Abstract
Tupperware parties are often associated with women. But are they a common occurrence, and, if so, what is their relevance to feminist scholars? As Jamie Mullaney and Janet Hinson Shope find in their engaging and excellent ethnography, 16.1 million women across the United States now work as “consultants,” a Direct Home Sales (DHS) term for their workforce, selling cosmetics, stoneware, even sex toys in this 30-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Drawing on interviews with DHS consultants, their clientele, and participant observation of numerous events, Paid to Party critically examines how in-home selling promises to transform contemporary American women’s thinking about the conflicts between balancing family and work.
To address women’s struggle with work–family balance, DHS recruiters emphasize what they call the “F words.” Unlike conventional workplaces with rigid time structures, DHS consultants have “flexibility” and “freedom,” and are told that they can put “family first” in doing this kind of work at home. Further, women who become consultants must not only be “friendly,” they must also be “fun” in the parties they plan for their “friends.” In other words, like many other interactive service jobs, this one requires management of one’s time and emotions, or “feelings.” In analyzing these processes, Mullaney and Shope develop a new conceptual term, “emoting time,” one that brings together the concepts of “emotional labor” (Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, 1983) and “time work” (Flaherty’s 2003 Social Psychology Quarterly article). Flaherty’s term describes “efforts to promote or express a particular temporal experience” (19). At the same time that DHS recruiters argue that selling at home requires friendliness and fun, they also contend that it allows women to put family first, to work for as long as they want, and in the ways that they want. In the author’s argument, the concept of “emoting time” captures these reciprocal processes: “how time transforms emotions and how emotions transform time” (15).
This concept is an important one because it enables feminists to think about the conflicts between paid work and family obligations in a new way. For instance, while a mother may feel guilty about leaving a young child in day care because it takes time away that she would like to spend with them, this feeling may change as the child grows older. Not only do our experiences generate emotions, the meanings we ascribe to them have temporal rhythms. These meanings, in turn, shape our emotional responses to new situations. As their ethnographic research demonstrates, DHS parties are intended to change how women experience work—it’s fun and it’s flexible because you can do it when you want. In turn, these meanings and experiences of time influence women’s emotional reactions—the flexibility DHS provides translates into feelings of autonomy and personal satisfaction, “without feeling guilty about not being there” (152).
However, there are limits of putting these ideals into practice. A sick child, a school that closes early, or some other unforeseen event means that a DHS party will have to be cancelled. Moreover, because these are “bad jobs” with no benefits (Kalleberg’s Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, 2011), there is no sick leave to buffer those times when it’s not possible to work. Consultants who can’t work are penalized economically. Moreover, a party that doesn’t go well means DHS consultants won’t make money. As the authors argue, despite its rhetoric, DHS does not transcend the problems of balancing family and work. Instead, its ideology and practice reinforces a traditional heterosexual family structure with a male breadwinner. The median gross annual income for direct sellers was $2,420. While consultants who worked 40 hours a week could make up to $34,120, most women did not, earning a supplemental income in their households, while the problems of balancing work and family remained.
In sum, this fascinating ethnography would work well in many undergraduate sociology courses on the family, gender, work and occupations, or the sociology of emotions. Further, the concept of “emoting time” deserves serious attention in research on other occupations and professions (See Disch and O’Brien’s 2007 piece in Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations, edited by Aikau, Erickson, and Pierce, for a provocative example of academic labor and time). How does “emoting time” operate in among secretaries, waitresses, lawyers, doctors, or the clergy? How does race influence “emoting time” (cf. Harvey Wingfield’s 2010 article in Social Problems). This last question raises one issue that the authors could have attended to more carefully. Though their sample was predominantly white and middle-class, I wondered to what extent race played into the interplay between emotions and temporal rhythms. Whiteness, gender, and middle-class status create boundaries rendering some feelings more legitimate than others (cf. Wilkins’s Wannabes, Goths and Christians, 2008). Would similar dynamics operate among African American or Latino women in thinking about paid work and family obligations balance? These are all questions worth pursuing in future research.