1장
The Invisible Safety Net: How America Depends on Women to Hold Everything Together
Have you ever wondered why America, the world's richest nation, lacks the social safety nets common in other developed countries? The answer might surprise you: we do have a safety net-it's women. In Jessica Calarco's groundbreaking book "Holding It Together," she reveals how American society forces women to stand in for missing social infrastructure, creating an illusion that we don't need robust public support systems. Unlike European countries that invested in universal childcare, healthcare, and paid leave after World War II, America dismantled its wartime childcare system and pushed women into domestic roles. This book has sparked conversations among policymakers and celebrities alike, with figures like Melinda Gates calling it "essential reading for understanding America's care crisis." As women continue shouldering nearly two hours more unpaid work daily than men while earning substantially less, Calarco's work exposes how America's self-help culture convinces struggling women their difficulties stem from personal failings rather than systemic design.
2장
The DIY Society: America's Failed Experiment
America once built elements of a social safety net through Roosevelt's New Deal, creating Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage laws, and the forty-hour workweek. But this progress was deliberately undermined by wealthy business interests, particularly those in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), who imported neoliberal economists to American universities.
These economists, including Milton Friedman, promoted the idea that corporations should maximize shareholder profits while taxes and regulations should be minimized. NAM launched massive propaganda campaigns arguing that lowering taxes on the wealthy would create "trickle-down" prosperity and that without safety nets, people would make "better choices."
This messaging helped elect neoliberal politicians like Reagan, who then installed these economists in policymaking positions. The resulting "great risk shift" slashed social welfare spending and transferred responsibility for well-being from government and employers to individuals and families, creating what Calarco calls a "DIY society."
Despite promises of widespread prosperity, economic growth actually slowed after this shift, with wealth increasingly concentrated among the highest-income households. Low and middle-income Americans have less wealth today than twenty years ago, while the burden of maintaining society has fallen disproportionately on women.
Consider Akari's story. After losing her partner Theo to gun violence, she juggled three part-time jobs totaling fifty hours weekly plus commuting, earning only $2,800-3,000 monthly. Even with this grueling schedule, she relied on food pantries for necessities. Adding a weekend manufacturing job meant working 12-hour shifts on weekends, forcing her to leave her children with relatives from Friday evening until Monday morning-a sacrifice that devastated her daughter, who developed PTSD after effectively "losing both parents." Worse still, the additional income pushed Akari over benefit cliffs, making her ineligible for welfare and public housing while increasing her costs for other programs.
The DIY society is merely an illusion sustained by women's invisible labor. When women seemingly make something from nothing, it falsely validates free-market theories that we can survive without social support. In reality, women aren't actually holding it together as well as it appears. Being the stand-in for the social safety net has severely damaged women's wellbeing and left their families less secure.
3장
Making Mothers: How Society Traps Women in Caregiving Roles
American society grooms girls from childhood to become the social safety net, teaching them caregiving while boys run free. We train girls to be "mothers-in-waiting," equating womanhood with motherhood to make women seem "naturally" suited for care work. When this grooming isn't enough, America's laws and culture force women into motherhood and child-rearing.
Brooke's story illustrates this trap. Despite never wanting children, she became pregnant and faced obstacles to abortion in Republican-controlled Indiana. After having her son, she struggled financially, eventually taking a minimum-wage childcare job she loved but that barely supported her family. Even when promoted to assistant director, her $25,000 salary left her in financial precarity, especially as the raise made her ineligible for government assistance programs.
America fails to prevent unintended pregnancies through comprehensive sex education and accessible contraception. Roughly half of all US pregnancies are unintended, with teen pregnancy rates more than double those in countries like Denmark. The 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade has only tightened the motherhood trap, making it harder for women to control both if and when they have children.
Pro-natal messaging and barriers to abortion access push women into poorly timed pregnancies or having more children than planned. Audrey, raised in a white evangelical Christian family, found herself pregnant after her husband Colby disregarded her explicit wishes to avoid pregnancy during pandemic stress. Though she recognized this as sexual assault, only her sister-in-law validated these feelings. She considered both abortion and divorce but felt constrained by her evangelical church community's beliefs against both options. The financial reality of divorce-managing childcare costs and $40,000 in debt on a single income while potentially losing health insurance-made leaving seem impossible.
