103 Quotes by 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.

The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our.

The basic feeling around town was that one shouldn’t get too hung up on the environment, feel too nostalgic for cleaner times, or be too retro; that wasn’t what residents were ‘supposed to feel.’ That’s because a fracking boom was on, and many new industries were on their way to Lake Charles to process the natural gas it freed from the cracked earth.

Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers and felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it as children. They knew it and respect it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted – often legally – this same wilderness.

Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves – white middle- and working-class people.

Three factors – the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages at work – have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.

A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.

To televisionize any serious problem, the program directors face the task of making the message ‘go down smooth’ until the audience is delivered to the commercial.

As one man explains, “A lot of us have done okay, but we don’t want to lose what we’ve got, see it given away.” When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air give to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to support non-working people and non-deserving people – and not just tax money, but honor too.