"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women." I’m guessing you’ve heard this quote before, because It was the quote heard ‘round the internet in November 2020 when sociologist Jessica Calarco gave an interview to Anne Helen Petersen about her research on pandemic-related childcare disruptions. I felt this quote in my bones the first time I heard it. It’s hard for me to even think about that time in my life and in our society without getting angry. Vaccines were on the horizon, but no one was sure exactly when they’d start reaching people. We were in the midst of a beyond stressful election. In my community, bars and restaurants were open, but not schools. My husband and I were both working. We had baby twins and a kindergartener whom we were expected to teach to read “during our free time.” And while the US had a weak safety net before the pandemic, so many of us felt what remained of it dissolve under our feet.
Fast forward to 2024. Jessica Calarco has kept up with her sharp insights backed by great data and research in her new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. In the book she helps unwind some of the intractable but often muffled problems about our country’s lack of support for women and families. She sees her work as helping to “un-gaslight” people in helping us all see clearly who is benefiting from the status quo, especially around the belief that “good choices” are all we need to save us. Her hope is that this can help build solidarity, and hopefully inspire us to come together to tackle some of these problems.
Jess sat down with my colleague from Better Life Lab Rebecca Gale to talk about the book. Rebecca writes the wonderful new Substack, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Hard, where she shares research, reporting, and solutions (lots of solutions!) to the childcare crisis in America. Whether you are new to some of the systemic issues with childcare or a salty vet like me, you’ll definitely learn something from reading Rebecca’s work. Give it a subscribe.
As part of my summer swap series, where I’m sharing some of my favorite Substack writers’ work, today I’ll be sharing a thoughtful Q and A between Jess and Rebecca about how much our society’s emphasis on individualism has skewed how we think about social policy and what we need it for. So much of our current culture props up an economic order that leads to a perpetual state of anxiety and unreasonable pressure and expectations on mothers and caregivers.
I’ll now turn it over to Rebecca, for a lightly edited and condensed Q+A with Jess.
Q. Your book talks about the United States’ insistence on maintaining the illusion of DIY society - that each of us should be making our own decisions and taking care of our problems without help from anyone else. But we know that many people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives - why has this illusion endured for so long?
Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don’t need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems - child care, health care - they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations. That is threatening to people; it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us - exploitation. They have this interest in maintaining this illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.
Q: Really?
Jess: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s and then was imported to the US for manufacturers to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the US and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.
Q. So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care, and why women are expected to make up the difference?
Jess: part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don’t have a social safety net, like universal child care, universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it’s not ever going to be work within our profit-based economic system without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.
We have pushed the high labor intensive work disproportionately onto women, and you can see that in industries like child care, home health care services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable - women, prisoners and immigrants.
Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as something that is somehow the moral or emotional benefits that must make up for what is not paid. So you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.
Q. You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of “Good Choices Won’t Save Us.” Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they’d never have a need for a social safety net?
Jess: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don’t have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. You won’t need protection because you will have made choices instead. This has been fully debunked - a social safety net does protect people.
People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It’s not that choices don’t matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.
Q. What about childbirth? Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes.
Jess: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can’t manage. [Whether] it’s childbirth, environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can’t manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people.
We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it’s your fault if you didn’t figure it out and make it.
Q. Let's talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you’ve posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?
Jess: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.
I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They’re told: ‘Stop being a nag. Can’t you lighten up?’
[This sexist humor] seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society that they are part of.
Q. Can you give an example?
Jess: Andrew Tate, he’s a former MMA fighter turned YouTuber, and already banned from a number of different platforms. There are hateful things that he says on many fronts. “Women should be men’s property in marriage” and that sort of thing. One of the problems with that is that if he is then able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying ‘at least I don’t believe the extreme version of it.’
Calarco writes about how her own mother shaped her perceptions of care and work, including the effort it took for her to run a childcare business of her own while selling Mary Kay cosmetics on the side, later going back to school to get her degree + masters.
Q. When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what do you want the takeaway to be?
Jess: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto other underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us to show that the system works - in ways that have made it incredibly hard for the safety net that we all need and deserve.
We need to be upfront about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives - even if it reduces some of the inequalities between us. We need to move away from opportunity-hoarding, which in the context of that kind of precarity, we see that those in the most privileged position have an interest in pushing off the risk and responsibility onto others and improving their own lot. People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others.
My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help to un-gaslight people by seeing where this DIY model comes from and how it’s hunting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.
Jessica Calarco’s book is available for purchase here.
In other news, in August I’ll be hosting an open-to-all virtual Double Shift book discussion about the fantastic new book, Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives. I interviewed one of the authors,
, this week and this book is something the Double Shift community needs in our lives. Stay tuned for that discussion with Emily later this month and details about the book club. In the meantime, pre-order your copy! It’s an easy, breezy, yet important read.I’ll be taking next week off as I’ll be on a family trip. Please note I said, “family trip” NOT a vacation.
Thank you for sharing. I am curious to read this book.
I have an observation I wanted to share. There is an interesting book, published in 1949, called "The Mentally I'll In America". It is basically a survey of mental health practitioners at the time, most working in private or state funded institutions. What they seemed to have been saying in 1949 about the best ways to care for some of the most vulnerable people in society was two things: 1) That state funded institutions were working more or less OK until the Great Depression when the state ran out of money and condemned many people to abusive conditions; and 2) That given the cold failure that state funding is prone to, families were the most humane and moral places to take care of the mentaly ill. I read this and went: oh my gosh, they wanted to add yet ANOTHER thing on the care plate for women and that's basically happened just without any support for those women.
What I think is important to notice here is that we have an example of where state funded care systems become abusive when funding runs out. So, I'm interested in reading about and exploring solutions that aren't just choosing between women and state-funded safety nets, because we now know both don't work well in times of crisis.