In Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” she recalls a lesson she learned from Florynce Kennedy, civil rights activist and lawyer, on dealing with detractors. Kennedy and Steinem would lecture together on college campuses in the 1970s, and the crowds would inevitably include a heckler. “Just pause,” Kennedy advised, “let the audience absorb the hostility. Then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’” Because ultimately, Steinem wrote, hostility educates an audience — about what stands in the way of progress and why it’s important to keep pushing. So when Jessica Calarco’s phenomenal new book, “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” came out less than a month after NFL kicker Harrison Butker used a college commencement address to tell “the ladies present today” that “homemaker” would be their most important title, I thought, “She didn’t pay him to say that. … But, man, it would have been money well-spent.” Calarco is a sociologist and author whose latest work interrogates the ways in which unpaid or underpaid women keep society afloat by bearing the brunt of the labor of child rearing, early education, health care, elder care and more — and why this system is broken, unsustainable and beneficial to almost no one except the wealthiest of the wealthy. “The U.S. avoids catastrophe and keeps our society and our economy from crumbling by relying on women as the invisible glue,” Calarco writes. “Holding It Together” is based on research Calarco and her team conducted from 2018 to 2022, 400 hours of interviews and two national surveys. She weaves in contemporary history, long-held economic principles and hundreds of families’ personal experiences to show the toll on women — and society — when we spin this set-up as a value system rather than calling it what it really is: exploitation. “In essence, the U.S. has decided that we can get by without a social safety net because women will protect us instead,” Calarco writes. “That choice is drowning women and leaving our society sicker, sadder and more stressed. Yet the engineers and profiteers of our DIY society refuse to see women struggling, because acknowledging those struggles would shatter the illusion. Ignoring women leaves us exactly where they want us — keeping society afloat without any buoy to hold us, and so out of breath that no one can hear us if we cry.” She writes about the way our culture raises girls to be “mothers-in-waiting,” the way our schools limit access to evidence-based education about avoiding pregnancy, the way our policies curtail birth control access and abortion rights, and then the way we write off unplanned pregnancies (which make up roughly half of all U.S. pregnancies) as the result of poor choices. She points out that 90% of workers hired to care for the resulting children are women, and they’re among the lowest-paid in the U.S. economy — often lacking access to health insurance or paid sick leave. She writes about the American obsession with rags-to-riches stories, callousness toward poor people and widespread beliefs that prosperity and health are simply the result of good choices. All of which serve to “divide and delude us into accepting the DIY society and women’s role as a substitute safety net.” She notes that simply telling men to take on more of the domestic burden isn’t a solution. “Telling men ‘Do more!’ doesn’t change the incentives that men have to dump the risk they face onto the women in their families — the same set of incentives that leads privileged women to dump the risk they’ve been handed onto others more vulnerable than them,” Calarco writes. “Telling men ‘Do more!’ also doesn’t change the gendered structure of our economy, the gendered pressures that men face to prioritize paid work over caregiving or the gendered differences in socialization that leave men less prepared to do the work of care.” It also, Calarco writes, hands women yet more thankless roles: gender police and cleanup crew. The answer, Calarco makes painstakingly clear, is an actual social safety net, made up of well-funded public programs that protect people from exploitation, provide essential protections like health insurance, paid sick leave and paid family leave. Such a safety net would allow families real choices and grant people dignity throughout their life spans. She makes the case for a union of care, similar to other labor unions, that bridges the gap between disparate care industries as well as the gap between paid and unpaid care workers and the gap between people who give and receive care. A unifier, where so much division exists. Which brings us, believe it or not, back to Butker’s commencement address. “I have seen it firsthand how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God’s will in their life,” he told the graduates, invoking his wife as an example. “Isabelle’s dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, ‘Heck, no.’” I’m sure that’s true. If you asked me today if I regret any of the time or energy I’ve devoted to my children I would also say, “Heck, no.” But that’s not for everyone. And it’s also not a system — certainly not an equitable or sustainable one. (A spouse with an NFL salary, for example, makes forgoing a career that provides a paycheck, insurance and retirement benefits possible in a way that few women will experience.) And that, believe it or not, brings us back to Steinem’s memoir. Kennedy, Steinem wrote, was used to skeptics — including women — who didn’t see the point of all her women’s lib talk. Women have it fine, they’d tell her. I have it fine, they’d tell her. And Kennedy would tell them this, Steinem wrote. “Just because you’re not feeling sick doesn’t mean you should close the hospitals.” Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she continues the conversation around her columns and hosts occasional live chats. Twitter @heidistevens13
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