How To: Mobilize the Labor of Love
“By not articulating the value of mothers’ emotional labor, they further reinforce fathers’ destiny to fulfill the “instrumental role.””
By Jessie Sun
Xiaoxiao Li deliberately chose a job that did not require working overtime. She takes on the lion’s share of providing her son with basic needs such as nutrition, daily meals, healthcare, playing, outside training, and emotional support without intergenerational parenting help. It’s worth noting that intergenerational parenting might not be the case in Western countries, yet it is common in China. Cong Zhang, an anthropology and ethnographic research scholar, wrote that” as the primary caregiver after the mother, the assumption of family childcare responsibilities by grandparents coincides with the changes in the country’s dramatic reduction of public kindergarten and nursery services from the early years of reform and opening up to the 1990s to withdraw childcare responsibilities from ordinary families.”¹ Without paying for the labor of grandparents’ parenting, couples also accept their default role of caring for them by following the tradition of “Respect the Aged and Care for the Young (in Chinese, zun lao ai you; 尊老爱幼),” the core values of filial piety. Everyone learned that filial piety and gratitude are the basic elements of traditional Chinese virtues and the basis for the formation of the Chinese character.²
Since February 2023, Xiaoxiao Li’s son has been attending kindergarten, and her husband has begun to take him to school every morning. Because of separation anxiety, her son screams, “I don’t want to go to school,” every morning when waking up at 6:00 am. Thus, Xiaoxiao has to simultaneously wake up and comfort her son while dressing him. She told me that once her husband became involved in the drop-off process this year, he began to realize how much emotional labor she (Xiaoxiao Li) has to spend in parenting.
Both working five days a week, Xiaoxiao Li told me her husband would care for their son on the weekend. She shares nearly half of her family’s financial burden with her husband. However, within the social discourse, she said, “Among all the 16 books on parenting I read, only one book targeted fathers. And the book title is Fathering from the Fast Lane: Practical Ideas for Busy Dads.”³ Here, the father’s parenting responsibilities are evoked by adding the adjective “busy” to limit and modify the father’s contribution to parenting on the economic level. This literary rhetoric may intend to build an equal parenting landscape within the family, but it also further prioritizes males’ societal role. It compares the roles between men and women in terms of the attributive term of busyness, i.e., idle moms.
While fathers who have experienced being stay-at-home parents report having a greater appreciation for family life and their children’s emotions, in mass media, fathers are still depicted as economic engines of the family. This occurs in Chinese TV dramas such as A Little Dilemma (2020), Super Dad & Super Kids (2018), Where Are We Going, Dad? (2013–2018), and A Love For Separation (2015), as well as the popular book To Be a Good Father (The Most Valuable Investment for a Man). Fei Huang, a researcher exploring stay-at-home fathers in contemporary China, pointed out that one of the common themes of TV dramas is that all men go back to work in the end, which signifies that paid work is still considered to be central to men’s identities.⁴ In 2021, Xuan Li, a psychologist whose research focuses on fatherhood and parent-child interactions in contemporary Chinese societies, explored fatherhood in global contexts by looking backward and forward beyond the era of COVID-19. She asserted that, despite the increasing presence of fathers’ involvement in Chinese societies, a father also has the ability to create the platform and context for his child to develop. He can act as a resource for money as well as social and cultural capital, influencing a child’s outside connections.⁵ And Xiaoxiao Li’s husband was an excellent example of the male perception of fatherhood at the domestic and social levels. During our interview, he said, “The father, the man of the house, is responsible for providing the financial backbone to ensure family stability.”⁶
By not articulating the value of mothers’ emotional labor, they further reinforce fathers’ destiny to fulfill the “instrumental role.”
This research made me understand why the discussion on mothers’ and fathers’ roles is mainly economically focused; social discourse doesn’t address the emotional costs associated with childcare, let alone analyze their importance. Though fathers’ involvement in parenting is progressing in media communication, academic research, and life practices, the limited progress in the quantity and quality of Chinese fathers’ share of childcare didn’t bring gender equality in parenting and attention to mothers’ unpaid emotional labor.
