Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
For Hollis, these long hours are temporary, self-chosen, goal-oriented, and have a tangible result. For the vast majority of other women caught up in long-hours cultures at work, overwork and its attendant exhaustion are simply a routine feature of their lives—and there is not a best-selling book at the end of it to help sweeten the pill.
Rosalind Gill • Confidence Culture
The rise of the service sector has, in her view, made emotional work more systematized, standardized, and mass-produced, but its existence still capitalizes on the fact that, from childhood women, have been trained to have an instrumental relation to their emotions.20
Silvia Federici • Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs. Security, the watchword of the industrial ethic, where workers spent a lifetime at one job and earned a p
... See moreSarah Jaffe • Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
These acts of re-labelling are often inspired by the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Hochschild’s 1983 The Managed Heart described how certain jobs involve the management of a worker’s own internal emotional states.
Amelia Horgan • Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)
It was a calling, a duty. Service was a contribution to society, heroic even. But in the home, service was care and maintenance. It was nursing the sick. It was tending to the baby. Service involved feces and food and dishwater. It was done out of love and duty and desperation. At its best, it was intensely intimate. “Service could be brutalizing a
... See moreEula Biss • Having and Being Had
I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our l
... See moreKiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
Anne Helen Petersen • "I Went Into Motherhood Determined Not to Lose Myself in It."
She had been stricken from her marriage, rendered near penniless by the events, and was now an older and disregarded woman. It’s a harrowingly common feeling, even if the details of her experience and solution are particular. We women age, eyes sweep over us in obvious disregard, our moments of confusion are mocked, our knowledge makes us schoolmar
... See more