Leaving Berkeley after 35 years: An Interview with Arlie Hochschild

Leaving Berkeley after 35 years: An Interview with Arlie Hochschild [1] / Alena Křížková

In May of this year I was working on a research project at Berkeley. There I met Arlie Hochschild, whose formal academic career as a professor of sociology at Berkely University for the past 35 years was about to end. I had the opportunity to visit one of her classes and discuss research methodology and ways of writing up results. We also spoke about the differences between American and Czech gender regimes. At that time I got the idea of asking Arlie if she would do an interview for this journal, and she agreed. Arlie’s knowledge and experience enable her to clearly and concisely analyze, formulate and produce unique ideas about our daily lives. She has introduced into sociology concepts such as the second shift, the stalled revolution, management of emotions, emotional work, the time bind, and many more. Arlie has been a major contributor to the field of sociology and we are grateful for the time she spared for this interview.

Arlie Hochschild is the author of The Unexpected Community (1973), The Managed Heart (1983), The Second Shift (1989), The Time Bind (1997), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich, 2002) and The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and Other Essays (2003). Her books have been translated in many languages, but none are yet available in Czech.

Alena Křížková: You developed the concept of management of emotions and feelings, so I would like to ask you about when you yourself last had to manage your emotions?
Arlie Hochschild: Oh! That is fascinating! When did I have to manage my emotions last? Yes. Today is Friday. Last Monday was a very emotional day for me … because it was the last day of a class, a large undergraduate class, here; and it’s the last large undergraduate class I will teach after 35 years of what has been for me a calling; it’s not just a job. And on my way to work, I mean to this class, I ran into a colleague who said, “Oh, I dedicated my last class to you and your work.” Well, I welled up with emotion at this, I thanked him, and then was walking on thinking: “I can’t, I can’t cry in my own class, I’ve got to be organized and in control. It’s okay to be feeling full but not to, what Goffman calls, “flood out”. So, I was turning my mind to what I had organized to say and trying to shut my feelings off, but then a student came up to me just as I opened the door: “Oh, isn’t this your last class?” and then I caught myself again. So I decided to slide with my feelings a little bit, and so I opened the class by saying: “My friends, we have come to the end of our journey in this class, and I also have come to the end of a personal journey.” I’m sad even recounting it. And then I said to them, “Look, I hope I get through this.” So they were with me then, and I summarized the main points of the class and ended with a joke and wished them good luck; and then there was a silence in the class, and then all the students threw out confetti and noisemakers and streamers, as if it were a New Year’s Eve party; and then they stood for about 5 minutes; and then I could not manage my feelings. I just wept. I was overcome, and so I just cried in front of them. And then they started coming up afterwards as class ended and giving me hugs. I know I represent some kind of motherly figure to them or something, and authority, but it was like suddenly they were helping me through this moment. And it especially moved me that one of the students who had bought the streamers – I think she was the one – was very poor and had to do babysitting to earn the money to get the streamers; and she is a Latina student, the first in her family to come to the university.
Alena Křížková: How do you feel at the beginning of the new career that is waiting for you?
Arlie Hochschild: Oh, wonderful! I’m first of all not totally leaving this career. I’m working with 12 Ph.D. students and I’m going to see them through finishing their work, and I’ll be back to teach graduate courses from time to time. But new is this next big project, which is to understand how women cope with the contradiction of capitalism. More women now work. They work longer hours than 20 years ago. And government supports are being cut. Job security has lessened. She is free, but she is free in the cold, hard market. She doesn’t have time. But one thing she has a bit of is money. So she is very tempted to use that money to buy services – to get out of doing the work of the home. But to others and to herself, she still symbolizes “home”. So if she buys a “Thanksgiving dinner” from the deli, if she hires someone to plan her child’s birthday, if she puts her mother in an old-age home, it is she – not others – who is seen as heartless. I think it creates a dilemma that on the one hand she is pushed at the office so that she yearns for some relief. But then she is asked to represent the only piece of family life that’s left – wife/mother – that is not marketized, so she’s an emblem of the “forever wild,” kind of sacred haven in a heartless world; she is to represent that. On the other hand, she can’t and doesn’t entirely want to, and so she can be the moral fallback guy of the system; she’s the one that’s blamed if it seems fake. She’s buying herself out of the role. Well, she can’t win. And so I guess I want to write a book that makes this clear.
