mother was the sad caretaker and my father the happy non-caretaker.” She writes in the preface to Strangers in Their Own Land that traveling with her father made her feel that her role was to “reach out” to people from vastly different cultural backgrounds, and that that experience was an important foundation for this book. Her household’s traditional but unsatisfying gender roles drove her research to focus largely on changing family dynamics, and her pioneering approach to the study of those dynamics’ emotional consequences has led many to consider her a founder of the “sociology of emotion.” In her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild famously developed the concept of “emotional labor,” meaning work that revolves around people’s expression and regulation of emotions—her examples in the book were flight attendants and bill collectors. But her most influential book, and the one that thrust her into the public spotlight, was her next, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, in which she argued that working mothers end up caught between “traditional” and “egalitarian” roles, taking on a double burden of labor and doing the majority of domestic work. She has also written The Time Bind, which explored working parents’ attempts to balance family time and company time; The Outsourced Self, which investigated places where one person’s love is another person’s commodity—surrogate mothers, nannies, and dating coaches, among others; and two books of essays (one edited, one original). Hochschild’s work is distinguished by its intensive interview method, emphasis on the emotional effects of changing labor and family structures, and its careful critique of second-wave feminism’s unintended consequences. In addition to her academic work, she continues to direct the Center for Working Families in Berkeley.