The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of three New York Times Notable Books, has been one of the freshest and most popular voices in feminist sociology over the last decades. Her influential, unusually perceptive work has opened up new ways of seeing family life, love, gender, the workplace, market transactions―indeed, American life itself. This book gathers some of Hochschild's most important and most widely read articles in one place, includes new work, and brings several essays to American audiences for the first time. Each chapter reflects on the complex negotiations we make day to day to juggle the conflicting demands of love and work. Taken together, they are a compelling, often startling, look at how our everyday lives are shaped by modern capitalism.

These essays, rich with the details of everyday life, explore larger social issues by looking at a series of intimate moments in people's lives. Among them, "Love and Gold" investigates the globalization of love by focusing on care workers who leave their own children and elderly to care for children and the elderly in wealthy countries. In "The Commodity Frontier," Hochschild considers an Internet ad for a "beautiful, smart, hostess, good masseuse―$400/week," and explores our responses to personal services for hire. In "From the Frying Pan into the Fire" she asks if capitalism is a religion. In addition to these recent essays, several of Hochschild's important early essays, such as "Inside the Clockwork of Male Careers," have been revised and updated for this collection.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Feminism, Gender

322 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 2003

About the author

Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Outsourced Self, The Time Bind, Global Woman, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

an important book.

[Maricruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

La mercantilización de la vida íntima reúne ensayos escritos desde finales de los setenta hasta los 2000 y poquito, sobre temas que conciernen de forma muy directa al feminismo. Y ¿sabéis qué? Que ni siquiera los más antiguos han perdido demasiada vigencia. Vamos, que al margen de ciertos avances evidentes, las mujeres seguimos estando bien jodidas. Eso convierte este libro en una lectura algo amarga, sin dulzura que palie lo agrio como no sea el estilo de Arlie Russell, que está en las antípodas del tremendismo y que quizás precisamente por ello llega al meollo de ciertas cuestiones importantísimas sobre las que toda feminista ha de reflexionar: cómo el capitalismo ha aprovechado a su favor ciertas teorías de la igualdad, de qué modo lo social conforma nuestros sentimientos o las estrategias emocionales que tenemos que emplear las mujeres para vivir en un mundo donde los hombres han avanzado ideológicamente más en la teoría que en la práctica.

¡Vida de pareja! ¡Conciliación! ¡Tareas domésticas! ¡Autoengaño! ¡Y desde una perspectiva sociológica!

Impagable, además, el retrato final que hace la autora del ambiente académico ya no solo como socióloga, sino desde lo más personal.