Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net

by Jessica Calarco Narrated by Karen Murray, Jessica Calarco

Overview

Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences.

America runs on women-women*who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and*fixing it when things fall apart.*In this tour*de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica*Calarco*lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. *

Holding It Together draws on five years of research*in which*Calarco*surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews*with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic;*a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a*well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals.*Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.**

Tracing present-day*policies*back to*their roots,*Calarco*reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country's social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt.*She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without*the*support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how*women's work*maintains the illusion that we don't need a net.**

Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Holding It Together is both an authoritative indictment of current and past US social policy and an empathetic, unsettling portrait of American motherhood. Jessica Calarco has masterfully leveraged the insights of a wide range of data to reveal the institutional engines of our deeply unequal status quo."
— Jennifer Breheny Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough
 
“Care is the cure for much of what ails us. But it is also often hard, tiring, uncompensated work that is pushed overwhelmingly onto women. Jess Calarco recounts moving, often wrenching, care stories of mothers, daughters, and wives across America, illustrating the deep injustice and short-sightedness of our current care system. Bring on the care union!”
— Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Holding It Together is a punch in the gut and a call to action. It's beautifully and persuasively written, exhaustingly researched but never overwhelming. No one's writing makes me angrier about the way we've replaced our social safety net with the labor of women — but no one is more effective in convincing me there's a different way forward.”
— Anne Helen Petersen, author of Out of Office and the Culture Study newsletter

“[Holding It Together] is the truth-telling we’ve been waiting for, helping us understand the landscape of policy choices and cultural narratives that have kept us from building the safety net we need and deserve in the United States. Calarco equips us with clear, sharp analysis and the appropriate level of outrage for action.”
— Ai-jen Poo, author and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
 
“Powerful and urgent. Jessica Calarco documents the sweeping costs of the political decision to make women responsible for the domestic work that other affluent nations cover with the welfare state - costs that not only women, but also every American family and community pay- and issues an unignorable call for change.”
— Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed

“Holding It Together embodies the sociological imagination. It is urgent, important, smart, and it changes the way you understand what you thought you knew. Jessica Calarco weaves powerful narrative with compelling empirical data to give us a metaphor for understanding our economic lives: women as social safety net. It is a fundamentally sound, well-argued thesis that sharpens a reader's analytical lens. Once you see the economy the way Calarco describes it, you cannot unsee it. You will also feel compelled to do something about it. “
— Tressie McMillan Cottom, Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and columnist for The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

2024-03-15
Historical analysis of how women have always been America’s de facto social safety net.

Sociology professor Calarco makes an evidenced-based argument about how women have been holding America together for decades, receiving little recognition or credit in comparison to their male counterparts. Drawing on 4,000 surveyed parents and five years of research, the author demonstrates the American tradition of relying on women to hold society together, forced to do the dirty work and bear the weight of a deeply flawed system. Calarco reveals that the U.S. continues to sell and push the neoliberal narrative throughout the country, instilling the idea that profit is the highest priority and that the state should stay out of it. The author chronicles the eye-opening stories of many people who have endured the worst of the system, including a single mother who struggles to stretch her meager state benefits while working three jobs and caring for her children; a daughter who became her family’s supplemental income foundation as a result of the opioid crisis. “Without a net, societies crumble,” writes the author. “That’s why people in the US are more depressed, more sick, and more likely to die young than people in other high-income countries. It’s why we work longer hours but produce less. Why we have a higher poverty rate…why we have more political unrest.” The lack of a net allows the broken system to continue to claim victims, more often than not leaving women to take on the grunt work. Calarco leaves readers to contemplate the many solutions mentioned throughout the book, from universal health care and child care to funding for agencies to assist the elderly. The author consistently emphasizes that it is a systemic issue, requiring a community response to be effective.

Filled with heart and engaging research, this book offers new light on an ongoing nationwide problem.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159561541
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	736,960

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Making them
Mothers-in-Waiting

In the US, we groom girls to stand in for the social safety net from the time they're old enough to hold a baby doll. We teach them to be meek while boys are loud and to obey where boys rebel. We give them toy vacuum cleaners to play with, task them with caring for younger siblings and cousins and neighbors, and keep close tabs on their movements, while boys are allowed to run wild. In essence, we train girls to be what sociologist Miranda Waggoner calls "mothers-in-waiting," because equating womanhood and motherhood makes it seem as though girls and women are "naturally" better suited to care.

This kind of grooming goes a long way in pushing girls and women toward model motherhood, but it isn't a guarantee that they all will fall in line. And so, rather than take the risk that too many women will refuse the work of the social safety net, the engineers of our DIY society have turned motherhood into a trap. As we'll see in this chapter, the laws and the culture of American society are designed to force women-and anyone who can be pregnant-into motherhood, into caring for children, and into bearing the risks that come with filling those roles.

Forced into Motherhood

Growing up, Brooke never wanted to be a mother. This ran counter to her upbringing as a white woman in a conservative evangelical Christian family. And yet, for Brooke, home wasn't a happy place. Her parents had a volatile on-again, off-again relationship. As a result, she had been sent to live with her grandparents for long stretches as a child. She told me, "Until I knew for sure that I had, like, a solid life, I never wanted to bring a child into the world." With a dry laugh and a glance at the six-month-old baby in her lap-her second child-Brooke added, "So I just opted to never have children-until I accidentally got pregnant."

