How U.S. women were forced to become their own social safety net

You might have heard of a quote that can be attributed to sociologist Jessica Calarco: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” 



That became the animating idea behind Calarco’s new book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net , which is out today. Calarco, who is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent her career studying the intersection of families and schools, and the inequities that persist along racial and socioeconomic lines. During the pandemic, as Calarco studied its effects on families and children, it became clear that women were bearing the brunt of the fallout—but yet again, the far-reaching policy changes that could have provided them more of a social safety net failed to materialize. 



Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with parents, Calarco’s new book dives into how women have been forced to become the social safety net that the U.S. lacks, along with the myths about women and mothers that keep them in that role. In an interview with Fast Company, she talked about how the motherhood trap forces women into “holding it all together,” the role corporations play in sustaining the status quo, how the pandemic failed to catalyze lasting change, and whether there’s a way out of this situation.



This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.



Why did you want to write this book?



This didn’t start out as a book about women and being the social safety net. My earlier research was on the inequalities in family life and education, and I spent a lot of time doing ethnographic research in schools and talking to families and being deeply embedded in communities. I developed this study that I was thinking of as “the best-laid plans of parenting.” You have these ideas about the kind of parent that you want to be, and I wanted to know, where do those come from? How are they shaped by the people around you? And what happens when things go wrong? 



I worked with a team of graduate and undergraduate students to recruit 250 pregnant people from prenatal clinics in Indiana—and they all identify as women, so I talk about them that way. For about half of them, it was their first pregnancy; about half had older kids, as well. We planned to follow them for their first two years postpartum. The data collection started in 2018, and the recruitment stage continued through 2019. We were still in the field doing follow-up interviews and surveys when the pandemic hit in 2020. It became very obvious very quickly how much of an impact school closures and childcare closures and even nursing home closures were having on families, and particularly on the women in those families. 



We had this moment where society was facing a crisis, and rather than try to put in place the kinds of policies that families might have needed, we often relied on women to pick up the slack instead. I felt like there was something here I had to explore. With Build Back Better , it seemed like we might actually learn something from this moment of crisis. That’s where I thought this book was going. But we didn’t. So it became this question of: Why do we keep falling into this old playbook? What are the myths that we tell ourselves that justify this kind of a system where we are disproportionately relying on women—and pretending like we don’t actually need a social safety net? 



You did hundreds of hours of interviews for this book, and it heavily relies on those personal narratives. Why was it important to you to use that framing and write this book through the lens of people’s experiences?



I think of myself kind of as an ethnographer. I try to understand society through the lens of the people who are living in it and experiencing it day to day. People’s stories are often one of the most powerful tools that we have to help other people understand both their own experiences, through finding stories that resonate with their own, and then also to understand people whose lives are very different. You can cognitively empathize with someone the way that you often do with good fiction. It can put you in someone’s life, even if it’s very different from your own, in a way that makes their choices and their life make sense. So that’s kind of my hope with these stories—that readers can both find themselves in some of these stories, and also see a window into experiences that they maybe would have judged from the outside. 



You talk about this idea of a “DIY society” and how we’ve accepted that as the norm in the U.S. Can you elaborate on what it means to have a DIY society and how that has led to women becoming this country’s safety net, as you say?  



Other countries have invested in sturdy social safety nets that help to protect people from poverty and precarity and support them in reaching for economic opportunity. In the U.S., we’ve instead tried to be this DIY society, operating on this model that people don’t need a social safety net—and if you’re getting to the neoliberal underpinnings of it, that we’re actually worse off if we have a social safety net because people won’t make choices to keep themselves safe. That’s the ethos or ideology undergirding this DIY society. In practice, that means lowering taxes on wealthy people and corporations; underinvesting in the social safety net and keeping it small and stigmatized, so that people are judged for having that support; and then deregulating corporations and emphasizing corporate profits. All of this kind of goes hand in hand. 



