Labor of Love (34 page)

Our challenge is to find ways to honor love properly without falling back into outdated patterns. We might think of this as a third sexual revolution. We should certainly not corral sex back into marriage. Though I have criticized the “dating market,” I am not saying that everyone should get out of it by “settling down.” Rather, we must find ways to celebrate the myriad kinds of love that sex and romance lead to. We must be mindful, kind, and appreciative toward our partners. One of the things we ought to appreciate about them is the work they do in appreciating us.

The logic of transactions deep in the structure of dating encourages us to see love as something we compete against others to get. The illusion that we can only win love and never will it leaves many people feeling paralyzed. The way that our culture has divided labor and desire, assigning one to history and the other to biology, renders us helpless: It tells us that love is a mere feeling, fleeting and uncontrollable. If you see love as the most important event of your life and believe that you cannot influence it, of course any difficulties you encounter in a relationship will seem terrifying. Any problem you and your partner encounter means your feelings have already ebbed. But this way of seeing love and emotion as absolutely separate from labor is mistaken.

Love consists of acts of care you can extend to whomever you choose, for however long your relationship lasts. Over the past century, dating has changed, changing how people imagine they must be in order to be loved. As it has, love has not stood still. Love changes in time, too.

The point of recognizing the labor of love is not to reject it but to reclaim it, to insist that it be distributed equally and directed toward the ends that we in fact desire. In dating or a relationship, seeing the labor of love for what it is allows you to conduct a simple test: Is what you are doing worth it? How much do you want, and how much is too much to give? There is a difference between putting off something that is bothering you until a time when you are confident you and your partner can discuss it productively and burying it because you fear that admitting anger will make you undesirable. There is a difference between making constant demands on a partner and admitting when you feel vulnerable. The difference is exploitation. Love demands that we recognize and refrain from it.

When we have the freedom to direct the ways we perform it, labor is not a liability. It is a source of strength. Once we have clarity, we benefit from acknowledging the ways in which love itself is work. It is a productive force. In order to harness it, we must be vulnerable. To feel incomplete, and thus to yearn for others, always means being able to be hurt. It is through the fearful process of recognizing our needs and showing them to others that we grow.

I fell in two kinds of love while writing this book. The first was with a friend. We had crossed paths a few times before we
met
met—before something she said or I said over the kind of lunch date half-strangers politely schedule sparked and gave us a glimpse of our potential. In movies and on television, women often seem to treat their friendships as fallbacks, like focus groups they use to work through romantic problems and dissolve once they find a partner. But a passionate friendship can be just as powerful as a romantic passion. You turn the lens on your life just a bit and a whole new plane leaps into focus. Tilt the page and you see shapes you did not know were there. It was that friendship that inspired and sustained me as I wrote this book.

The second was with the person I have since married. To have come to know him and to know myself through him has been the greatest joy of my life yet. I had always feared that love would require ceding more of myself than I wanted, or would require losing my identity. It turned out that the opposite was true. It was through this relationship that I first came to see who I was and what happiness meant.

Both experiences took me by surprise. It was not only that they happened, as they say, when I least expected it. Love itself was not what I expected. It was not the end of a search but the beginning. In love, I began to feel desire as a movement in me that reached outward, yearning to act upon the world.

If we can be brave enough to honor love, we might begin to change all the things that people hate about dating. By treating the work of reproduction with the seriousness that it deserves, we might begin to see how productive—and truly
creative
—it can become. One thing is clear: Whatever we can do cannot be done alone.

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are so many books that helped me write this book. In the following pages, I would like to give a brief account of works that have broadly shaped my thinking on feminism, gender, sexuality, and work (in other words, everything). Then I will offer a list of references for books that directly guided my research.

When I first started to articulate the idea for
Labor of Love
, a wise person told me to read Beth L. Bailey's
From Front Porch to Back Seat
. That book, and her
Sex in the Heartland
, provided an invaluable introduction to the field. So, too, did John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman's
Intimate Matters
. Stephanie Coontz's books
Marriage, a History
and
The Way We Never Were
helped me begin to think about how emotions that we often presume to be unchanging and eternal, like love between romantic partners or family members, in fact change dramatically over time. Alice Kessler-Harris's classic
Out to Work
and Ruth Schwartz Cowan's
More Work for Mother
provided helpful overviews of the history of labor performed by American women in the paid workforce and outside it.

