How Women Became America’s Safety Net

Other countries have an elaborate safety net to help keep families healthy and functioning—the U.S. has women. That’s the central idea at the heart of Jessica Calarco‘s new book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Based on 5 years of research and more than 400 hours of interviews with U.S. parents, the book explores the myths that drive this unequal system as well as some of the potential reforms to improve it. Calarco, a sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke with Spotlight recently about her book. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why don’t we start with what drove you to write this book?

So, this was not a book that I intended to write. I had started the research that became this book back in 2018 and that research had been mostly ethnographic work on inequalities in education where I was spending time with families and in communities and schools. I recently had my own two young children and going back into the field doing that kind of intensive ethnographic work wasn’t going to be possible given child care challenges and lots of other things. And so, I designed a new project that I thought of at the time as a look at the best laid plans of parenthood—trying to understand how parents develop ideas about the kinds of decisions that they make for their new babies, and then what happens when life intervenes, often in unequal ways, and how do they feel about themselves in the process?

I worked with a team of graduate and undergraduate students to recruit 250 pregnant women from pre-natal clinics in Indiana. We started with a survey about all the decisions they planned to make for their new babies and then followed up with them at six months and 12 months and 18 months postpartum, asking them about all the decisions that they were making, how they felt about those decisions, and what was going on in their lives. The initial data collection started in 2018 and 2019, so we were still in the field with that project when COVID hit in 2020. And it became deeply obvious, almost from the get-go, how much of an impact COVID was having on families with young children, and particularly the mothers in those families who were doing a vastly disproportionate share, not only of the added child care responsibilities, but of making sure that grandma got her medication and that neighbors got meals delivered and that people got taken care of when they were sick.

So, as it turned out, we had some of the earliest data on the pandemic’s impact on families because we’d already been in the field. I started doing a lot of media around pandemic parenting and the consequences for women. And an editor reached out to me from the press that I worked with to suggest that this could be a book. At first, I thought it was going to be a more hopeful story. I thought, especially in the wake of some of the policies that we put in place during COVID and Joe Biden’s election, that this might end up being the story of how we finally learn to stop treating women as our social safety net and actually build a real one instead. But that’s obviously not how things turned out.

And so, I think that if anything, the death of Build Back Better, the end of many of the pandemic programs and the shift that we’ve seen in growing levels of sexism in our society made it feel even more imperative to tell this story of how we came to rely on women as our social safety net and what that work is doing to women. And then also what kinds of myths are keeping us from fighting for the kinds of better social policies that would not only help women but help almost all of us move out of the more precarious positions we are in right now.

And what are some of those myths?

In the book, I outlined three myths that operate to delude us into believing that we don’t need a social safety net and to divide us by race and class and gender in ways that keep us from coming together to fight for stronger social policies. That includes things like the myth of meritocracy, which suggests that people don’t really need a social safety net, because if they just make good choices and work hard enough, they’ll be able to be successful and support themselves and their families without government support. And the problem with that myth, and with all of these myths, is that it often ignores the fact that correlation is not causation. Just because people make “good choices,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s those choices that are leading to better outcomes. Often, it takes a great deal of privilege to make those “better choices” instead.

And at the same time, I show how buying into these ideologies, particularly for people who are not in poverty necessarily, but in economically precarious positions, leads them to believe that we don’t need a social safety net and even to fight against it. Because not having one allows them to feel morally superior to the people who are just a little bit less well-off than them. I tell the story in the book of white evangelical Christian mom who I call April, whose family gets by on around $30,000 a year from her husband’s job as a pastor. She’s a stay-at-home mom, but she opposes any effort to expand the social safety net, in part because she buys into this idea that her family’s ability to get by is based on their good choices. She thinks that we didn’t need the government stimulus money during COVID. We didn’t need the Child Tax Credit. And if anything, she took it a step further and blamed those families who do need those kinds of policies, saying that they must have just made bad choices.

They are often described in sexist terms—these women must just be getting their nails done or going out partying—and that feeds into some of the other myths like the myth of Mars and Venus, which is this idea that men and women are just naturally different and that women are naturally better suited for caregiving and that they’re even happier at home than they would be in paid work. I talk in the book about how there’s evidence that young men in particular are increasingly buying into these ideologies, in part because of messaging that’s coming from right-wing media and politicians as well as social media influencers. The myth of Mars and Venus messaging tells men that they are good guys and it’s actually natural and reasonable for them to focus on paid work and for their wives or their girlfriends or their mothers to focus on the caregiving responsibilities so that they can be the ones who get ahead financially.