The problem is this DIY society model is not sustainable. It’s leaving many American families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse. We can see it in the fact that we have lower rates of happiness than other countries. We’re more likely to die young. We have all sorts of health problems that other high-income countries don’t experience. We have lower productivity rates. So we can see this precarity, but we pretend that we can manage this DIY society by pushing the responsibility disproportionately onto women.



We have them do the disproportionate share of the work of a social safety net, filling in gaps when it comes to childcare and eldercare and care for the sick. They also fill in gaps in our economy, holding the kinds of low-wage jobs that nobody else wants because they’re often too labor intensive to be highly profitable. Those jobs are filled by women, which makes the rest of the economy possible in the absence of high levels of government support.



There are many different themes you touch on to help explain how women ended up “holding it all together.” A major one is how women fall into the motherhood trap, and then are denied the support they need to raise children. How did that combination impact the women you heard from?



I think the idea here is that there are lots of ways to push people into exploitation. But in the absence of universal paid family leave and universal childcare and other kinds of support—things like strong child tax credits or subsidies or dependent care benefits—motherhood can very easily become a trap for women. They can be easily forced into doing a disproportionate share of both the unpaid labor at home and the underpaid labor in our economy. That’s how our entire welfare system was very explicitly designed. 



I talk in the book about a mom who I called Brooke, who accidentally got pregnant when she was in college. She had a difficult home life growing up and never wanted to be a parent. She initially planned to get an abortion; her boyfriend’s parents even offered to pay. But her parents are deeply religious, and her mom persuaded her to keep the baby and said, “We’ll help you finish college and figure this out.”



Once the child was born, they figured out that they couldn’t actually afford to pay for both college and childcare. She ended up dropping out of college and moving herself into a women’s shelter; to get affordable housing or childcare, one of the best ways to get to the top of the list is to be in a very precarious position, like a women’s shelter. So she signed herself up for welfare, which comes with work requirements. College classes don’t count toward them, so she had to take whatever job she could find.



That started with retail, and from there she actually took a job at her son’s childcare center, because that was the next best thing she could find. Now she’s making minimum wage, but at least she got free childcare. So that’s the pathway of how we structure even our welfare system, and how once women get into motherhood, we deny them support. 



You obviously focus a lot on lower income and middle class families, who are most impacted by the lack of a robust social safety net. But even the people who can afford to pay for childcare feel trapped in their own way, and you talked to women in those situations, as well. What did you hear from them? 



Women who are in more affluent positions have a little more privilege. They do have options, in the sense that they can often afford to outsource at least some help with care. But there’s so much risk in the system. There’s so much responsibility that’s heaped on families that even when you’re outsourcing some of it, it’s still almost impossible to manage that level of risk. For higher income women this creates pressure to essentially try to exploit others to be able to get ahead yourself—and that creates a sense of complicity and guilt. 



I talked to a same-sex couple for the book, and they were having trouble finding reliable childcare. One of them had to continually drop back to half-paid work or work from home while also providing childcare. When they did find a childcare center, they were frustrated because it was costing them so much money and the center wasn’t able to open for full-time hours because of staffing crises. So this mom went into the center to complain about what she saw as limited hours and high costs, and how she’d seen a decline in the quality of care with some staff members leaving. 



What she got from the center director was a lesson in the economics of childcare about how they just can’t make it work without government subsidies. They couldn’t afford to pay enough to keep highly trained, experienced workers or even give them health insurance. Many of their workers were dealing with huge amounts of medical debt because they didn’t have health insurance. Many of them left during the pandemic because they were able to find better jobs that paid more than childcare.



This mom felt guilty that she was relying on these women, many of whom were women of color, to watch her kid. But then she also felt like, “I can’t do anything about it.” Without a social safety net, there’s always this precarity—and so you feel kind of compelled to hoard whatever opportunity you can then just sit on top of it, as opposed to trying to fight for a better system.



Coming to the path forward: You write about the pandemic-era relief funding, and how that illustrated what a social safety net could look like for a brief moment. I think many people thought that would be a real turning point, and we now know that didn’t quite turn out to be the case. What was the impact for the people you heard from who had received financial assistance, only to lose it later?