Brooke and Brendan met in college and started dating. "We were typical college kids," Brooke recalled a little wistfully, as if describing someone else's life. "We liked to go out on weekends, we slept in, we skipped class sometimes. But then we ended up pregnant, or I ended up pregnant, and [Brendan] decided that he would rather finish school."

Brooke and Brendan initially planned to get an abortion, and Brendan's parents even offered to pay. Brooke, however, decided to talk things over with her own parents first. Brooke's mom, who had left college herself when she got pregnant with Brooke's older sister, took Brooke to get an ultrasound and promised that she would help Brooke raise the baby on her own, without Brendan or his family involved. "It's funny," Brooke explained, "how seeing a heartbeat on an ultrasound machine can change your perspective on life."

The possibility of that kind of change of heart is why legislators in Republican states like Indiana, where Brooke lives, tried to make it as difficult as possible to get an abortion, even under Roe v. Wade. If her mother hadn't taken her for an ultrasound, Brooke likely would have gotten one anyway as part of a state-mandated abortion consultation. That consultation would have had to be at least eighteen hours before the actual abortion procedure, adding further time to mull things over, and it would have included counseling designed to discourage her from going ahead with her plans.

Brooke initially thought she and the baby would be able to live with her parents and that they would help her financially so she could finish college. Once her son, Carter, was born, however, Brooke realized that things wouldn't work out the way she thought they would. Brooke's parents both worked low-wage jobs and couldn't afford to pay for childcare for Carter. Without childcare, it was difficult for Brooke to stay enrolled in school. She couldn't take night classes because she worried about leaving Carter alone with her parents; they struggled to manage their anger, and unlike Brooke, who described herself as "not big on spanking," they were quick to use physical punishment with her when she was a child.

Brooke decided to set out on her own. She applied for welfare, WIC (a version of food stamps for low-income families with infants), rental assistance, and subsidized childcare. Brooke also got a paying job in retail, working for the same store as her mom. Brooke was grateful to have money coming in, and grateful that having an income made her eligible for EITC. Yet that money wasn't enough to offer a sense of security, and retail wasn't the job she wanted long-term. "I absolutely hated it," Brooke recalled.

The director of Carter's childcare center saw Brooke's unhappiness at work as an opportunity. At the time, the center was struggling with staff turnover. So the director begged Brooke to quit her retail job and come on board. Despite paying only minimum wage, the position came with free childcare, which was costing Brooke nearly as much as rent. She warily accepted the job. "I thought I was gonna hate it," she said, but she "absolutely fell in love with it. Children have taught me so much. Children have taught me patience, they've taught me to think outside the box."

Despite the job's emotional payoff, the financial rewards left a lot to be desired. Even when she got promoted to assistant director of the center a few years later, Brooke's salary was only $25,000 a year. Brooke appreciated the raise. Yet the extra money didn't go as far as it could have, because, like Akari when she took on her third part-time job, Brooke found herself suddenly ineligible for some forms of government support and having to pay a great deal more for others that operated on a sliding scale.

Rather than wallow, Brooke tried to stay hopeful, imagining a future where she finished college and became a nurse. While taking a state-mandated parenting class for WIC recipients, Brooke had met another single mom who had pulled herself and her three kids out of poverty by getting a nursing degree. Talking about her friend, Brooke's voice glowed with admiration, saying, "I just think about everything she went through, and now she has a house, she's got a car, her kids go to private school-like, she's got it!" Brooke figured that if she followed a similar path, she could earn $75,000 a year or more-enough that, in her mind, she wouldn't have to worry about the future for herself or her child.

With no one to care for Carter in the evening, however-Brooke still didn't trust her parents to watch him-taking night classes wasn't an option. And quitting her job, even with how little it paid, seemed too risky. So Brooke just kept working at the childcare center, even after she met and married her husband, an auto mechanic, and after she gave birth to her second child.


Whether from their families, their schools, or their churches, the message to young girls and unmarried women in the United States is often “Don’t have sex!” or even “Sex is a sin!” That kind of abstinence-based messaging is far from effective, especially for young adults and teens.

What can be prevented is unintended pregnancy and parenthood, and that's where the US falls short. Other countries reduce unintended pregnancy by teaching kids how sex works, by making birth control free and easy to access, and by making healthcare universal and easy to afford. Going a step further, other countries also reduce unintended parenthood by reducing the stigma around abortion and making these services free and readily available to use.

In the US, we fail on all these fronts. And we have the high rates of unintended pregnancy and parenthood to show for what we have (or haven't) done. Roughly half of all US pregnancies are unintended, and roughly half of the American women who become pregnant unexpectedly end up having and raising the child. By contrast, in other high-income countries in Europe and East Asia, only about a third of pregnancies are unintended, and less than a third of those are carried to term. Becoming a parent unexpectedly is particularly disruptive for teen girls and young women. And yet, US rates of teen pregnancy and parenthood are alarmingly high. In the US, 57 out of every 1,000 girls ages 15-19 become pregnant, and 60 percent of those go on to give birth. That's more than double the rate in Denmark, but not because Danish teens are having less sex. During a mini-exchange trip to Denmark when I was in high school, I was shocked to learn that my host-a fellow 16-year-old girl-was allowed to have her boyfriend sleep over in her room and shocked to see her birth control pills just sitting nonchalantly on the bathroom sink.

It would be so easy for the US to reduce unintended pregnancy, but instead, we've chosen the other way. On June 24, 2022, I was editing this very chapter when my phone buzzed with a text from my husband, saying simply, "overturned." I cried on my keyboard that morning, backspacing over the sentence I had previously written here: "At least for now, abortion is still legal in the United States, though a Supreme Court decision on Dobbs is due any day." June 24 was the day the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Dobbs case, which ended the legal protections for abortion services that were established under Roe v. Wade in 1973 and secured under Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.

Forced To Have More Kids


Laws alone, however, aren’t the only force trapping women in motherhood. Even before Dobbs, a toxic mix of pro-natal messaging and barriers to abortion access was already pushing women into poorly timed pregnancies or having more children than they planned. In late 2019, Audrey and her husband, Colby, decided they were ready to try for a second baby. They had both grown up in white evangelical Christian families with lots of siblings, and they wanted to give their daughter, Harmony, who was a toddler at the time, that same experience as a child.

Audrey and Colby were still trying to get pregnant in March 2020 when Audrey lost her job in retail, leaving her to care for Harmony, whose childcare center closed. Colby, a healthcare provider, started working overtime to meet the increased Covid demand.

Unemployment was hard for Audrey. Going back to work full-time had been the thing that helped most in overcoming the postpartum depression she experienced when Harmony was born, and returning to a full-time caregiving role left Audrey slipping back into the gloom. The loss of Audrey's job also led to conflict with Colby, who was feeling pressured to take on more overtime at work to maintain their roughly $80,000-a-year household income. As Audrey told me a few months into the pandemic, "I think some of it was that he didn't really know how to deal with the stress of his job and took it out on me and took it out on us." He wasn't abusive, she hastened to add, but he was touchy and grumpy. "We just pretty much ignore each other because we know we're going to get into a fight."

Given the stress and conflict at home, Audrey decided that they should stop trying for a second baby. She told Colby multiple times that she wanted to wait. Audrey and Colby were relying on the withdrawal method to avoid pregnancy, which is far-from-guaranteed birth control. Yet, like many men, Colby preferred not to wear condoms, and, like many women, Audrey has health conditions that make it too risky for her to take hormonal birth control pills.

Audrey was aware of the risks of relying on withdrawal-she has a college degree and was a social worker before having kids. So she asked Colby to be careful and to always pull out during sex unless she said otherwise. Usually, he would ask if he was unsure. But once, Colby didn't ask and didn't pull out, and Audrey happened to be ovulating.

Colby's actions, and the resulting pregnancy, weighed heavily on Audrey. "It's very clear that it wasn't something I was okay with," Audrey told me, referring to the fact that Colby didn't pull out. "It wasn't something that I consented to." When she saw the two lines on the pregnancy test, she was "REALLY pissed off."

Audrey wanted to talk about what she'd experienced with Colby, but her friends and family members dismissed her concerns. "I think that the term 'sexual assault' is appropriate," Audrey explained, but "other people I've spoken to have mixed opinions." In the end, one of Audrey's sisters-in-law-the wife of Colby's brother-was the only person who made her feel validated in viewing what happened as assault. Recalling that conversation, Audrey said, "I was like, 'Yes! Thank you!' That was really helpful-it made me feel like I wasn't just overexaggerating or anything like that."

Audrey's only close friends at the time were other mothers who were part of what she called her "church family"-the members of her evangelical Christian church. As a new mom living hours away from the town where she grew up, Audrey relied heavily on the women in her new church family. When Harmony was born, it was the leader of Audrey's church moms' group who volunteered to go to the hospital with Audrey if Colby was stuck at work. And after Audrey lost her job during the pandemic, weekly church services and Bible study groups and moms' group meet-ups were the only regular adult interactions she had with anyone other than Colby. At that point, she and Colby weren't talking very much, either, which led Audrey to lean even more heavily on the women at church. When I asked Audrey what she would do without support from her church family, she told me, "I genuinely don't know how we would do it. Especially living so far from home. I do not know what we would do without our church. Like, they've just been-they've been everything to us. They've helped us out with meals and helped us out by giving me stuff to help with nursing, they've given us baby clothes, they've just been there to talk to us when we need advice."

The members of Audrey's church family were supportive, but not of abortion and divorce. Both were, according to Audrey, "against our faith and our belief system." Those beliefs left Audrey feeling very alone in navigating the decisions she had to make in the wake of the sexual assault and the unintended pregnancy that followed. She considered both getting an abortion and leaving Colby, but she worried about how her family and friends might judge her for those choices. So, instead, Audrey stayed with Colby and tried to feel excited about having a second child.

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