Kathy Peiss's
Cheap Amusements
gave me a vivid view into the lives of working-class women in New York City in the early twentieth century, introducing me to the phenomenon of “Charity Girls” who were “treated” to dates. Ruth Rosen's pioneering study on prostitution,
The Lost Sisterhood
, and
The Maimie Papers
, a collection of letters that the ex-prostitute Maimie Pinzer wrote in the 1910s and 1920s, which Rosen edited with Sue Davidson, provided a window into the lives of women doing sex work during that period. The more recent work of Elizabeth Bernstein (
Temporarily Yours
) and Melissa Gira Grant (
Playing the Whore
) updated my understanding of “sex work as work,” the evolution of which often anticipates broader trends in the American economy.

It would be difficult to account for all the works of Marxist and feminist theory that have influenced my thinking about gendered forms of labor. But I want to acknowledge the ones that have been most important to me.

Arlie Hochschild first defined and described the phenomenon of “emotional labor” in
The Managed Heart
, a sociological account of the work performed by flight attendants and debt collectors. That study and her more recent book
The Outsourced Self
have deeply shaped my perspective on these matters. So, too, has the work of the feminist activist Silvia Federici. Her essay collection
Revolution at Point Zero
provides an overview of her thinking on how capitalism exploits women. Her fascinating history
Caliban and the Witch
offers a longer view on how modern economies have subjugated female and nonwhite bodies, making their work seem like part of their nature in order to justify expropriating its fruits from them.

Shulamith Firestone's
The Dialectic of Sex
stunned me with the scope of its ambition. Its argument for understanding women as an underclass that must “seize the means of reproduction” gave me new perspectives on fertility and ways of child rearing, as well as on the history of feminism more broadly. The writings of Angela Davis on sexism and racism in the United States provided me with an invaluable framework for understanding certain limitations of the liberal feminist movements whose history I was taught in school. Her classic volume of essays
Women, Race, & Class
crystallized many things for me about how these categories intersect. So did the essays of bell hooks, particularly those collected in
Feminist Theory
and
Ain't I a Woman
. The friend who first recommended hooks's beautiful book
All About Love
to me described it as “a field guide to still being able to experience love under capitalist patriarchy.” Its prose is more graceful and moving than that makes it sound. I strongly recommend it to everyone. Approaching the subject from a different direction, Laura Kipnis's
Against Love
gave me rich food for thought.

Below is a list of bibliographic information for the books I have mentioned, as well as other scholarly works that I drew on during my research.

 

Almeling, Rene.
Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Aschoff, Nicole.
The New Prophets of Capital
. New York: Jacobin/Verso, 2015.

Bailey, Beth L.
Sex in the Heartland
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

______
.
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Bartell, Gilbert D.
Group Sex: A Scientist's Eyewitness Report on the American Way of Swinging
. New York: P. H. Wyden, 1971.

Bernstein, Elizabeth.
Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Bogle, Kathleen A.
Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus
. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla.
Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Chauncey, George.
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Cherlin, Andrew J.
Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014.

______
.
The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Cohen, Lizabeth.
A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

Coontz, Stephanie.
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
New York: Penguin, 2006.

______
.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Cooper, Melinda, and Catherine Waldby.
Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz.
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Davis, Angela Y.
Women, Race, & Class.
New York: Random House, 1981.

______
.
Angela Davis: An Autobiography
. New York: Random House, 1974.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman.
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons.
Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Fass, Paula S.
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Federici, Silvia.
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.

______
.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004.

Freitas, Donna.
The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy
. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Fronc, Jennifer.
New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Gould, Deborah B.
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Grant, Melissa Gira.
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
. New York: Jacobin/Verso, 2014.

Halberstam, David.
The Fifties.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.

Haraway, Donna J.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell.
The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us
. New York: Picador, 2013.

______
.
The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

hooks, bell (Gloria Watkins).
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.
New York: Routledge, 2015.

______
.
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
. New York: Routledge, 2014.

______
.
All About Love: New Visions
. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

Johnson, David K.
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Kessler-Harris, Alice.
Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.