Even women who never planned to become mothers find themselves thrust into caregiving roles. When Sylvia was fifteen, her brother's addiction issues left her as the primary caregiver for his children. She abandoned her college plans to raise her niece and nephew, eventually becoming their full-time caregiver. This pattern reflects the broader impact of the opioid crisis, where millions of children are placed with relatives-usually women-who receive little support, perpetuating cycles of poverty and hardship.
Once trapped in motherhood, women face a maternal health crisis that disproportionately impacts Black women, who are 2.5 times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications. Society places blame on mothers when anything goes wrong with their children, creating pervasive guilt, particularly in countries like the US with inadequate social safety nets.
4장
No Escape: How the System Keeps Women Trapped
Once women are caught in the motherhood trap, they're easily forced to stand in for the social safety net through systematic denial of paid family leave and affordable childcare. This lack of support allows employers to reject mothers from male-dominated jobs or relegate them to lower-paying positions, questioning their commitment to work. Locked out of high-paying careers, women have little choice but to fill gaps in failing systems like childcare, healthcare, education, and eldercare-either through underpaid caregiving jobs or unpaid work at home.
Erin's story illustrates the impossible financial calculations that trap many low-income mothers. After marrying Mark, they struggled on their combined $30,000 annual income in small-town Indiana. When their son Carson was born in 2016, they faced the childcare dilemma that forces many women out of the workforce: neither had paid family leave, they earned too much for public childcare assistance but too little to afford private care, and family help wasn't available. Erin initially tried working night shifts while Mark worked days, but the sleep deprivation became unbearable. Quitting her job made financial sense-they qualified for Medicaid, WIC, and EITC-though Erin struggled with the stigma of accepting government assistance.
When women prove they can hold it together, society rewards them with more responsibilities. The precarity affecting American communities forces families to rely on mothers who have shown resilience, while simultaneously preventing these women from refusing additional burdens. In 2022, nearly 38 million Americans lived in poverty, with another 25 million living within 150% of the poverty line-representing 20% of the US population. Nearly a quarter of Americans have no emergency savings, while another third have insufficient savings to last three months.
This precarity disproportionately affects Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. Black men like Rodney often face limited employment prospects and flexibility, forcing women like Patricia to be both primary breadwinner and caregiver-a situation affecting 69% of mothers in the lowest-income families and 68% of Black mothers, compared to just 30% in the highest-income households and 37% among white mothers.
In communities where nearly everyone lives precariously, women who have demonstrated resilience become the default resource for solving everyone's problems, even as they themselves reach breaking point.
5장
The Moral Trap: How Privilege Creates Different Burdens
The more gaps in our social safety net filled by women like Akari, Brooke, Sylvia, and Patricia, the easier it becomes for privileged women to escape the motherhood trap. In our DIY society, higher-income women can outsource domestic labor and caregiving-often exploiting more vulnerable women-allowing them to compete professionally and secure salaries that give them leverage at home. Money buys women more choices, but these choices come morally fraught.
Holly and Kathleen faced an ethical dilemma that exemplifies the moral trap many middle-class families experience. Despite paying over $1,200 monthly for childcare, they discovered their financial security depended on the exploitation of underpaid workers-primarily women of color-at their daughter's childcare center. When Holly approached the director about quality concerns, she learned that to keep prices affordable, the center could only hire staff willing to work for low wages without benefits, resulting in high turnover.
This exploitation isn't unique to childcare. In the US, childcare workers-over 90% women-are among the lowest-paid workers, rarely receiving benefits like health insurance or paid leave, despite the labor-intensive nature of their work. Other countries have solved these problems by removing childcare, healthcare, and eldercare from free-market pressures through government funding. In Norway, childcare workers earn the equivalent of $40,000 annually-double US wages-with comprehensive benefits.
Even women who outpace their husbands economically still shoulder the burden of default caregiving. Despite earning $75,000 as a tenure-track professor-$30,000 more than her husband Charles, a middle school teacher-Virginia became the default parent and caregiver due to her gender and perceived job flexibility. When their two-year-old son needed to quarantine after COVID exposures, Virginia managed childcare while working remotely, lamenting: "I've paid two thousand dollars to have twelve days of care in the last six weeks...I've paid two thousand dollars to watch my own child."
