Women are tired. If the past few years haven’t made that crystal clear, Jessica Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, certainly does. Calarco, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin who researches family inequalities and education, didn’t intend to write a book about how women stand in for the country’s lack of a safety net; she was studying how mothers navigate parenting controversies. Then the pandemic hit, shutting down schools and daycares. While interviewing many of the study participants, she noted how quickly women stepped in to fill the gap of childcare and schooling, and everyone around them seemed to take for granted that they would. “It wasn’t something that was negotiated. It was just assumed by default,” Calarco tells Esquire.
It wasn’t just the pandemic, though. It was the woman who was attempting to care for her mother while juggling her marriage, a teenager, and a full-time job. It was the teenage aunt who had to step in to parent her young niece and nephew when their parents couldn’t due to opioid addiction. It was the single mother who couldn’t climb out of poverty even though she was doing everything right. Despite the different circumstances, a common thread throughout the interviews with these women was a sense of failure, but Calarco emphasizes it’s a systemic issue, not a personal one. I spoke to the author by Zoom from her home in Madison, Wisconsin, about the enormous and devastating effects of this unseen, unpaid labor on women (and by extension men and families)—and what we can all do about it. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: How would you describe the current safety net in the United States?
JESSICA CALARCO: We have programs like welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid, but the level of support they provide for families is not sufficient to allow them any sense of stability or security. I wrote about one mom in the book, Akari. As a single mom with two kids in Indiana, the most she can qualify for in welfare benefits is $288 a month, and that’s if she’s not working any hours for pay. She’s also required to work for pay in order to keep her welfare benefits, and every dollar that she earns in paid income reduces her benefits. It’s the way we push women in our economy to do 70 percent of the lowest-wage jobs; many of them are pushed into those jobs because of the kinds of restrictions and requirements that we place on our social-safety-net programs. It’s both an insufficient system and a deeply punitive system that’s designed to discourage people from being dependent. It promotes this DIY model, treating it as if you should be able to get by on your own without any sort of government support. If you’re not, there’s something wrong with you, as opposed to something wrong with the system.
Tell me more about the DIY system.
I mean, really, I’m talking about neoliberalism, which is the idea that people should be able to get by without any sort of support from the government, their employers, or any extra support beyond their salaries. We can’t really get by without a social safety net, but we’d like to pretend that we can, and that’s where women’s labor comes in. We maintain the illusion of a DIY society by relying on women to fill in the gaps. Women do the unpaid and underpaid labor that holds everything together. That makes it possible for people in the U.S. to believe that we can get by without these kinds of strong programs, while also putting a tremendous amount of work on those who are oftentimes in highly vulnerable positions. They’re not able to push back and demand better support.
So rather than having the illusion of a safety net, what would an adequate safety net look like?
An adequate social safety net, first and foremost, would make sure that we remove the kinds of profit pressures that come with putting care work in the market, making things like childcare, elder care, and health care free and universally accessible for everyone. Then these models need to be funded, not only to a level of quality but also to the level of sustainability: Workers are paid living wages and have the benefits they need to take care of themselves and their families, too. It’s also about recognizing that we all have responsibilities for care, whether those are paid or unpaid responsibilities, and making sure all people and all workers have the space and the time in their lives to contribute to that care work. That takes things like paid family leave, paid sick leave, adequate paid vacation time, and making sure that those are available to everyone—even making stipends available for families with dependents so they have more choice about whether to pay for care work or to do that work themselves, particularly for those who have high care needs within their families.
To that point, whether as children or as older adults, we’re all going to need care. What’s preventing the U.S. from adopting a more robust safety net?
Most Americans support expanding the social safety net. At the same time, there’s a disconnect. It’s very easy for wealthy people and corporations to buy influence over our political system and install policymakers who will resist these kinds of policies, because the costs involved would disproportionately fall to wealthy people and corporations paying their fair share for the kind of support that everyone needs in our society. As I wrote about in the book, the myths—like the myths of meritocracy, Mars and Venus, and the supermom–are promoted by the people and the organizations that are engineering and profiteering from this DIY society. That’s all to discourage people from seeing the value of expanding the social safety net, making it easier to elect politicians who will fight against these kinds of policies.
You write that meritocracy is baked into the fabric of our country. How so?
I go back to Ben Franklin and the early writings in American history. We like to think of ourselves as a society where people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and with enough luck and pluck, enough hard work, enough motivation, or the right amount of faith, people can be successful no matter what their origins happen to be. Surveys show that Americans are disproportionately likely to say that hard work alone can get you to success. A more critical take is if people aren’t successful, they probably didn’t work hard enough. This can lead to the kinds of stigmas and stereotypes that we often attach to the social safety net in the U.S. Despite strong evidence that when people are struggling, it likely stems from the systemic inequalities in our society, there’s often this lingering belief that, well, maybe they just didn’t try hard enough. Maybe they just didn’t want to do enough. Maybe they’re just not as good.