And you would’ve thought that the experience of the pandemic would have exploded some of those myths, but it certainly seems to not have been the case.

We certainly learned a lot from the pandemic in terms of what is possible when we put the right kinds of policies in place. We learned that child poverty is a choice, that we can literally lift millions of children out of poverty overnight by changing our social policies. We changed rules around housing access in terms of moratoriums on evictions that kept people from falling into homelessness. We had stoppages on student loan payments, which reshaped families’ decision making and made it possible for some of the families that I talked with to think about having a second child when they weren’t sure if they could afford it before. These kinds of policies make a huge difference. But when we ended those policies at the end of the pandemic, I think it was very easy for people to feel a kind of dejection. And it’s not surprising given that the people who are often most affected by our lack of a strong social safety net have so much responsibility and so much risk heaped on them that they often struggle to find the time and the energy to be able to fight.

Talk about the DIY society.

I talk in the book about how other countries have invested in social safety nets as ways to help people manage the risks and responsibilities that they face in their day-to-day lives. In the U.S, billionaires and big corporations and the politicians that they often collaborate with have decided that they don’t want to pay for those kinds of social safety nets. They’ve leveraged their wealth to turn the U.S. into this DIY society instead. And the idea of a DIY society is that people are supposed to manage their own risks and responsibilities without support from the government. At the same time, the reality is that while some people might be able to get by without a social safety net, plenty of people among us, including children, elderly people, and those who are sick or disabled or socially marginalized will need support from others to be able to get by.

And so collectively, this DIY model leaves us with too much risk and responsibility for each of us to just be able to manage on our own. At the same time, we’ve managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society to pretend that we’re a society where everyone gets by on their own merits, by relying on women to fill the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our social safety net, essentially doing the work of taking care of those who can’t fully take care of themselves. This shows up in the economy in the sense that women hold almost 70% of the lowest wage jobs in the U.S. economy. And those are disproportionately jobs in the caregiving sector, things like home health care and child care. And on top of that, women are also doing roughly twice as much unpaid care labor as men. This work of maintaining the illusion of a DIY society is really crushing women and particularly women from systematically marginalized groups who often have kind of nowhere to turn for support.

And that leads a little bit into another concept in the book, which is the Motherhood Trap.

The Motherhood Trap is this idea that there are lots of ways to exploit people but one of the most effective tools that the U.S. has found for getting people to stand in for the social safety net is by tasking them with responsibility for children and then giving them no support at all in raising those kids themselves. This explains a lot of what we’ve seen in terms of attacks on reproductive freedom. Because the idea is that if you could push women or even young girls into motherhood, it limits the options that they have, especially if they don’t have access to support from strong social safety net policies. And in the absence of those kinds of policies, that’s part of how women get pushed into these often very, very low paying jobs. And at the same time, even if you’re able to avoid that kind of low paying work, it’s very easy for mothers to be pushed into doing the unpaid care work because they know that the buck stops with them in the sense that they are the ones who are going to be judged by our society if their kids are not doing well in school, or if their kids are experiencing health problems or facing bullying.

Have more flexible work schedules as a result of the pandemic helped?

That’s definitely the case, but it’s also important to acknowledge that while things like flexible work schedules can be a tremendous boon for families, they also operate as somewhat of a double-edged sword in the sense that research is showing that women are trying to use them as substitutes for child care because of this persistent child care crisis that we are facing. Growing numbers of women are trying to work remotely while also being the full-time caregivers for their young children and that is exhausting. Research also shows that on top of that, women are penalized for using flexible work policies in ways that men aren’t, because women are assumed to be using them for caregiving purposes. And that runs the risk of perpetuating things like gender wage gaps and motherhood wage penalties.

Given all these interviews that you’ve done, do you come away with any thoughts on how to make some of these policies perhaps more politically palatable? I know with the experience of the expanded Child Tax Credit, there was polling that showed that when you talked about that as a pro-family policy, it was much more popular than as an anti-poverty policy.

I think you’re right that when we can frame these policies as pro-family, that is a place where we can get buy-in, particularly from people in caregiving roles. Proponents of these kinds of policies are often tagged as anti-family or anti-child and there are so many ways to push back against that kind of messaging. Everything from child tax credits to universal child care to affordable preschool to universal free lunch programs are deeply pro child and pro-family. And when these policies are actually put in place, they are widely popular.