How Women Became America's Safety Net: An Interview with Jessica Calarco
Issue 121: A critique of self-help culture, which diagnoses all problems and prescribes all solutions at the level of the individual.
One of the themes of our newsletter has been on the need to think about collectives, rather than merely individuals. This is a particular problem in a highly individualistic culture, like the United States, where we tend to view almost every issue through the lens of individual choices. In fact, if you visit any bookstore you’ll see stacks and stacks of books on self help—but there is no corresponding section for collective help.
This is why we are excited to share an in-depth interview with Dr. Jessica Calarco, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that provides a devastating critique of this self-help lens. Jessica has published a fascinating new book, ‘Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net’, which illuminates how the impoverished social safety net in the United States places a chronic and systemic burden on women.
In the book, I show how the engineers and profiteers of our “Do It Yourself” society have promoted myths to delude us into believing that we can get by without a social safety net. They divide us by gender, race, class, religion, and politics in ways that keep us from coming together to demand the kind of social safety net that would better support us all.
In her view, self-help culture is a serious problem. This focus diagnoses all problems— and prescribes all solutions—at the level of the individual. America is an outlier in individualism, an ideology that downplays the role of society, institutions, and groups in shaping people’s life circumstances. Although individualism is often described as “just common-sense”, it is, in fact, a norm to which Americans are ironically rather conformist. In other words, we are individualist to fit in!
Such norms can and should be challenged…and Jessica’s book does a fantastic job of illuminating the limitations of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. We hope you enjoy her interview as much as we did!
What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?
In the book, I show how the engineers and profiteers of our “Do It Yourself” society have promoted myths to delude us into believing that we can get by without a social safety net. They divide us by gender, race, class, religion, and politics in ways that keep us from coming together to demand the kind of social safety net that would better support us all.
Consider the myth of meritocracy—the idea that anyone who is willing to work hard will be able to get ahead in the end. The reality is that hard work doesn’t guarantee success, particularly in the absence of a social safety net. Low-wage workers, for example, may find themselves working two or three jobs and still struggling to make ends meet because of how employers cap their hours and use those hour caps to deny them benefits like access to healthcare. Despite the meritocracy myth’s empty promises, most Americans believe these ideas. Why? Because many parts of American culture—from self-help books to religious sermons to popular television program promote this myth. In a society as a unequal as ours, it’s reassuring to believe that hard work alone is enough to achieve the sense of security that only comes from getting a spot near the top.
The problem, however, is that the myth undermines support for efforts to strengthen the social safety net, even among those who would benefit most directly from expanding the net. Consider a white, Republican, stay-at-home mom I’ll call April. April, whose family gets by on the $30,000 a year her husband makes as a pastor at their evangelical Christian church, would benefit from a broader social safety net. Yet, when I asked her whether she would support policies like universal healthcare or universal childcare or universal paid family leave or free college or a higher minimum wage, April opposed every single one. Digging into those objections, I found that April and many other mothers like her oppose efforts to expand the social safety net because believing in the myth of meritocracy allows them to maintain a sense of superiority over other mothers who have to rely on the meager support the government provides.
Take, for example, how April talked about the Covid relief and child tax credit checks she got from the government, explaining that, although she cashed the checks, “I really felt we didn’t need the stimulus package. We weren’t eagerly awaiting that. We’re used to living off of one relatively meager salary.” Drawing on racist “welfare queen” stereotypes, April also took aim at other mothers, implying that if they needed government support, it was probably because they were spending money frivolously on things like getting their nails done or going out partying, and insisting “I’d never do those things.”
Now, April acknowledged that she rarely gets any time for herself, and that she sometimes ends up eating her kids’ scraps for her own meals when the money gets short at the end of the month. Yet, by rejecting the need to expand the safety net, April was still able to judge herself favorably in comparison to other more vulnerable moms.
What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?
Broadly speaking, the book’s core takeaway is: Other countries have social safety nets; the US has women; and even when we’ve had the chance to build something stronger, we’ve relied on women to hold it together instead. To unpack these ideas in a bit more detail, it’s important know that other high-income countries have invested in social safety nets to help people manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that everyone has time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care.