You also reference Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which was a popular book in the 1990s. Why do you think this book has recently become popular on social media, too?
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this growing trend toward more traditional views on gender. You see this with things like the tradwife trend. You see this with growing misogynistic humor and harassment on social media. In this moment where women are doing so much, it’s easy to fall back on tropes. Maybe there’s something inherently different about men and women that explains why women do so much more of the caregiving labor and men do so much more of the paid work. These kinds of explanations, like Mars and Venus, where men and women are just fundamentally different, is both a psychologically useful explanation and a convenient one. It means we don’t need big structural solutions. We can just tell people to make different choices, or tell people that they don’t even need to make better choices, because this is just what they’re naturally suited for instead.
In one chapter, you write about men who identify as progressive and favor a social safety net but then benefit from the perks of patriarchy at home and at work. What do you mean by that?
When push comes to shove, research shows that many men—even if they hold these kinds of egalitarian ideas—are willing to make choices that benefit themselves over their partners, women colleagues, or the other women in their families. I wrote about a man that I call Dennis. He said, “I don’t believe in that 1950s stuff.” When he and his wife had their first child, he was making about $90,000 a year working in IT, and she was making about $30,000 a year as a social worker. They could have afforded to pay for full-time childcare for their new baby. By his assessment, at least, he didn’t think it was reasonable for her to spend half of her paycheck on childcare—and he made it very clear that he thought this should come out of her paycheck. She talked about possibly going back to work a few times and picked up some part-time work, but he discouraged her from doing that because he saw that there were perks to having a stay-at-home wife. He never had to take time off if the kids got sick or needed to go to the doctor, for example. He talked about how that meant he could save his paid time off days for more fun things, and he could afford to go to the gym after work and get a workout in before he came home because he didn’t have to worry about picking up the kids.
As we head into the election in November, women’s reproductive rights remain under attack. How does this figure into the safety-net discussion?
I think it’s important to note that reproductive rights are under attack in part because restrictive laws make it easier to limit women’s choices about when and how they become mothers. It makes it easier for women to get trapped in motherhood, even when they would prefer not to be, if abortion is not easily on the table. The same is true with attacks on contraception. Even with IVF, one of the primary reasons that women end up using IVF is as a way to delay fertility, start a career, and have time to make other choices—go to college, go to graduate school, find the right partner—before having children. This is all part of the same system where attacks on women’s reproductive rights and reproductive health are aimed at making it easier to trap women in motherhood. That makes them easier to exploit; it’s easier to force them into being the ones who fill these gaps in our economy and in our social safety net.
So how would a more robust safety net benefit us all, men included?
We know that relative to other high-income countries, we are less healthy, live shorter lives, have higher levels of precarity and higher levels of political unrest, and are often less happy, so certainly there’s evidence to suggest that investing in a stronger social safety net would leave the vast majority of us better off than we are right now. By investing in these kinds of social safety nets, it would not only leave us better off on an absolute level, but it would certainly reduce the incentives to perpetuate these myths that divide us along race, class, and gender lines.
In the book, you propose a union of care. What is a union of care, and how is it integral to expanding and strengthening the social safety net?
Recognizing that we are all part of the same system and could all be better off requires that we be willing to reject these myths pitting men against women, pitting white people against Black people, or pitting rich against poor. A union of care is designed to help people bridge those differences. A union of care would be different from a traditional labor union in the sense that it would try to unite people not only around particular paid work-based identities but around our shared relationship to this project of care. It’s about recognizing that we are all part of this shared project and that our own ability to both provide that care and benefit from that care depends on the availability of other people to do that work.
For men, what would be an actionable thing they could do?
Be willing to listen and be willing to understand the toll this is taking on women. Then be willing to question your assumptions. Be willing to ask, “Why is it that we are devaluing care work in these ways? What would it take to put a higher value on that kind of caregiving labor, and what would it take for me to be in a position to help more with the kind of caregiving labor that needs to be done at home?” I think that’s a place where men in particular can fight back against overwork norms. “What would I need from my employer to be in a position where I could help more with childcare and elder care, and where I had time and energy and space to learn to be the kind of caregiver that the people around me need?” So men should think about the structures that would need to change and how they can use their relative privilege to fight for those changes, in addition to joining the fight for the social-safety-net policies that would better support those who are giving and receiving care.
