Hochschild - The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
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- Book:The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
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From the famed author of the bestselling The Second Shift and The Time Bind, a pathbreaking look at the transformation of private life in our for-profit worldThe family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private lifelove, friendship, child rearingis being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.Drawing on hundreds of interviews and original research, Hochschild follows the incursions of the market into every stage of intimate life. From dating services that train you to be the CEO of your love life to wedding planners who create a couples personal narrative; from nameologists (who help you name your child) to wantologists (who help you name your goals); from commercial surrogate farms in India to hired mourners who will scatter your loved ones ashes in the ocean of your choiceHochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.Sharp and clear-eyed, Hochschild is full of sympathy for overstressed, outsourcing Americans, even as she warns of the markets threat to the personal realm they are striving so hard to preserve.
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For Neil Smelser
Table of Contents
Villager and Outsourcer
Y ou might say this book began on those August mornings when I was a child picking pigweed from the corn rows in my grandmothers vegetable garden on a gently sloping hill in Turner, Maine. My widowed grandmother would point her crutch at the tall corn, Aa-leeshe always dropped the r from my namethat corn looks just fine. But now, look how the weeds have gotten ahead of the broccoli over there . Afternoons, my brother and I and a gaggle of cousins husked corn, shelled peas, peeled apples, knocking off around four to swim in a nearby pond. As a plate of steaming corn was later passed hand to hand among a dozen family members seated at a large kitchen table for supper, I would hear my name praised as a good weeder and husker.
I didnt love farmwork. But I remember it vividly, partly because it conveyed a lesson that I came to understand only much later. My ancestors, thread lipped and grim in sepia photographs hung on the farmhouse parlor walls, had tilled the soil of this farm since the first one chopped and plowed it out of the stony wilderness in the 1790s. By the late nineteenth century, when my grandmother was a child, it had grown to medium size: sixteen milking cows,a dozen chickens, some pigs, sheep, and a retired milk truck horse named Frank, credited with great empathy for small children. My grandmother married in 1904 and moved with her husband to Boston. When her parents died, the farm passed to her. Now based in Boston, my grandparents sold off the sheep, hogs, and most of the cows, but otherwise maintained the Maine farm year-round. In the winter, two hired hands, and in the summer, my father, his brother, and two sisters tilled, planted, and hayed the fields, milked the cows, and fed the chickens. My grandparents had left for the city but kept the idea of a farm alive.
One photograph from 1933 shows my father beaming in a white hat and glasses, atop an enormous haystack, pitchfork paused in the hay. My mother, his new bride, leans over the hay, face to the camera. The pitchforks of two hired men in overalls on the ground below create a photographic swirl of motion. Shown this photo a few years ago, my then ninety-four-year-old aunt Elizabeth, born in Boston but returning in her twenties to settle in Turner year-round, quipped subversively, City folk. A real farmer could do the job single-handed in half the time. She was onto something.
To some extent, we were playing at farming. By the time I was weeding the pigweed out of the cornthree weeks every summer in the 1950sthere was no hay to reap, cows to milk, pigs to slop, or eggs to gather. But that didnt mean there wasnt a barn to paint, path to clip, or peas to shell. Aa-lee, my grandmother would call, now be a good girl and dust the paa-laah. I would aimlessly whirl a feather duster over a seashell collection and small tintype photos set on lace doilies atop spindly legged wooden tables in a formal and seldom-visited front room. This is silly work, Id whisper to my older brother. You have it lucky, hed whisper back. Grandma has me stacking shingles in the barn with the edges even . Such tedious tasks seemed like empty rituals. They werent necessary or fun or educational in any way we could see. So what was the point? we wondered. Still, my grandmotherwith nodding approval from parents and aunts and unclesgave us taskafter task with such serious, kindly intent that we sensed the presence of some larger purpose.
No one outright said what it was, but we sensed it nonetheless. Our farm was indeed different from the real farms up and down the road, but it was not a gentlemans farm that simply consumed the freshly picked results of someone elses labor. We were a gentlemans farm without gentlemen. For us, the point of pride was the labor itself. That was the lesson: the near-sacred value of working together to grow our own food and put it on the table.
When I was twelve, my father was posted as charge daffaires to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, and I was transported to an utterly different world. We moved into an enormous white stucco mansion protected by a uniformed guard with a military-type hat who stood to salute my father each time he walked from house to car or car to house. If I tiptoed into the kitchen looking for some melon in the refrigerator, the white-coated cook, Josef, politely shooed me out. I snuck back during his off-hours, though, leaving serial, anonymous scallops in open-cut melons. Maisel, in black uniform with a white lace collar, daily mopped the stairs, laundered our clothes, and answered the door.
To my great embarrassment, a liveried chauffeur named Shalom drove me to school in a long, black limousine, letting me off at the entrance in front of a sidewalk cluster of whispering schoolmates, pointing, some hesitantly touching the metal rod on each side of the hood where small American flags fluttered whenever my father rode in the car. I made a deal with Shalom to drop me off a block early, but there, too, a few children would bend forward to peer through the darkened glass, hands cupped around wide, curious eyes.
My life was unbelievable to them, as it was to me as well. At the embassy residence everything we normally did for ourselves was now done for us by someone else, conspicuously so. On the farm in the summers, we children sensed ourselves on a stage subtly designed to teach the value of self-reliance and communal work. Now I discovered myself on another stage created to display American wealthto our poorer hosts and to diplomats from around the world. On the farm, I had wondered why we had to do everything from scratch. Now I wondered why we couldnt do the slightest thing for ourselves.
I did nothing. I didnt set the table. I didnt clear the dishes. I didnt fold laundry or tend our beautiful flower garden. What made an impression on me was not simply the contrast between hoeing the pigweed in Turner and being waited on at our embassy dining table. It was the feeling I had about myself in each place. In Turner, through doing my jobs, I felt a part of a larger whole. To my ten-year-old self, the farm tasks were not just tasks; they joined me to my playful cousins, to stories of family pranks, to rippling laughter around the dinner table. Those three weeks in August, which stretched in my imagination to half a year, offered a taste of a village style of life. As a minor contributor to this village, I was less free in one way (the chores were a bore), but more free in another (it gave me a reassuring sense of belonging to something larger than myself). This childhood experience became a prototype for later experiencesof being part of a circle of friends, a neighborhood, an academic department, a social movement.
Our embassy life offered a different way of relating to the world. Household tasks were outsourced to Maisel, Josef, Shalom, and others with whom I was not expected to have meaningful or lasting bonds. And while I lost the feeling of belonging to a community, freshly ironed clothes and favorite meals appeared as if by magic, the final product of someone elses work. As in the best market arrangements, the pay was fair, the household atmosphere pleasant. But after five months, Maisel and Josef left for England to be replaced by a jolly Greek Cypriot couple, Sharley and Jorge. A new cook, Victor, presided in the kitchen. Sharley, Jorge, Victor, and Shalom came, as it were, with the house. If household relations in Turner were as in a village, relations in our embassy home were as those in the marketplace.
Embassy lifeours and that of all the top officers in other embassieswas a project in status display, as I came to understandlater. The farther away my father, and by association, his family, seemed from hoeing corn or doing any necessary work, the greater the respect and honor accorded hima dynamic that Thorstein Veblen observed in his Theory of the Leisure Class . Our help embodied our detachment from the essential tasks of life and, since it was my fathers job to represent the United States, such display bestowed honor on it as well. As a young sidekick to this status display, I felt pampered and oddly important myself, but vaguely wondered why.
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