Fed Up

Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

De: Gemma Hartley

Narrado por: Therese Plummer

A rousing call to arms, packed with surprising insights, that explores how carrying ""the mental load""—the thankless day-to-day anticipating of needs and solving of problems large and small—is adversely affecting women’s lives and feeding gender inequality, and shows the way forward for better balancing our lives.

Launching a heated national conversation with her viral article ""Women Aren’t Nags; We’re Just Fed Up""—viewed over two billion times—journalist Gemma Hartley gave voice to the frustration and anger of countless women putting in the hidden, underappreciated, and absolutely draining mental work that consists of keeping everyone in their lives comfortable and happy. Bringing long overdue awareness to the daunting reality of emotional labor in our lives, Hartley defines the largely invisible but demanding, time-consuming, and exhausting ""worry work"" that falls disproportionately and unfairly on all women—no matter their economic class or level of education.

Synthesizing a wide variety of sources—history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology—Hartley makes the invisible visible, unveiling the surprising shapes emotional labor takes at work, at home, in relationships, and in parenting. With on-the-ground reporting, identifiable personal stories and interviews from around the world, this feminist manifesto will empower women to transform their inner dialogue and give all women the emotional fortitude and courage to ask for what we most want—without shame, without guilt, and without the emotional baggage.

Beyond naming the problem, Fed Up offers practical advice and solutions for teaching both men and women how to wield emotional labor to live more full and satisfying lives. Hartley helps us to see emotional labor not as a problem to be overcome, but as a genderless virtue we can all learn to channel in our quest to make a better, more egalitarian world for ourselves and most importantly, our children. Insightful, surprising, deeply relatable, and filled with all too familiar moments, this provocative, intelligent, and empathetic guide is essential reading for every woman who has had enough with feeling fed up.

Repetitive Yet Good

First of all, I found this book repetitive in the extreme ... same idea repeated hundreds of times in nearly the same words for over 250 pages. Yet I feel that as a mother and wife it is nice to hear that you are not alone in a lot of the things she explained and that females are not the only ones that feel this way. Try listening to this with a male or even your husband so you can hear that wow he feeling the same way and you have not been aware. See as humans we are all different and in a relationship where one might be fed up another can think it is perfection.

Emotional labor burnout

For as much as I understand that men are human beings, I always see this narrative that women have to make space for them to develop their emotional labor skills, but it’s still our job to guide them through it. There needs to be accountability that men should be the leaders in their homes that they position themselves to be elsewhere and just take ownership of their home life in the same manner. Women should not be expected to lead men in their self-awareness journey any longer. The author comes from a place of love for her husband, but it’s still exhausting to her that it’s still our job to show men the way.

Good information if you can get past the tone.

I work professionally with families and this title was recommended at a training. I have seen the emotional labor divide in many contexts, and this book explains it in an accessible way. However, the narrator was too dramatic and whiny for a non-fiction text, and I almost stopped listening because the first few chapters sounded like a frustrated, nagging wife complaining about her clueless husband. The substance of the book got better, but I sort of wish I had read it instead.

Good discussion, but repetitive

I really wanted to enjoy this book more. The topics seemed fairly repetitive and no solution was brought up until the very end, at which point I wasn't convinced it was a solution at all.

Best book EVER!

This was eye opening and even felt necessary for me raising a Son. READ NOW!