Stand by Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment

• In Event: 381 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Work and Family: Session II

Abstract

Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This paper uses data from over 50 in-depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men’s unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. The author finds that wives of unemployed men seek to encourage their husbands to persevere in the emotionally arduous job-search process as they worry about their husband’s well-being and their families’ finances. Wives’ emotion work takes the following forms: actively encouraging husbands to continue job-searching; giving space; and concealing their own concerns. Wives also “disengage” by choosing at times to protect their own emotional well-being. These findings highlight how wives’ emotion work is a resource for unemployed husbands as they job-search. As such, these findings extend research on emotion work by illuminating how participants in this context link wives’ emotion work to material outcomes in the form of employment for their husbands.

Author

• Aliya Hamid Rao, Stanford University