Arlie Russell Hochschild author photo
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Arlie Russell Hochschild

Born: January 15, 1940 – Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Arlie Russell Hochschild is an American sociologist whose work examines emotions, labor, family life, and political culture. She is best known for The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land. Her scholarship popularized concepts such as emotional labor and the second shift, shaping sociology and public debate.

Biography & Author's Journey

Arlie Russell Hochschild was born in Boston on January 15, 1940, and grew up in a family shaped by diplomacy, movement, and close attention to social nuance. Her father, a lawyer who moved into State Department work during and after World War II, took the family through Washington-area suburbs and abroad; her mother, a homemaker and volunteer, left a different kind of imprint, showing her daughter how much social life depends on managing feeling, reading people, and noticing what goes unsaid. A posting in Tel Aviv when Hochschild was 12, followed by adolescence in New Zealand, sharpened her sense of being an outsider and made questions of belonging, culture, and status feel concrete. She studied international relations at Swarthmore College, then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where the civil-rights era, the women’s movement, and the campus politics of the 1960s became part of her formation as a scholar and writer. ((https://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/attachments/transcript-ohi-Arlie-Hochschild-08-09-2023final.docx.pdf))

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Quotes

quote
We're being invited into living ghostwritten lives
-The ideas interview: Arlie Russell Hochschild
quote
The solution is not for men and women to share alienated work. The solution is for men and women to share enchanted work
-The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’
quote
This, of course, opened a whole can of worms, which I love
-American Philosophical Society oral history transcript
quote
To take my own alarm system off and to try and cross an empathy wall
-Why red states depend on and distrust government the most
quote
The whole thing opened out a world
-UC Berkeley Legacy Project Interview
quote
I came to see it as life in a stalled revolution
-UC Berkeley Legacy Project Interview
quote
a story that feels as if it were true
-Strangers in Their Own Land
quote
an obstacle to deep understanding of another person
-Strangers in Their Own Land

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"Arlie Hochschild gives us a vital roadmap to bridging the deep divides in our political landscape"

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