‘Nothing to Worry About’: Emotion Work, Contraceptive Responsibility, and Pregnancy Prevention in College

• In Event: 4463 - Framing Reproductive Decision-making

Abstract

Gendered feeling rules regulating women’s emotional expression prescribe that women do the majority of emotion work in intimate relationships. Although emotion work in marriages has been well documented, few studies have examined how partners manage emotion work in unmarried sexual relationships and how that division of emotion work might contribute to gender inequality. We analyze 57 in-depth interviews with university-attending women to show how worry about pregnancy in unmarried heterosexual relationships constitutes a form of emotion work that is disproportionately done by women. Our findings suggest that women’s worry about unintended pregnancy is chronic, exacting a burden on women’s time as well as their mental well-being. Women navigate the burden of their worry about unintended pregnancy with two main strategies: 1) Seeking and 2) Concealing. We refer to seeking as women who pursue assurances that they are not pregnant (such as pregnancy tests and emergency contraceptives) to assuage the emotional burden of their worry about pregnancy. Further, by concealing we refer to women attempting to manage their emotions by hiding their worry about unintended pregnancy from their partners and other loved ones in order to alleviate their partners’ emotional burden and their own. These strategies largely perpetuate gendered feeling rules on women’s emotional expression and shift more of the emotional burden for unintended pregnancy onto women, making emotional management of avoiding unintended pregnancy a labor-intensive process for women.

Authors

• Abigail Nawrocki, Purdue University

• Christie Sennott, Purdue University

• Laurie Elizabeth James-Hawkins, University of Essex