Labor of Love
Moira Wegel
[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]
In a memorable scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a fire-and-brimstone Christian terrorises a young pregnant woman with tales of how those who “clutch-and-hug dance” damage their unborn babies. Labor of Love details a number of similarly extreme and absurd US courtship cautions over the years. One particular gem is colonial-era “bundling”, where two young daters are encouraged to sleep together, but in separate sacks “shut with a drawstring at the neck”. Sometimes, for extra protection, “a piece of wood called a ‘bundling board’ was placed between them.” If this foolproof system failed, of course, the woman bore the burden of sexual promiscuity. This book is far more than a catalogue of historical courtship quirks, though. Wegel shows how rituals of dating, sex and childbirth have always converged with gendered social and economic expectations, and how women and non-heterosexual men still generally perform the majority of emotional and cultural labour in seeking and maintaining romantic relationships.
Indeed, the author troubles the idea of a contemporary “free for all” in US dating, finally liberated from excessive sexual regulation and female disempowerment. Wegel argues that the way love is produced and consumed simply changes to reflect the economic circumstances of the time. Thus, the economic stability of the 1950s generated a kind of “romantic full employment”. In contrast, the contemporary moment blurs all lines between work, leisure and love, extending neoliberal mandates of productivity, lifehacking and niche self-branding to the romantic sphere. The book is particularly strong on economically and sexually managed time, connecting the disappearance of defined “on the clock” worktime with mythoi around the female “biological clock” as a limitation relevant to women alone. Wegel’s aim is not to de-romanticise the pursuit of love, but to re-romanticise the connections that are possible when daters perform a different kind of emotional labour – the work of understanding, unraveling and unlearning the classed, gendered and raced assumptions that shape and perpetuate oppressive, individualistic relationships. If further studies pay a little more attention to non-middle-class, non-white, non-straight romantic communities, this lofty goal might just be in sight.
Words – Gillian Moore
