We’re back in your inboxes with the next installment in our writer-mom Q&A series. It feels fitting that we’re bringing you this discussion just in time for one of the wildest elections in our lifetime. One where reproductive rights are on the line and mothers are feeling all of the load of society on our shoulders.
To ignite the fire in you, we talk with Jessica Calarco, author of Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Calarco is a sociologist and researcher in inequalities in family life and education. Holding It Together is rooted in research she conducted throughout pregnancy and thereafter of various mothers in Indiana. The time period of her research saw the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the fall of Roe v. Wade. Calarco brings her whole self into the book in addition to details about the lives of the women interviewed for the study. And what she found is something we all know: America is using women as a scapegoat to shortchange its citizens of the social services we all need and deserve such as childcare, affordable healthcare, elder care, and all of the services that can keep an individual afloat.
Do yourself a favor and get the book (read it, listen to it, however you consume your books) and share it with others around you. It’s infuriating, but also full of potential solutions that if the election goes the way of progress, we might have the chance at achieving.
You can listen to the full interview above or read a shortened and edited transcript of our conversation below.
Elizabeth: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your life as a mom and your life as an academic and a writer?
Jessica: So I'm a sociologist. I teach university classes at the University of Wisconsin. I'm also a writer and researcher and mom of two kids. And when I was doing the research that ultimately became the book, I've been primarily on inequalities in education mostly ethnographic work where I was spending time embedded in communities and schools, following families with children and looking at their experiences in the classroom.
And I knew after I had my own two kids, my oldest was born in 2014 and my second was born in 2017, I wasn't in a life place to do another ethnographic study. I had two kids, child care challenges and my partner didn't have paid paternity leave. And so it was like lots of challenges on lots of fronts. And I knew I couldn't do another study like that. And so at the time I decided that my next project was going to be an interview project looking at what I thought of at the time as sort of the best laid plans of parenthood where I wanted to see kind of, you know, where do we get our ideas about the kinds of parents that we want to be? And then what happens when things go wrong, when life intervenes in ways. That that push us and challenge us. And how does that shape our sense of ourselves as parents?
And so I worked with a team of graduate students and undergraduate student research assistants to recruit 250 pregnant women from prenatal clinics in Indiana And we gave them all this fairly extensive survey about all the kinds of decisions that they might want to make for their new babies. So we plan to follow up with those same moms every six months six months and 12 months and 18 months postpartum to kind of see what decisions they were actually making and how they felt about it in the process.
The data collection started in 2018 and 2019. And so we were still in the field collecting those surveys and interviews when the pandemic hit in 2020. My oldest was in kindergarten. And at the same time, it's becoming deeply apparent through these interviews that we're doing how much of an impact COVID is having on families with young kids.
And I'm like living it in the background at the same time, trying to do these interviews over zoom with these moms. And it, you know, it was one of those moments where I was like, do I abandon this project or do I dig in? And, and at the time, you know, We had some of the earliest data on pandemic parenting, in part because we had already been in the field with this project.
And so I was getting calls from reporters that I'd worked with saying like, Hey, what are you finding? What are you hearing in the field? And, you know, for me in that moment, it felt like a sort of an important moment to tell those stories and to actually decide to dig in as opposed to just trying to give up and say no, I need to document this both for myself and also for The women and the families that we've been following for so long already at that point.
And so we did three more waves of pandemic data collection with those families and their partners and the moms and their partners. And then we also did two national surveys with about 4000 parents together from across the U. S. to kind of get a sense of, you know, how are these patterns that we're seeing in our interviews playing out across the U. S. And it was difficult and exhausting and, you know, emotionally taxing work. But the chance to share those stories and the insights from the work in this book and in some of the other readings that I've done it feels I feel incredibly privileged to, to have the opportunity to, show, you know, what we've done to the women in this country through the policy choices that we've made, how this is impacting real people in their lives.
And also to maybe offer some hope in terms of, you know, what could a better path forward look like? And what can we learn from the challenges that we're facing in the history that got us here?
Elizabeth: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what you learned and what your team learned?
Jessica: I think that the big takeaway here is that essentially other countries have invested in social safety nets as a way to help people manage risk and responsibilities. The things we all have to deal with in our day to day lives. In the US, instead, big corporations and billionaires have essentially decided that they don't want to pay for those kinds of safety nets, and so they've leveraged their wealth to turn the U. S. into what I talk about as a DIY society instead. And so the idea behind this DIY society is that people are supposed to be able to manage their own risks and responsibilities without support from the government. And they're kind of told that if you just make money, Good choices. You know, if you just find the right partner, if you just wait to have kids, if you just go to college or pursue the right career path, then you shouldn't actually need that safety net at all.
