The role of emotional labour in doula practice

Childbirth is an emotionally complex experience. Some women seek additional support during pregnancy and labour, beyond what is typically offered in a hospital setting. Birth doulas fill this role by providing continuous emotional and physical support during labour. Based on interviews with 26 doulas practicing in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how the work of providing emotional support to women during childbirth and avoiding conflict with hospital staff requires significant emotional labour – the purposeful management of emotion to incite certain feelings in clients or customers. Doulas perform emotional labour to accomplish two main tasks: managing their client's emotions during childbirth to help create positive birth experiences, and concealing emotions from hospital staff to avoid generating conflict. The inherently emotional context of childbirth also complicates demands for emotional labour, since doulas must balance their genuine emotional reactions to witnessing someone give birth with carefully managing their own affect to encourage particular feelings in their clients. Taken together, these findings indicate that doulas navigate a complex web of “feeling rules” that requires them to oscillate between manufactured emotion and authentic feeling – a demand that can be mentally exhausting. Overall, the emotional labour they perform seems to require a great deal of effort and skill – work that is often invisible and devalued. This study reinforces the importance of social support during the perinatal period by demonstrating that doulas attempt to “create” positive birth experiences, despite not playing a role in the medical management of the labour.