So that’s one project that I want to get to work on, and I also want to write a book on empathy, and this may turn into two projects, one more basic and long-term, and one more immediate; but in the immediate term, I’m very interested in why the blue-collar class in the United States has supported George Bush, who is doing everything he possibly can to make their lives worse, including sending their sons to war and reducing long-term unemployment [compensation] and reducing job retraining programs and taking away good jobs, putting in lousy jobs, calling it economic growth, and again, they are the fall guys of this capitalist system, and yet they’re identifying with George Bush, who I think is a very frightening figure in our history. And it’s because they don’t empathize with the poor, I think; they want to get away from that. So I’m extremely interested in that, and it’s gotten me interested in religion and the religious right wing. In the US the Evangelical Protestant church has grown very rapidly; it is very right wing, very against feminism, against government services, against minorities, pro-Bush, pro-military. It is the twin-brother of Muslim fundamentalism. It’s dangerous. So, I want to know, why has it grown? (I wrote an article on this called “The Chauffeur’s Dilemma”, The American Prospect, 2005) At bottom I believe the church addresses frightened blue-collar men and their families. One of their core beliefs is in the “rapture”. According to the “rapture” the world is coming to an end, and after it does, the saved will rise up to Heaven and join all the other saved people and the damned will go to Hell; and if you look at the American blue-collar man, his world of factory work really has come to an end. Those well-paid, union-protected jobs are no more. And rise to Heaven? What is that? I think it metaphorically parallels the social class divide. The poor will at least get to go to an upper class party with George Bush and his friends leaving the poor behind. The rapture appeals to what they anxiously desire, and it’s kind of a religious substitute for what they can’t get in their real life. So I guess I want to go out and interview people and hang out in churches and kind of see if I can get inside that story.
Alena Křížková: And in the long term?
Arlie Hochschild: In the long term … I have a number of other projects. I think I will circle back to The Managed Heart to look at all the work that we unconsciously do to live in a market-drenched culture and will circle back to the stalled revolution and feminism and to the question of equal to what? That is a basic question that underlies all of my work. Equal yes, equal always, but equal to what? In our culture this is especially important because the revolutionary potential of feminism has been, I believe, set aside, and a kind of assimilationist feminism, what we used to call liberal feminism, has come to the fore. According to which the definition of liberation is that you get to be, in Gloria Steinem’s words, like “the father you never saw.” Equal to what? Is that where we’re going? It wasn’t the original idea; I mean the original idea was to change him, too. So I guess I’ve seen various models of feminism, and the one I like is actually the Scandinavian model, where you have a shorter workweek and you have paid parental leave and you have all women working. It’s not perfect, God knows, but I don’t know of one in the real world that comes closer to a kind of revolutionary answer to “equal to what?” Yeah, it would be great if both men and women were able to do meaningful work, let’s get homeless orphans into warm homes, not make up a new ad for Pepsi.
Alena Křížková: Yes, it is very much the question of care that I wanted to ask you about. What do you think the welfare state, the American welfare state, if we can somehow call it that, how is it influencing women’s and men’s lives when you compare it, for example, with the Scandinavian one, or if we take the example of the Czech Republic. We have maternity and parental leave, which together is quite a long period: the 28 weeks of maternity leave is only for women, and then until the child is three there is parental leave; it is very poorly paid, but you can stay at home with your child, and your employer assures your position at work. I consider the length of it to be a kind of discriminating factor for all women. Because men almost never take part in it, and all employers are expecting you to take it, women often lose their qualifications during this time, etcetera. What do you think is better, if I put it very simply: the American system, where you have only six weeks, or then this long term, which should help women and parents, but on the other hand is a big burden?
Arlie Hochschild: Right. Well, there are problems both ways. Neither is ideal. What is missing in both cases is any cultural or political value placed on care. So I think that is a very basic issue to which we can reply in a number of ways. The American system says: “You can make it. But you’re on your own. The government won’t help much. If you are poor, you only get five years of help, that’s it. If you want unpaid leave, you can take three months off, job assured, but only if you work for a business that employees fifty or more employees. But that rule disqualifies half of women workers. So we stand out in the industrial-developed world as the least caring, the most aggressively uncaring, society, and the ethos is one of privatism: If you want to have a child, or have an elderly parent who is sick, or a partner who has just had a heart attack, that’s up to you; and we’re not going to help you. So, you can say, well, stiff upper lip; this is liberation; you’re free now, you’re equal in this system; you can say that. I call that a cold modern culture of care and a cold modern idea of equality because it’s simply asking women to join in a quite harsh, I think masculinist, conception of life, because men haven’t been the ones to do care. It’s more of a man’s view of things to create a society that doesn’t look at care, so I’m critical of that; that’s why I look more to Scandinavia.
The Czech system that you are suggesting answers one problem and creates another. It answers one problem in the sense that it’s a little more generous, although nothing like Norway, but these care benefits are within a system that doesn’t honor it, so you get an advantage within a macrosystem that considers it a disadvantage, so it’s kind of a sponsored downward mobility, and that is not a solution either.
I think the ultimate solution is to create generous care packages that allow for the care of children and sick members and give you – in Norway they have care salaries – but to have them equally used by men and women. Then you have a level playing field. But then you need a culture, and a politics, that fosters that. Of course, in Sweden there are benefits that only can be used if men use a certain proportion of them; that’s an interesting idea. So I am critical of both of those models and would call for a third. We are all in a stalled revolution; we’re not there yet.
Alena Křížková: Let’s stay at this work/life balance issue. I would like to know on which side you stand in this, I would say, theoretical conflict between those that think it’s all a matter of individual choice, because women now can choose, can design their life, or that it’s a given by conditions, and our society is totally gender-structured. What do you think about this divide? There are different theorists, for example, the discussion in Great Britain between Catherine Hakim and Rosemary Crompton: Hakim has been saying that it’s all a matter of choice because there have been revolutions like contraception or equality legislation, simply put, and Rosemary Crompton is focusing on the conditions and the opportunities that society is giving to different types of women according to their position, where they are coming from in our society.
Arlie Hochschild: Women have more choice today than before in the United States and in the Czech Republic, in Europe, but capitalism is invisibly distorting that freedom. We can vote. We can own our own property. We can take out loans. Even in the 1950s in the US, you couldn’t take out a loan to buy a house without your husband’s signature. With contraceptive methods, we can sexually express ourselves. And women can now get jobs and have careers; so this is all, of course, self-evident.
But we are moving into an all or nothing culture that removes our new freedoms by the backdoor. For example, a woman may choose to work in a career as a lawyer and she may choose to make partner in the law firm; this is her personal choice. But you can only make partner in the law firm if you work 11 hours a day, take it or leave it. Can she choose the atmosphere in the workplace? No. Is it a family-friendly workplace where both men and women understand that life is a combination of personal life and career? No. That constructs the options she has.
Another example; our government is pulling away safety nets; even Social Security is now being challenged by the Republicans, and the marketplace is doing the same: it’s reducing benefits; it’s reducing health insurance. This creates a culture of anxiety and fear. That culture creates, in turn, a desire for some magic wand to banish fear. The wand? Money. If you lived in a culture that gave you some security, then social class attainment wouldn’t be such a big deal, and your choices would be different. So we tend to presume the floors we walk on, and that’s what’s wrong with, I think, the individualistic worldview.
Take the same thing with sexual freedom. Yes, women have sexual freedom, and this is wonderful, but what if you live in a sexual culture that’s masculinized, and where women get older and older and older, and men are making themselves commitment-scarce because they can wait till they’re 45. And what if that becomes culturally acceptable, for men not to acknowledge the realities of reproduction? Well you’re free to be a single mom; you’re free to get in vitro fertilization, or are you? Or are you? If you only look at the freedom of choice, and you’re not looking at the cultural infrastructure in which you are forced to make those choices, you’re really defining freedom in a very narrow way. Feminism contests sexual norms. We get to say: Wait a minute, is this good for women? Or is it just good for men? Why are we getting used to this?  You know; this isn’t made up for us and our bodies, and we could change it. Cultural writing and social movements have the power to shift cultures, power to shift the contexts, which are what give us our freedom. Freedom is in the context. So we’ve got to change contexts. That’s why we need a feminist movement.
