As Claire Langhamer points out in her Afterword to this challenging new collection, “work is one of the defining features of human existence … and yet we still know too little about feelings at work in past and present times” (255). Feelings and Work in Modern History is an innovative interrogation of the link between emotion and work. It opens up new territory, not only in the history of emotions but also, as the editors Agnes Arnold-Foster and Alison Moulds write, in the “histories of work and labour and of wider social and cultural life” (3). To this end, the essays are intended to explore “the emotional regimes and communities that underpinned … different types of work, the entanglement between occupational and personal identities and the spaces of labour and leisure available to … divergent groups” (1). The breadth of contributions in Feelings and Work in Modern History is similarly ambitious, in time, space, geography, source material, and work itself. The essays move from late nineteenth-century New York and Paris to contemporary Argentina and India, from the emotional cultures of live-in servants to the emotional training found in method acting, from a Lyons tearoom to a department of science, and from letters written in Soviet Russia to contemporary Brazilian media. Arnold-Foster and Moulds are to be congratulated for embracing such an expansive approach and for bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from history, theater, sociology, and healthcare. Feelings at Work in Modern History needs to be read by historians of emotion, work, and gender. It is, of course, impossible to do justice to all the qualities of such a collection in a short review. In disparate ways, each of these essays fulfills the aims of Arnold-Foster and Moulds in making us think about bringing emotion to the study of work.

A particular theme linking the essays is the relationship among work, gender, and emotion. Gender clearly constituted what kind of work was done by particular people. Work was also constituted by gender, with, for example, both Lyons waitresses and Brazilian businesswomen bringing what were perceived to be feminine qualities of empathy and tact in the workplace. But, as these essays clearly show, emotion also ran through and shaped diverse work experiences, whether this meant the management of emotion by workers of both sexes, the anxieties and insecurities of both men and women at the workplace, or the complex emotional landscape of childcare. Another consistent theme is the shifting emotional communities created at the workplace, as is shown in the contributions on domestic service in England and Argentina, hospital residences, and shops. Several of these essays also highlight the intersections between emotion and power in various forms, whether neoliberalism, liberal democracy, or particular campaigns such as that of anti-vivisection.

Rukmini Barua's contribution, “Negotiating Deindustrialization: Emotions and Ahmedabad's Textile Workers,” shows the promise of thinking about emotion and work. Barua looks at the experience of deindustrialization in textile mills through the prism of emotion, “as a dynamic emotional and effective process that shapes memory and animates notions of class and community” (77). Her essay shows how particular emotions—anxiety, nostalgia, and a hope for harmony—structured both workers’ responses to deindustrialization and the political approach adopted by local unions and political parties. Affect became an important battleground of labor: “emotions (or, more precisely, appropriate ways of feeling) in the face of extreme economic crisis emerged as the site on which workers and the union were pitted against one another” (82). In these ways, the histories of labor and the economy are deepened by thinking about emotion.

Other essays helpfully stress other links between work and feeling. Alison Moulds’s chapter on living in and shop assistants excavates an early attempt to think through how emotional health at the workplace and beyond became a “a category of health to be recognized and valued” (53) in conceptions of welfare and state policy, an early iteration of what might now be called workplace well-being. Agnes Arnold-Foster's careful study of hospital residences for doctors effectively shows how spaces linked to work had to be considered as sites of “emotional well-being” for the “clinical competence” of doctors (71). In both examples, the feelings generated by the workplace had to be wound together with the conception of work itself. Hannah Parker's, Sally Horrocks’s, and Paul Merchant's contributions point to the constellation of feelings—joy, anxiety, resentment, gratitude—that were critical to the production of disparate work processes, whether Soviet modernization or the production of scientific knowledge.

Of course, a collection as ambitious and innovative as Feelings and Work in Modern History raises some important critical questions. One is about the very capaciousness of terms such as “work” and “feeling.” One sometimes wanted a greater definition or interrogation of these terms. Claire English's chapter on childcare usefully touches upon the confusion about defining the work of childcare, which, as English points out, both “feels emotional” and “feels like work” (242), a tension that is the subject of Sarah Stoller's recent work Inventing the Working Parent (2023). More attention might have been given elsewhere to delineating differences between political, cultural, and economic work, for example, or between the disparate feelings generated along class lines. There might have been more sense here, for example of the different kinds of feelings or drudgery, alienation, or even fear associated with industrial work compared to retail or professional work. With respect to fear, for example, though James Brown's chapter on whistleblowing is fascinating, a potentially important avenue of exploration would be the emotional effect of abusive workplaces, revealed, for example, in work tribunals.

These latter comments only testify to the importance and the innovation of Feelings and Work in Modern History, which is a major intervention in the history of work and emotions. One can hope that it will provoke further work in this area.