Now, the problem, though, is that we can't actually DIY society. You know, some people might be able to get by without that kind of support, but there are plenty of people among us. Including maybe most obviously children, elderly people, people who are sick or disabled who need support from other people.
What that means then is that we need someone to do that work of supporting others, even while we're telling everyone you can just do it on your own. And essentially what I show in the book is that we've managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society. by relying on women to fill in thegaps in our social safety net and the gaps in our economy, essentially relying on them to do the work of caring for anyone who can't fully care for themselves.
And so what that looks like in practice is that women are holding almost 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs in the US economy. You know, those are disproportionately jobs in the caregiving sector, things like home health care workers and childcare workers. And on top of that underpaid labor. They're also doing roughly twice as much unpaid care work as men are within the context of their families and their communities.
And really I show in the book how that work is crushing women, you know, particularly women from systematically marginalized groups who often have not only kind of nowhere to turn for support in managing the kinds of responsibilities that we've given to them, but also often nowhere to hide when others you know, see them figuring it out and ask them to try to do even more.
And yet, at the same time, this is, this is also drowning even, you know, relatively privileged women, because if you don't have the resources to, you know, hire a full time nanny and a full time housekeeper and, you know, a full time staff to manage your calendar, you know, you still have more risk than you can manage. You still have more responsibility than you can manage. And oftentimes even mothers and those more privileged families are still doing a vast amount of work. The outside share of the kinds of responsibility at home. And so I talk in the book about how this isn't working for any of us, and it's actually hurting men and others in our society, too.
But we haven't fixed these problems because the same billionaires and big corporations who could have sold us this DIY society are also selling us these myths.
In the US big corporations and billionaires have essentially decided that they don't want to pay for those kinds of safety nets, and so they've leveraged their wealth to turn the U. S. into what I talk about as a DIY society instead.
Elizabeth: Your book reminded me of kind of the the climate crisis essentially created by corporations that have sold us this story that it's our responsibility to save the planet that they are destroying. And so it's the same thing with this DIY society. We've all been fed this story and it's this cultural like thing that has seeped into this peer pressure campaign.
Jessica: tI tell my sociology students all the time, individual solutions can't solve structural problems because they're just too big, but there's an appeal to it because whether it's just reduce, reuse, recycle to solve the climate crisis, or just find the right local support system and figure it out for yourself with parenting those solutions feel empowering because they make us feel like we're feel as though we can change things or that we can solve them, and maybe we can chip off a little bit in the process, but it won't solve the larger structural issues, and especially it won't solve the deep inequalities that come from either, the climate crisis or from the way that we've pushed responsibility onto families.
Elizabeth: One of the things that I loved about your book too, is that you really brought yourself into it. I think as a mom and a woman, it was like you were speaking on behalf of me in those moments. I could see myself in the book. For example, one of the moments was when your husband texted you that Roe had been struck down and I even had like a visceral reaction reliving that moment when reading that. And so I'm curious about, the approach of like bringing yourself into it. What was it like writing it and how did it feel like even in your body?
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a book that mostly got written between 5 and 7 am. before my kids woke up in the morning. And so, I mean, that's, that's where I'm at life wise. And so, I can't tell you how many of the words here were written with a kid tugging on my pants or somebody asking me for a snack in the background. And so I think this is one of those moments where this is very much about the research that I've done, but the writing process itself was so much steeped in my own experience as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister, as a person in a community of caregivers who, and sort of it felt, it would have felt disingenuous to not bring some of that in here.
Like you mentioned with the Roe decision and thinking about the implications of it for the many people in my life who will be and are impacted by these kinds of decisions. For the women that I've studied who are impacted by these decisions you know, and, noticing in those moments what my own reactions are and feeling like I have to bring them in to help make sense of the way that others are feeling.
My hope with the book in general is that it will be both a chance for readers to find in the stories that I share, either my own or other people's things that resonate with them in their own lives, but also stories that are very different from their own experiences too, to help us sort of push outside the boundaries of our own experiences and see how different experiences with our policies and our social safety net can be especially for those who have different means or different experiences than we do.
Elizabeth: Yeah. speaking of that are there any stories that really stand out to you or that's stuck out to you as examples of kind of what the society is doing to women?
Jessica: Yeah. You mentioned the Roe decision before, and I think that one of the stories in the book that was maybe the hardest to write. I talk in the book about this woman that I call Brooke whose story really illustrates this point that I make about how the motherhood trap is one of the key mechanisms that the U. S. uses to force women into standing in for the social safety net and filling the gaps in the economy.
Brooke was someone who actually never set out to be a mother herself. She had grown up in a very difficult home situation and didn't feel like motherhood was the right path for her. And then like many young women ended up becoming pregnant unexpectedly in college and actually initially planned to get an abortion. But her own parents found out and she was raised in a very conservative evangelical Christian family and they persuaded her to keep the baby and not to go ahead with the abortion. They said they’d help her finish college, but they figured out in the end that they couldn't afford both.
