Comfort and Struggle: Emotion Work in Family Life

Though family life is typically associated with emotion rather than work, the concept of emotion work reveals the effort behind family feeling. Existing literature on family emotion work emphasizes caregiving and interpersonal support—activities associated with the housewife ideal of the industrial age. This article examines not only such caregiving and support activities but also several other forms of emotion work that become visible when we consider families whose lives diverge from this privileged ideal.