In the US, we’ve tried to DIY society. We’ve kept taxes low, slashed huge holes in the meager safety net we do have, and told people that if they just made “good choices,” they wouldn’t need government support at all. The problem with this model is that we can’t actually DIY society—forcing people to manage all that risk on their own has left many American families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse. And yet, we haven’t collapsed because women are holding it together, filling in the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our threadbare safety net. In practice, that means that women are disproportionate the default caregivers for the children, the sick, and the elderly and also the ones who disproportionately fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy—jobs that are too labor-intensive to be profitable or highly paid, including jobs in childcare, customer service, and home health care.
As I show in the book, this unpaid and underpaid labor helps maintain the illusion of a DIY society by making it seem as though we can get by without a net. That illusion and the labor required to maintain are also crushing women and others forced to hold most of its weight. And yet, even when we’ve had the chance to take a different tack—like after World War II, or in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—we’ve opted to stick with our old playbook of relying on women. And we’ve done so because billionaires and big corporations have an interest in maintaining the illusion of a DIY society, because maintaining that illusion is only possible through exploitation, and because—in the absence of a sturdy social safety net—motherhood makes women particularly easy to exploit.
Why did you write this book and how did writing it change you?
This wasn’t the book I set out to write with these data, which include more than 400 hours of in-depth interviews and surveys of more than 4,000 people across the US. Instead, when I started this project in 2018, I was interested in studying the best laid plans of parenting—how parents decide what kind of parents they want to be and what happens when life intervenes in ways that make it difficult for parents to follow through on those initial intentions.
To answer those questions, I started by surveying 250 pregnant women (about half of them first-time mothers) about the kinds of decisions they intended to make with their new babies, including decisions about things like paid work and childcare, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, vaccines, and screen time. Working with a team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants, I then followed up with those same women at 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months postpartum with additional surveys and in-depth interviews about their parenting decisions, what led to those decisions, and how they and other people around them felt about the decisions they ultimately made. My team and I were still in the field conducting those follow-up surveys and interviews when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US in 2020, and it quickly became apparent how much of an impact the pandemic was having on families with young children and especially on those children’s moms. Those early pandemic interviews were fraught with stories of fear, stress, anger, and exhaustion and stories of lost jobs, lost loved ones, lost support networks, and lost hope.
To better understand that impact, my team and I conducted three more waves of pandemic-focused follow-up surveys with the moms, their partners, and other parents in their social networks. I also conducted two national surveys, one completed in late 2020 and the other in early 2022, each with more than 2,000 US parents of children under 18, to examine how the patterns I had seen in the smaller-scale data were playing out across the whole US. The idea for this book came out of those pandemic surveys and interviews. I wanted to show readers what we lose when we sacrifice women for the good of the economy, and how we’ve done so many times before.
At the same time, and with Biden’s promise to Build Back Better still on the table, I was also hoping to tell a story of how we would finally change our ways. In the end, however, Build Back Better died in Congress. And at that point, it seemed imperative to explain why we continue to fail. I answer these questions, in part, through stories of the families my team and I interviewed. I also weave in some of my personal stories, as a way of showing how this book connects to my own biography and how writing was as much a labor of fury as a labor of love. My hope is that these stories will both resonate with readers and help them to achieve a sense of cognitive empathy with others whose lives are very different from their own.
What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?
Maybe the most provocative part of the argument here is about how the US gets women to stand in for the social safety net, which involves turning motherhood into a trap. Certainly, there are many routes into exploitation. In the US, however, we’ve figured out that one of the most effective ways to push people into low-paying jobs and into doing a disproportionate share of the unpaid caregiving work is by making them responsible for children and then leaving them with nowhere to turn for support in managing that responsibility and nowhere to hide when others then ask them to manage even more.
