Keeping a husband is skilled emotional labor with material stakes for women

Evidence

There is an art to “catching a husband”: “keeping” him is a profession. It takes a great deal of skill. A prudent sister said to a cranky young wife: “Be careful, making scenes with Marcel will make you lose your situation.” The stakes are the highest: material and moral security, a home of one’s own, wifely dignity, a more or less successful substitute for love and happiness. The wife quickly learns that her erotic attraction is the weakest of her weapons; it disappears with familiarity … She also counts on the force of habit, on the charm he finds in a pleasant home, his taste for good food, his affection for his children; she tries to “make him proud” by her way of entertaining, dressing, and exercising authority over him with her advice and her influence; as much as she can, she will make herself indispensable, either by her social success or by her work. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1324

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the wife’s situation as a ‘profession’ — the analytical framing of marriage as unacknowledged labor.
• XREF: Connects to the theme of invisible/emotional domestic labor later theorized by Hochschild and feminist economics. — connects to: Women’s organizational leadership raised both their own and their husbands’ power — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 315; Both patriarchal and liberatory marriage scripts equally enable and constrain women through savoir-bound power — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1205
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Women’s organizational leadership raised both their own and their husbands’ power — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 315; Both patriarchal and liberatory marriage scripts equally enable and constrain women through savoir-bound power — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1205