This was both one of the things that was most heartening, and then in the end, one of the things that made me the saddest. These programs helped families across the spectrum. I talked to one Black, low-income single mom for the book who couldn’t afford to take any time off when her son was born. She had to go back to work right away because she didn’t have access to paid leave. During the pandemic, she lost her job. But with the money that was coming in from the stimulus checks and unemployment and other kinds of programs, it was the first time she had ever been able to just stay home and enjoy time with her son.



She talked about how she taught him how to play Connect Four; they were watching videos together and drawing together. This was just the best time that she’d ever had as a mom, when so many of us were crushed with the weight of responsibility. For her, these programs that we put in place made life so much better in so many ways—and we took them away almost immediately. That pushed her back into the workforce because she had no choice as soon as that money dried up. 



But even for women who were in higher-income positions, many moms talked to me about things like the universal free lunch program during the pandemic, and the amount of time and energy and emotional stress they saved by not having to worry about it in the morning. It was just this moment of freedom—and we took that away, too. Many families talked about the student loan moratoriums, and not having those payments constantly hanging over their heads every month. Many of the couples who had high incomes also had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. We talked to moms who said, maybe we can actually afford to have a second kid, or maybe we can afford to buy a house now. Once those payments came back, it seemed less possible going forward.



I often think about how for certain leading companies with generous benefits, the lack of federal paid leave or universal childcare effectively gives them a competitive advantage. We know there’s a clear economic case for those policies. But it seems like many companies are not particularly interested in going to bat over these issues. Can you talk about the role of business leaders and how they could effect more meaningful policy change, if they really wanted to? 



We have to think about: Why aren’t companies using their collective power to fight for these stronger social safety net programs? In theory, they’re spending a lot of time and energy on figuring out things like healthcare and childcare for their employees. So you have to wonder, why would they not want to be spending more of their energy focusing on their core business model instead? 



I think the reason has to do with the fact that our system is very deeply stratified. When companies are providing strong worker benefits, it’s often going toward those workers who are already most privileged. What that allows companies to do is compete for the best talent, so it’s essentially used as a sort of carrot. By not having those benefits be universal, it means they can continue to exploit workers who are doing the kinds of jobs that don’t have a huge profit margin.



To the extent that companies can keep those workers underpaid and given very little in benefits, it can help the corporation’s bottom line, often because those are the vast majority of workers relative to those knowledge workers who get the benefits. On balance, companies have a certain incentive to maintain this kind of exploitative system. It allows them to exploit people at the bottom while still bragging about the kinds of benefits that they offer to the people at the top.



There’s a lot that they could, in theory, be doing. One way is by lobbying collectively, by thinking about using the power of business as a whole, as an industry, as a sort of institution, to be able to push Congress and push the policy changes that could get us to the place where we actually have a stronger social safety net. Historically, it has worked the other way; business interests have instead lobbied against higher taxes and against stronger social safety net programs. I talked in the book about the early history of that in the 1930s and pushing back against things like the New Deal and importing these neoliberal ideas specifically to fight against that. At the same time, that shows the power that corporations and wealthy people could have if they were to push the other way.



After writing this book and speaking to all of these people, do you feel optimistic that things could really change?



I see hope in the possibility for individuals to change their minds. If we can start to call out in ourselves and in others the kind of mythical thinking that justifies inequalities and that deludes us into thinking that we can get by without a social safety net, then we can start to bridge the divides between us. Those myths operate not only to persuade people that we can get by without a net, but also to divide us by gender and race and class and politics and religion in ways that lead us to focus on having a sense of moral superiority over others. 



If we expanded the net, we’d all be better off. Rejecting that kind of thinking can help us see those bridges between us, to reject some of those artificial divisions. We still live in a democracy, technically, so if enough of us vote in certain directions, we can affect policy. We can put in place policymakers who are willing to fight for these big social changes, but it takes persuading enough people to get on board. So I think it’s hard work, but it’s possible.