Review: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride”

Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs

I sometimes write on the top floor of an old Vermont woolen mill near its once necessary river. I fell for the space because I grew up in a New England factory town and my strongest ties connect to such buildings. I am always drawn to them, to what their emptiness holds still.

I learned about the power of absence from my father, an industrial laborer who became a union organizer for the Chemical Workers Union. He usually worked in the shipping department, but he earned time-and-a-half scrubbing the tanks where vinyl chloride was produced. My father’s observations taught me how to look for what I might not readily see.

After picking me up from my friend’s apartment on a winter’s night, he might notice the locked front doors of St. Cecilia’s, the French Catholic church that rose above the tenements surrounding it. Workers’ earnings had paid for that big church and their hands had built it. If its doors remained open on a night like this, cold people could get warm, and tired people could find a much-needed seat. The forests we passed on drives to visit faraway cousins were also dense with opportunity: trees in need of cutting, trails in need of clearing, tasks that could teach unemployed young people. These observations were clues, which strengthened our bond of companionable silence. Everyone, he said, needs to be of use.

This “feeling of use,” the personal pride that is bound to it, and its systemic origins, is what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is seeking to make visible in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The book, which is set in eastern Kentucky, grew out of her longstanding interest in emotion and its material conditions. Care gaps. Wealth gaps. Equality gaps. Health gaps. She pays close attention to what we tell ourselves, what we do and don’t express about the circumstances of our lives, and how our emotional logic fares against the facts of forces beyond our control. She is alert to cultural narratives that run against or beneath what appears in the news.

In this sense, Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs: the absence of time that accompanies lengthening American workdays (The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home and Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work); the absence of supports for caregiving and intimate life (Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, and The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us). Over the last decade, she’s become interested in how emotion operates in politics, especially among the white, rural, blue-collar men who were longtime Democrats. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which began to map some of the emotional terrain of the Tea Party, Hochschild came up with the concept of “deep story.” She’d spent years traversing Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, a region poisoned by petrochemicals, trying to understand why its inhabitants resisted basic environmental protections to clean up the land they lived on and loved. Deep stories underly commitments and perceptions that can seem counterintuitive; they resist facts and moral precepts, and tend to be told in metaphor. “We’re not fully aware of them. They’re dreamlike,” she says. Every one of us has them.