This week on The Future of Teamwork podcast, Dane hosted USA Today’s “Gratitude Guru” Chris Schembra. Chris spoke with Dane about how practicing gratitude can change your life and outlook.
For a while now I’ve been curious if a mantra of thankfulness or gratitude could create a form of Karl Marx’s “false consciousness” for women at home. Although Marx is infamous for his controversial political perspectives and his writings on how different economic systems are related to social class stratification, these perspectives grew out of Marx’s extensive analyses of how different groups of people interact. Specifically, Marx argued that ideological or institutional practices could conceal the exploitation of regular people by the very wealthy. More recently, the term refers to a way of thinking that prevents people from seeing their actual economic or social situation. Is it possible that an attitude of gratitude could lead caregivers to create a false consciousness whereby an emphasis on appreciation leads caregivers, especially women, to justify an unequal distribution of labor?
Women have long performed more housework than men. In the 1970s and 1980s, when women moved away from working in the home to enter the workforce, Hochschild’s seminal piece (1989) found that women came home to do what she called “the second shift.” Women entering the workforce didn’t lead to men and women sharing housework more evenly. Instead, women came home and performed their second job.
This gap persists today. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, women perform 47 more minutes of housework than men every day. That’s five and a half hours a week. To work the same amount of housework hours as husbands in a calendar year, women would need to stop doing housework on August 29th.*
Sociologists argue that this isn’t because men have bonded as an evil cabal and tricked us into performing more housework while they play in their mancaves. Instead, it’s about how we socially construct women’s work as a way of demonstrating “being a real woman” and showing love and care for their families. So cooking, cleaning, and laundry are ways to “do gender” and communicate womanliness and affection (West and Zimmerman 1987). Simply put, women demonstrate their gender and love for their families via housework. This then works to conceal that so-called women’s work actually is work.
So I’ve worried that an attitude of gratitude could become a form of false consciousness. For example, “I’m so grateful for you and us – that I’ll reject any resentful feelings around this situation and accept what is inherently unfair.” This isn’t to say that women don’t have agency. They do. But social norms are a strong force in our society. Just ask any person whose been asked to break a social norm in Sociology 101, wore the wrong attire to an event, or laughed at a funeral.
This idea is furthered by the sense that the commercialization of gratitude seems marketed toward women. A simple Google search of “grateful mug” leads to the images below. When marketing the ideology of gratitude on a mug, a relatively gender-neutral object, the coffee mug certainly seems directed at women (unless I’m missing something and men’s taste in mugs has recently changed).
Agarwal (2022) argues that compared to men, women are expected to demonstrate more positive emotions – including gratitude. Combined, we have the societal expectation of women needing to be grateful, mass marketing efforts targeting women and gratitude, and the social construction of women’s work as demonstrating womanliness and love for their families. Could this lead women to create a false consciousness of gratitude regarding housework?
I emailed Chris.
He responded that, yes, women could create a sense of pseudo-gratitude.
In delineating between pseudo-gratitude and genuine gratitude, Chris creates an analytical tool for all of us to question if we are creating a false consciousness that could ring disingenuous to ourselves or others.
From Chris’s perspective, we need to examine when social forces are pressuring us to express gratitude when we aren’t actually experiencing gratitude. In acknowledging that pseudo-gratification exists and is problematic for everyone, Chris creates a space for women, or anyone, to examine their feelings to determine if the gratitude is out of a sense of obligation or a genuine expression of gratitude. Identifying when we can’t or don’t have to be grateful becomes a tool to determine why we aren’t grateful. This allows us to dig deeper into the realities of our situations and create meaningful change in our lives – for which we can be grateful.
*Beyond the Litepaper
In episode 17 of the podcast, Communities as Teams & Expanding Opportunities for Women with Reena Gupta, Reena talked about how to support mothers returning to work. She recommends that the family sit down and have an explicit conversation about how other family members will do the work that Mom previously accomplished. You can hear her talk about it here:
Chris believes there are three parts to giving and one of those parts is that gratitude should cost you something rather than be easily given because it will mean more. It is likely that families who institute Reena’s above tip will help moms return to work and to be truly grateful for their families. You can listen to Chris talk about it here:
References
Hochschild, A. R., & Machung, A. (1989). The second shift: working parents and the revolution at home. New York, N.Y., Viking.
West, C., & Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing Gender. Gender & Society, 1, 125-151.