Shujuan Li, a researcher on human development and family studies and associate professor in the Department of Living Sciences at the National Open University Taiwan, wrote, “The more the social discourse maternalizes child-rearing responsibilities, the more men profit from this unpaid domestic labor and the market economy.”⁷ As reported in the Blue Book of Women: Report On The Development Of Chinese Women In The New Era (2022), newly issued on April 19, 2023, only 7.5% of Chinese parents cared for their children together, and Chinese women still bear the main responsibility of domestic work and nurturing care.⁸ Yet it is also worth noting the flip side of these discourses: By not articulating the value of mothers’ emotional labor, they further reinforce fathers’ destiny to fulfill the “instrumental role.” However, Xiaoxiao Li’s present emotional work is just the tip of the iceberg in her enormous “emotional labor” of motherhood.
In her 1983 book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life, coined the term “emotional labor,” which refers to the management of one’s feelings and expressions based on the emotional requirements of a job. In her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, Hochschild asserted that “for women to assume ‘parental work’ and housekeeping without financial compensation resulted in increasing women’s dependence and diminishing their power in all areas of life.”⁹ For example, currently, most companies consider the salary, insurance, and other compensations they must pay for female employees during their two-thirds year of maternity leave. When signing the employment contract, they require women to sign a commitment to not get pregnant within two years or else be liable for a certain amount of liquidated damages or dismissal. That’s why Yanfang Zhou, deputy of the National People’s Congress and deputy general manager of China Pacific Insurance Company, said on March 6, 2022, “As a woman, I have seen both male and female managers in the workplace discriminate against female applicants and harshly ask working mothers to increase the intensity of their work. I also fear that childbirth is becoming exclusively about women.”¹⁰ Women don’t enjoy equal rights, as the three-child policy propaganda ensured.
The inconsistency between explicit policy compensation and covert employment discrimination motivates women to devote their limited time to wage rather than unpaid labor to achieve better autonomy. The longer the maternity leave and the more maternity benefits the state requires, the more reluctant companies will be to hire women. In her book Feminism, Yinhe Li, a Chinese sociologist, sexologist, and author, wrote, “The most important way for women to be emancipated is to enter the labor market.”¹¹ Yet, “Are women gaining equality and liberation by entering the workplace under unpaid labor like housework unabated?”Ueno Chizuko, a Japanese sociologist, and Japan’s “best-known feminist,” asked during her conversation titled “Fertility and Non-fertility Are Both Hell” with students from Peking University, China, on February 25, 2023.¹²
Understanding this imbalance between the state benefits and companies’ disguised disobedience, and the weighing of values between womanhood and motherhood, women refuse to fulfill motherhood’s fate to avoid future family exploitation and lose opportunities in the labor market.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Read: Feminism by Li Yinhe.
- Read: Women and China’s Revolutions by Gail Hershatter.
- Watch: Changing Landscapes of Fatherhood in Global Contexts webinar hosted by University College London.
- Zhang, Cong; Yang, Aaron Z.; Kim, Sungwon; Fong, Vanessa L. “Why Parents’ Fertility Plans Changed in China.” The China Quarterly. 253. 2022.
- “Filial Piety and Gratitude.” Chinakongzi. 2017.
- Interview with Xiaoxiao Li. 2023.
- Huang, Fei. “TV Drama Discourse on Stay-at-home Fathers in China.” SOAS China Institute. 2022.
- “Changing landscapes of fatherhood in global contexts.” University College London. 2021. 6
- Zoom interview with Ning Liang. 2023.
- Li, Shu-Chuan. “Research on the Difference of Fathering and Mothering.” Taiwan: National Open University. 2013.
- “Women’s Blue Book: Report on the Development of Chinese Women in the New Era.” Social Sciences Academic Press. 2023.
- Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. 2012.
- Wang, Haiyan. “Deputies call for less cost for businesses to hire women.” Shanghai Observer. 2022.
- Li, Yinhe. Feminism. 2018.
- “Fertility and Non-Fertility Are Both Hell.” Youtube. February 25, 2023.
