There is a word in feminist literature — emotional labour — that was coined in 1983 by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe the work of managing one's own feelings to fulfil the emotional requirements of a job. It has since been expanded to describe something much more familiar: the unpaid, unacknowledged work of managing the emotional lives of everyone around you.
In Indian households, this work has a face. It is almost always a woman's.
What Invisible Labour Actually Looks Like
When people talk about women's domestic labour in India, they usually mean the visible kind: cooking, cleaning, childcare. These are enormous, quantifiable contributions. But the invisible labour — the mental and emotional work that makes a household function socially — is rarely named even by the women performing it.
It looks like this: remembering that her mother-in-law's birthday is next week and planning the celebration. Noticing that her husband is in a difficult mood and managing everyone else's behaviour around it. Remembering every family member's dietary restrictions, medical appointments, school deadlines, and social obligations. Being the person who keeps track of everyone's feelings, and is expected to regulate her own so they don't inconvenience anyone.
None of this appears in GDP calculations. None of it is acknowledged at the dinner table. It is simply expected, performed, and made invisible by the very completeness of its execution.
The Cost of Constant Management
The cost of carrying this invisible load is not abstract. Research on the mental health of women in dual-income Indian households consistently shows that women experience significantly higher rates of stress, anxiety, and burnout than their male partners — even when both partners work equivalent hours outside the home. The difference is the second shift: the domestic and emotional work that waits when the professional work ends.
Women who carry this load often describe a specific kind of exhaustion that is difficult to articulate because it has no single cause. It is not the tiredness of having done too much. It is the tiredness of never being truly off duty — of always having some part of your mind engaged in the management of other people's lives.
Managing others' moods · Mediating family conflicts · Keeping track of social obligations · Performing cheerfulness when exhausted · Anticipating needs before they are expressed · Being the "easy one" in every difficult situation · Apologising to maintain peace · Making everyone else comfortable before yourself
Why We Don't Name It
The reason this labour remains invisible is not that women don't notice it. They notice it acutely. The reason is that naming it feels dangerous — like ingratitude, like complaint, like a failure to appreciate the family one has been given.
Indian women are socialised from childhood to understand that the health of the family is their responsibility. A woman who says, "I am exhausted by managing everyone else's emotional lives" is implicitly saying, "I don't want this role." And the cultural response to that statement is not sympathy. It is judgment.
So the labour continues, unnamed. And the exhaustion accumulates, unnamed. And the resentment builds, unnamed — until it finds the only outlet available to it: silence, or collapse, or the controlled fury that some women channel into art.
Naming It is the First Act
I wrote about this in She and the World because I believe that language is the beginning of change. Before you can refuse a burden, you have to be able to call it by its name. Before you can share a labour, you have to make it visible.
This is not an argument that emotional labour should never be performed. It is an argument that it should be recognised, valued, shared more equitably, and never performed at the cost of the person performing it disappearing entirely into its demands.
Indian women have been managing invisible labour for generations. The least we can do is finally see it.