Alena Křížková: Okay, now I would like to go back to your work, and I would like to ask you about the authors that influenced your work the most. Can you describe how they influenced you and at what stage in your career.
Arlie Hochschild: Yes. I think the three writers that first opened my eyes to sociology were Erving  Goffman, David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd), and C. Wright Mills (Power, Politics, and People, and White Collar). But once I got to Berkeley, the feminist movement itself; I almost want to give it a face and a name. And these were not authors that I could talk to. I mean, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan; The Second Sex and The Feminist Mystique were important texts, but they were only the match that lit a kind of fire, an intellectual fire, that very much influenced my thinking. And I began here in Berkeley the Women’s Caucus. It was made up of graduate students – I was an instructor here and found that women were dropping out of the program. We had a 50 percent dropout rate in my year and the next year after. But after we got the Women’s Caucus going that dropout was much reduced. And in those meetings, we would begin to say: “Well, what if sociology was shaped not around just the lifestyles of men but of women? How would we conceive of social mobility? Are you just comparing father and son or mother to daughter or father to daughter? How should we think, you know? It was revolutionary! What are social classes? Are women a social class, or are they just part of the man’s social class, so it’s social class by association? How does social class work? You know, ethnicity: Is it the same for men and women?  Deviance: Is it the same for men and women? Small group organizations, you know, social psychology: Is it the same for men and women? In what ways is it different?  Well, it just led to an invitation to rethink the entire discipline. So I sat in one class after another, writing a different curriculum in my head, and it wasn’t just that all the texts were by men; even the ones by women reflected a kind of a mental set that didn’t take the organization of gender as primary. So if I look back on what influenced my thinking, the starter theorists were these three, but then I got to Berkeley and participated in really what was a collective rethinking, and that was very influential for me. You could see much of my work as late answers to those early questions. It was wonderful.
Alena Křížková: What about figures like Nancy Chodorow, who has been here at Berkeley? Did she somehow influence you? Did you work with her?
Arlie Hochschild: I worked with her; she was a colleague of mine; we are friends. Would I say that I am in receipt of ideas from her work? I would say that in her second book, The Power of Feelings, I guess – which I found very Talmudic and kind of abstracted – I find a very important emphasis on systems of personal meaning, and I think that’s extraordinarily important, and lost in a lot of sociology, which is dividing things up into kinds of social-capital, cultural-capital, emotional-capital, physical capital. I think: Wait a minute! These are terms and categories that erase the kind of personal meanings that Chodorow is lifting out for inspection. So I think that’s an enormous gift, and I’ve learned a lot from her on that. And I think that her Reproduction of Mothering is accurate. I think it describes kind of the psychodynamics of childhood in a very important way. I would say that my own work is not psychoanalytic in the sense that her work is, but that it’s an area in which I would, in my new career, like to do a lot of reading. I think it’s an area I want to develop.
Alena Křížková: Another project. And that leads me to another question: Because you’ve spent 35 years here at Berkeley, it would be interesting if you could describe how the perception of the field – gender studies – has been changing during this time, what it was like when you came here and what it is like today. How has the perception developed, or has it already been accepted much as it is now?
Arlie Hochschild: It’s gone through a variety of stages. In the first stage, the very idea of gender as a category was questioned, and people asked, “Well, what do you mean? There’s no field there; there’s nothing to study. There is the family; there is the workplace; and we study men and women in each. But it’s like people with blue hair or green hair or brown hair: You don’t make sociology of brown-haired people because it doesn’t make sense; it’s the same with men and women.” This was where we started. So if you remember how bad it was when it started, then we’ve come a very long way, a very long way, in our establishment of categories of thinking. And there was a second stage in which people talked about simply adding women onto the usual sociology. But in the third stage, feminism became the source of a great number of brilliant ideas, and these have been picked up in other fields. And the ultimate test is whether one sees feminist-inspired inquiries; that is, inquiries that use the classifications and styles of thinking that were animated by a movement that challenged the gender system. If you see those books on the reading lists of all the fields taught by all the genders, then you’ve arrived; and I would say we are a good way toward that here. We are a good way toward that simply because a lot of good work has come out, and it’s been positively reviewed and used, and students bring these ideas to their professors: “Oh, have you read the such-and-such-book?” He hasn’t read it, but after the third student comes and says: “Oh, my mind’s really been turned around by such-and-such a book,” then he has to read it, and then he puts it on his list after a while. So that’s how it’s happened, I think; a kind of a revolution bottom up. We’ve come a great long way. Yeah.
Alena Křížková: Last week at the “leaving” session with the faculty you were trying to show them and the students how they should write more interesting texts, as you do. Could you describe your research process? We are reading the wonderful books as the result, and they read so easily, are written in such a fresh and inspiring way…
Arlie Hochschild: It’s hard work to make it seem simple. All my books are a long journey and a lot of work, a lot of re-writing.  If I took The Second Shift, for example… and I wrote this at a time when many women were trying to, were going out to work in droves, and there was a feminist movement, which was a cultural bubble for women but not for men; and many marriages were falling apart. And I began to think, well, wait a minute. I really want this movement to work. I don’t want 30 years later for the daughters who grow up in these homes to say: “Oh feminism only led to fights and unhappiness and bitterness and poverty; what a stupid movement.” Let’s make it happy, too, because then it can last. This was what was on my mind, and so, okay, what’s the most difficult issue in working this thing out? Well, it is this hidden invisible issue of care and men not getting it that it’s really driving women crazy, so how can I explain this both to the women and to the men? Not just to talk about how who does what at home, which is an obvious issue, but how people feel about it. That’s where it gets complicated and fascinating and the underworld stories of the resentment in families emerge in all their complexity. You find two versions of reality, and you want to explain the women’s version to men and the men’s version to women. “Look”, you want to say to the men, “you think it’s her second shift, but The Second Shift (the book) is really about the second shift in you; she’s already shifted; that’s the first shift. Now you’re the second shift.” It’s a double – double entendre – you know French. So I went in kind of with that concern.
Then I approached a Fortune 500 company here in the San Francisco Bay Area and miraculously got permission to get their personnel roster and pick every thirteenth name and send out a short questionnaire to men and women … asking if they had a working spouse and a pre-school age child. And from those I asked at the bottom of the questionnaire whether they would be willing for an interview. That’s how I got the sample. And so the second stage, I’m there hearing stories. And then at the last stage, having gotten sucked in, pulled myself out, written a number of drafts of this, a number of drafts; there might have been twelve drafts of The Second Shift, in a way redrafted each time for a different problem. And in fact, just yesterday I got an e-mail from a woman who is Chapter 10 in The Second Shift from 20 years ago, and she’s back in town and wants to have lunch, and …  So I’m very excited by that, to see how she’s doing. Another couple invited me to their summerhouse in Tahoe; they liked how they came out.
Alena Křížková: I have a different question now: When did you become a feminist, do you think?
Arlie Hochschild: Oh … age three. I had an older brother who was very much favored in the family. And I loved him very much; in our adulthood we were very, very close. But growing up we fought a lot, and we both agreed that he was the favored one in my mother’s eyes, and since my father wasn’t around very much, these were the important eyes. And yet my mother conveyed the feeling that men and woman should be equal; boys and girls were equally valuable. But I remember her saying that, “Well, what the girls do is just as important as what the boys do,” and I thought, “Why is she telling me that? Why does she have to tell me that? What reality is that countering?” Something to look at here – I think I was a sociologist already at a very young age – that there were underlying realities that you had to expose to live – to understand what’s happening to you. So, very early ...
Alena Křížková: And my last question is: If you could change three things in American society that would benefit women, what would they be?
Arlie Hochschild: Wow! It’s a wonderful question! There are so many possible answers to that. The obvious one would be to impeach George Bush. He has militarized society; he has made it harsh; taken out any welfare. And it’s mainly women; women are the poor group, women and children, so when we’re talking poor, we’re talking women, and he’s got an invisible war against the poor in this country. So getting some kind of a Democrat would be number one. So I would change that.
Then, second, I guess because care of all sorts does fall on women, and women want to do care…and I want women to be able to do care and to bring men into care and to value care. That would revolutionize American society, I think. We are a very harsh, aggressive, masculinist kind of culture without even knowing it. And, I mean, just look at the ads for automobiles, you know, racing; and look at our sports, you know, paintball, where you have a gun and you splash paint on someone, and it’s considered fun. To go into a game parlor, it’s all very aggressive. And television I think is full of this stuff. So I think if care wasn’t this boring, stupid, privatist, housewife thing to do, but was part of a collective calling that people felt had dignity, so that we’re not just putting old people off in warehouses for underpaid immigrant caretakers who are appalled by it. They so disapprove of what America is doing. We’re doing the same thing to our children. Childcare is lousy, in 70 percent of childcare centers the television is on. There’s a story we’re not looking at, and I want feminism to pick this one up, rather than join the harsh show, join the critique of the harsh show and make it more humane. So what practical policy would I point to? Well, I would put a lot of money into childcare; a lot of money into eldercare; I would make family-friendly policies for men and women that encourage utilization by men and women, so that there can be some private possibility of care. You know, you’re caring for your own family to some extent, and the institutions that help, those also have been lifted up. Then I think something huge would have happened.
What I think is actually happening now is that we’re still in a stalled revolution. Men are doing a little bit more at home; women are doing a lot less; a lot of that work has been outsourced to poor immigrant women. So I think we’ve gone ahead a little, but gone back some on the second shift. The time bind; I think we’re still in it, and rather than pulling both couples out of it, both men and women out of it, such families are bringing their children into it, so children have their own time bind to be parallel with their parents’ time bind. So I’d like social policies that solve the problem The Second Shift points to and solve the problem The Time Bind points to and solve the problem that Global Woman points to. And I think solve the problem Commercialization of Intimate Life points to, which is the over-marketization of life.
Third, I would strengthen government, make it a progressive force to create and in-balance capitalism. I think Habermas is right, that we have a system world and a life world, and the system world, which is a highly masculinized world, is growing larger and larger and the life world smaller, and women are asked to be equal within that system world and participate in the squashing of the life world. And that’s, I think, the absence of a radical vision and a more humanistic vision that I mean to animate all my work. I’m holding out for that larger vision and equality within that larger vision.
What I fear is that the American model is being exported to Europe, maybe to the Czech Republic as glamorous, as associated with wealth and success. But it’s a harsh model; it’s a flawed model. I think it’s hurting people here, and I don’t think it’s good if it hurts people anywhere else.
I think it’s a big job, and that young women have to know that the job is not done. We older women have tried our best, but we’ve gotten only so far, and the young have to realize that they’re not the happy inheritors of a gender revolution, which has been accomplished, and so their only job is to live it. I think the more profound truth is that they have to carry on the unfinished job. But the life of working for social change, rather than just consuming it, so to speak, the life of making it, is hugely satisfying. It’s a good life to be an activist-scholar, you know? It’s very rewarding.
Alena Křížková: Are you optimistic even in this world of multinational companies with their “cold cultures”?
Arlie Hochschild: In a new rebalanced capitalism we could rebalance our private lives.  But we need to act collectively to make it happen. In the end, I would like to live in a world where we took care of each other, where interdependence was politically honored and built into the very structure of our notion of pride and identity, and so, you know, turning what we have upside-down. Today, in a large multinational company, one man would say to another: “Oh I worked so hard on this project that I wasn’t even there for the birth of my child. That’s how committed I am to the company,” and it’s considered a matter of pride. Well, is that the world we want to be equal in, or do we want to change that world? You know, why are you saying that? Get into the hospital room right now! You know?

[1] The realization and publication of this interview was supported by the project „Work-Life Balance from the Pespective of Gender Relations and Socal and Employment Policies in the Czech Republic“ financed by Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (grant no. 403/05/2474) and by the project „Support of Social Acceptance and Efficient Enforcement of Gender Equality in Public Sphere“ financed by Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (grant no. 1QS700280503).