Take, for example, a mom I call Patricia. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Patricia, who is Black, had three young children—and toddler and two in elementary school—and was working full-time from home as a customer service agent for an insurance company. Patricia found the job repetitive and demoralizing, and she hated that it paid less than $10 an hour, but she took it because it was the only work-from-home job she could find, and working from home meant she didn’t have to figure out afterschool or summer or backup care for her kids. That choice, however, also forced Patricia into the role of default parent. When Covid closed their children’s school and childcare center, for example, Patricia and her husband Rodney, who works as a construction laborer, never even discussed who would be responsible for the kids. Being that default parent took a heavy toll on Patricia, who often found herself exhausted and overwhelmed. She told me, “You start getting a headache, and they want you to sit and listen to them talk and everything. And it’s like, ‘Just go! Please! Everybody just leave me alone!’” At the same time, Patricia felt guilty about being so short with her kids, chiding herself “When it’s time to clock out, I need to not clock out mentally as a mother, too.” So, Patricia decided in the fall of 2020 to cut back to four days a week of paid work. She hoped that, even if it meant less money coming in, the switch would allow her to have more energy to give to her kids, one of whom was having a difficult time in school, and she hoped she would have more time to rest, which she needed, because she had recently and unexpectedly become pregnant with twins.
What ended up happening, however, was that Patricia’s extended family saw her extra day off as an opening to ask her for help with rides and errands, because she is one of the only people in her family with a reliable vehicle, and because they all live in Indianapolis, which was recently rated as the worst major city or public transit in the US. Shaking her head, Patricia explained how, “your whole day that you had to yourself ends up dedicated to running errands for someone else.” Despite losing her time off, Patricia rarely said no to requests from friends and relatives, because she knew they had nowhere else to turn and because she knew she might someday have to ask them for help. That someday came when Patricia and Rodney divorced just before the twins were born. Patricia broke things off with Rodney primarily because of his lack of support with the kids and household chores, but doing so also meant she had to rely more on her network, including asking a friend to drive her around while she was recovering from her C-section, and asking her parents to watch the older kids so she could go to the doctor with the twins. Patricia was grateful for that support—and grateful that she hadn’t pushed her family or friends away when they had asked her for help before. And yet, that support wasn’t enough to give Patricia a sense of security. “It’s pretty depressing,” she explained, because “It’s just all on you.”
As we see in Patricia’s story, our attempts to DIY society have left families struggling. In those contexts, it’s almost impossible for mothers like Patricia not to get stuck filling in the gaps in our economy and our social safety net, because we’ve left them with nowhere to turn in managing all the responsibility they’ve been handed and nowhere to hide when others see them holding it together and ask them to hold even more. These webs of exploitation are particularly sticky in economically and racially marginalized communities. And yet, as I show in the book, even relatively privileged mothers often find themselves caught in similar binds, even as they benefit from the exploitation of others whose underpaid labor makes it possible for them to afford to outsource some help with care.
Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas?
Given my book’s critiques of self-help culture, I’m hesitant to imply that individual efforts can solve the kinds of structural problems that a DIY society creates. One thing we can do as individuals, however, is to resist in ourselves and call out in others the kind of mythical thinking that keeps us from fighting together for a stronger social safety net. For now at least, we live in a democracy. Which means that billionaires and big corporations can only maintain a DIY society indirectly by influencing politicians and people who vote. And which means that if enough of us reject the myths that we’ve been sold to delude and divide us, we could elect the kind of leaders who would commit to building the net we actually need.
In practice, one way to reject those myths is by recognizing how care links our fates. In a society as large and diverse as the US is, it’s easy to focus on the distance and differences between us rather than on how we’re connected and on what we share. Yet, care networks tie us together. A childcare provider, for example, is connected not only to the families she cares for, but also to their friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues but also to her own friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues, and to the friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues of each of the people to whom she is directly connected, as well. Which means that when there’s tension in one part of the network—like when a childcare provider gets sick or has to care for a sick loved one—it puts stress on the network in ways that can cause it to break down.
To purchase or learn more about Holding it Together, find the book here and follow Jessica on Twitter/X.
News and Updates
As we write, Dom is in the UK to lead a session exploring how identities and institutions reinforce, influence, and disrupt one another at the Social Identity Small Group Meeting at the University of Kent.
Catch up on the last one…
Last week, we put together a brief “Devil’s Playbook” for recognizing and understanding dark behavior online: