Arlie Russell Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild (born January 15, 1940) is an American professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer.

Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally.

She is the author of nine books including, most recently, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Hochschild graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962 where she majored in International Relations.

After, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, whose faculty she soon joined.

Hochschild has been married to her husband, writer Adam Hochschild, since June 1965.

They met at a Quaker work camp in Spanish Harlem when she was 20 and he was 17.

Although they aren’t practicing Quakers, they still like to embody some of the Quaker values, which are also what drew her to Swarthmore College.

Hochschild joined Swarthmore as a sophomore transfer student after spending one year in New Zealand for college, where her family was located at the time.

She and her husband used their learning from Swarthmore to participate in “civil rights work in Vicksburg, Miss.” before their marriage in 1965.

She later became a mother herself and raised two sons named David Russell and Gabriel Russell and currently has one granddaughter.

Hochschild says that “By making herself a player in this evolving social phenomenon, she’s signaling, 'You’re not just an insect being scientifically inspected by the white-coated scientists.' Here, she met an Indian journalist, Aditya Ghosh, whom she later helped to get a Ph.D.

Prior to joining the staff at University of California, Berkeley, she was an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1969–1971.

She wrote her first book, The Unexpected Community: Portrait of an Old Age Subculture, which was focused on how community affects the differences in elderly people's mental health, in 1973.

As a graduate student, Hochschild was greatly inspired by the writings of well-known sociologists, Erving Goffman and C. Wright Mills.

In White Collar, Mills argued that we "sell our personality."

This resonated with Hochschild, however, she felt that more needed to be added.

As she writes,

Hochschild went on to create concepts that illuminate the power of emotion in social life.

Although Hochschild identifies as more “left-leaning” politically, her work shows consideration and reflection on those opposite of her on the political spectrum.

While she may not agree with them politically, she understands the importance of learning and connecting with those who do not agree with her personally on politics.

In her book Strangers in Their Own Land – Anger and Mourning on the American Right, she discusses the motives behind members of the Tea Party learning about them and how their lives led them to support political figures such as Donald Trump.

She spent five years in Lake Charles, Louisiana to examine their community, as it is a republican dominated environment.

In The Managed Heart (1983), The Second Shift (1989), The Time Bind (1997) and many of her other books, she continues the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills by drawing links between private troubles and public issues.

Her impact worldwide is recognized, as her books have been translated into 16 different languages (World Affairs).

She is also the author of a children's book titled Coleen The Question Girl, illustrated by Gail Ashby.

Hochschild seeks to make visible the underlying role of emotion and the work of managing it, the paid form of which she calls "emotional labor."

For her, "the expression and management of emotion are social processes. What people feel and express depend on societal norms, one's social category and position, and cultural factors."

In 2021 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Additionally, she is a member of various other sociological societies; such as the American Sociological Association, the Gerontological Society of America, the Sociological Research Association, the Sociologists for Women in Society, and the American Federation of Teachers.

Arlie Hochschild was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Alene (Libbey) and Francis Henry Russell, a diplomat who served in Israel, New Zealand, Ghana, and Tunisia.

In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild says that her first experiences reaching out and getting to know people different from her stem from her father's profession as a diplomat.

Hochschild grew up in a household where her mother was the primary caregiver and her father was the provider.

Her mother "volunteered for the PTA, and helped start a preschool program in Montgomery County, Maryland, all the while supporting [her] father's job as a government official and diplomat".

Hochschild drew on her positive childhood experiences to study and write on caregiving and having a loving relationship with your children.

In the preface of her book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she says that her mother was a wonderful woman who committed her life to care for her family and was excellent at it, but who never appeared pleased doing so.

In Hochschild's early life, she became fascinated with the boundaries people draw between inner experience and outer appearance.

Living internationally at a young age challenged her to see the world in a unique way.

As she writes in the preface to her book The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling, "I found myself passing a dish of peanuts among many guests and looking up at their smiles; diplomatic smiles can look different when seen from below than when seen straight on. Afterward, I would listen to my mother and father interpret various gestures. The tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul . . . I learned to convey messages not simply from person to person but from Sofia to Washington, from Peking to Paris, and from Paris to Washington. Had I passed The Peanuts to a person, I wondered, or to an actor? Where did the person end and the act begin? Just how is a person related to an act?"

The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling explores how we grapple with the emotions we are truly feeling versus the emotions we think we are supposed to feel.