The term “emotional labour” is applied to an array of home-based activities — from keeping mental to-do lists, to remembering to call your in-laws on their birthdays. Some advocate the need to teach boys emotional labour, or identify it as the unpaid jobs men still don’t understand.
But that’s not what emotional labour is, according to the sociologist who coined the term in 1983, in her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.