And so what that meant for Brooke was that she ended up not only dropping out of college, but also moving with her son into a shelter. She eventually found affordable housing, but had to qualify for welfare, had to take the first job that she could find, which was a low wage job in retail. Even when she was able to find a better job, the next job, it was a low wage job in child care, and she took that one because it came with free child care, which was costing her almost as much as rent at the time. She ended up really loving the job, but even when she got promoted to assistant director of the center, she was still only making $25,000 a year. That was just demoralizing for her in some ways. And she wanted to go back to college. She wanted to finish her degree.
She had dreams of becoming a nurse because she felt like that would maybe give her a more stable path forward for herself and her son. But she couldn't figure out a way to make childcare work because she still didn't trust her parents. And she still had to work full time during the day, and so there wasn't any option for her to be able to to go back to school to get that degree.
I think Brooke's story is really emblematic of the perniciousness of that cycle where we simultaneously push women into motherhood and then penalize them for not being in the kinds of circumstances that would make it possible for them to support their kids on their own.
Elizabeth: Yeah I think, you know, Brooke's story, it's an example of so many stories, whereas oftentimes the story that we're fed is that kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You mentioned in your book that it was used originally to describe something that’s impossible to do, but we’ve turned it into something of an example.
Jessica: Yeah! The original phrase was intended to highlight the impossibility and the absurdity of this kind of mentality, and yet it speaks to the myths that I talk about in the second half of the book. We buy into these myths because they're reassuring in some ways, they tell us that we can just better choices our way out of precarity or into success for ourselves.
we can make these changes overnight with a stroke of the pen, essentially, if our policymakers are willing to understand the value of caregiving and and put in place the kinds of policies that can make a real difference in families lives.
Elizabeth: What was the most hopeful thing about this? I think it's important to focus on what gives you hope and what are the solutions.
Jessica: Yeah, I think this is one of the places where there were moments when I thought that this would be an even more hopeful book than it maybe is in its current construction. There were times in 2021 where we had Build Back Better on the horizon. We put in place all of these programs during the pandemic that were actually helping people.
I talk in the book about that. This one mom who I call Sierra, who's a low-income Black single mom who'd lost her job at the start of the pandemic and she was unemployed and struggling with with housing costs. And yet she had a cushion. She had a cushion from the financial supports from the pandemic, from the rent relief from moratoriums on a number of other types of payments and just a little bit of extra money in her pocket. She talked about how this was the first time, even though she was unemployed, this was the first time she'd ever been able to just spend time at home with her son without having to worry about money because, like many, many women in the U. S., she didn't qualify for any paid leave when her son was born and so went back to work basically as soon as she gave birth. And so this was a hopeful time and a happy time for herself. Even as things were hard in other ways and we could have learned from those moments in the pandemic.
And even higher income families, things like the universal free lunch program free meal program that we put in place at schools. So many of the even middle income and even higher income families that we talk to said how much stress is taken off my plate if I don't have to worry about what to pack my kid for lunch every day?
That gives me hope in the sense that, these kinds of changes, lifting millions of kids out of poverty with child tax credits, we can make these changes overnight with a stroke of the pen, essentially, if our policymakers are willing to understand the value of caregiving and and put in place the kinds of policies that can make a real difference in families lives.
And I think there's lots of ways to think about what might that decent safety net look like that we really need. And I like to think about it as sort of three broad buckets of things that we want to achieve.
The first one is that we want to make sure that everyone can live with dignity. In the sense that they have affordable housing, that they have access to decent food and clean water and the kind of basic necessities for living.
The second thing is that we want to make sure that everyone has access to economic opportunities the chance to strive for something better through things like affordable child care and things like free college tuition that many other countries have in place already, and that can give us a chance to move forward to have a better life than what we have right now.
And then the third thing is that we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care. And this is a little bit different policy wise, but this means giving people freedom from paid work. In the sense that you are have things like paid family leave, universal paid vacation time, four day work weeks, or limits on paid work hours, the way that places like France have put in place. To kind of curb the demands that employers can make on us and make sure that we have the time to tackle that pile of laundry that's sitting on the floor in my bedroom, or have time to spend with our kids, have time to care for our loved ones in our community and like those kinds of things, those kinds of policies are possible.
And I argue in the book that one of the best ways to do that is is to think about how we have to reject the myths that keep us from seeing the value of those policies and that keep us focused on fighting with each other. You know, mothers versus non mothers or mothers versus fathers are people of color versus white people in society.
There's lots of different ways that we're sort of divided, and I think we can help to reject those myths that divide us and dilute us by focusing on how care links our faiths. And this idea gets at the fact that whether we think of ourselves as caregivers or not, we are embedded in networks of care.
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