Arlie Russell Hochschild

“Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn't get done.”

“Each person's drive to overwork is unique, and doing too much numbs every workaholic's emotions differently. Sometimes overwork numbs depression, sometimes anger, sometimes envy, sometimes sexuality. Or the overworker runs herself ragged in a race for attention.”

“Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.”

“The emotional magnets beneath home and workplace are in the process of being reversed. Work has become a form of 'home' and home has become 'work.'”

“In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.”

“What is for sale, what is not? If we really think that making your apologies to your wife or reading a bedside story to your child are activities that we can pay a stranger to do, then, without moralising, what has happened to us?”

“Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.”

“The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.”

“And we're in the middle of a 'perfect storm.' These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.”

“Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes--through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor.”

“The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.”

“And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.”

“If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.”

“It's been a long struggle. But we've made huge progress. I mean, when I started at Berkeley, women weren't allowed to be part of the band. No women were allowed into the male faculty club. I mean, I was there. I remember that! The worlds were so divided. So the change has been huge.”

“People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'”

“Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?”

“The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel--happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, resentful to pay taxes. The left sees prejudice.”

“The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'”

“The strategy we need to pursue is one of recovering our time - to push back on our hours of work. We need to form a new alliance between feminist groups, labor unions, child advocates, progressive corporations, and the federal government insofar as it's willing to pursue a family-friendly agenda.”

“What emotions would we experience if we weren't working ourselves to death? What wishes drive us? What fantasies hitch themselves to our continual busyness? Only when we step away from our frenzy can we know.”