Virginia's caregiving extended to her mother with Alzheimer's, with her brother acknowledging her as "the matriarch" who was "holding the world up" rather than sharing responsibilities. These mounting responsibilities prevented Virginia from focusing on her research, despite her academic position.
When gender roles are reversed in caregiving arrangements, the underlying inequities of our social safety net remain, just with different manifestations. Ivan, among only 7% of American dads who stay home full-time with children, made this choice based on economic logic: his wife Nancy earned $125,000 as a nurse practitioner-more than double his income as an art appraiser.
Unlike most breadwinner fathers, Nancy actively supported Ivan through his caregiving struggles-taking their daughter Cecilia for an hour each evening so he could rest, reducing her workweek when financially possible, and arranging childcare when Ivan was diagnosed with cancer. This stands in stark contrast to breadwinner dads like Colby, who rarely spend their incomes to outsource care or reduce their partners' burdens.
6장
The Myth of Good Choices: Why Individual Solutions Fail
Rather than acknowledging women's overwhelming burdens in our DIY society, those in power gaslight women who struggle, blaming their problems on laziness or poor choices. Neoliberal think tanks promote research claiming that following a simple "success sequence"-finishing high school, working full-time, and marrying before having children-guarantees financial stability. However, this promise of salvation through good choices is hollow.
Marriage fails to provide financial security for many women. Despite following the traditional path of marriage and motherhood, Jocelyn faced constant financial struggles. Her first husband Kyler couldn't support the family with his minimum wage job and failing pet care business, forcing Jocelyn to work grueling hours as a cashier and house cleaner while managing childcare. Their split-shift arrangement led to frustration and ultimately domestic violence, prompting Jocelyn to leave despite her religious beliefs against divorce.
Higher education doesn't guarantee women financial security either. Despite earning both college and master's degrees in therapy, Lillian struggled financially after moving to Indiana with her husband Desmond. Her job with the Department of Children's Services paid only $30,000 annually without benefits like paid family leave. When she had two children in quick succession and faced pregnancy complications, she took unpaid leave and relied on WIC assistance, her husband's meager part-time income, and family help.
Even STEM careers don't save women from these burdens. Despite Teresa's engineering degree, MBA, and $125,000 salary at a biotech company, she faced workplace challenges including colleagues' hostility toward her pumping schedule and management's resistance to providing adequate lactation facilities. She repeatedly passed up promotions to support her husband Cole's career and manage family responsibilities, despite earning twice his salary and carrying significant student debt.
The "good choices" rhetoric serves as a diversion-a way to justify not building a real social safety net by creating the perception that women don't need or deserve support. Our DIY society is designed to force women to hold everything together regardless of their choices.
7장
The Meritocracy Myth: How False Beliefs Maintain Inequality
Americans have long embraced rags-to-riches narratives while harboring disdain for the poor. Benjamin Franklin's assertion that the best way to help the poor is by "leading or driving them out of it" reflects a belief that poverty stems from ignorance or laziness rather than systemic issues. This callousness toward the poor stems from the meritocracy myth-the belief that success comes solely from "good choices."
April, who grew up in an upper-middle-class white family with college-educated parents in healthcare, opposes expanding the social safety net despite relying on programs like Medicaid and EITC herself. Her job providing temporary childcare for low-income families shaped her beliefs about parenting and discipline. Despite living on her husband's $30,000 pastor salary and relying on government benefits, April maintains moral boundaries between her family and those she sees as "truly poor," insisting her family's faith and good choices will see them through.
The meritocracy myth has deep American roots, from Benjamin Franklin's writings to the mid-nineteenth-century New Thought Movement, which taught that people could think their way to health and prosperity. This philosophy laid groundwork for the "prosperity gospel" embraced by evangelical Christians like April, teaching that God rewards the faithful with earthly wealth and good health.
Despite evidence disproving the meritocracy myth, Americans continue to believe it. Over 70% of US adults believe hard work alone determines success, and more than 90% believe it plays at least some role-far higher than in countries like France, where only about 50% believe hard work affects who gets ahead.
The meritocracy myth undermines our social safety net by encouraging the belief that struggling people simply haven't tried hard enough. This erodes empathy and leads to punitive policies that force people to prove they're worthy of support. Instead of universal programs built on the notion that everyone deserves healthcare, childcare, and adequate income, we've created a restrictive net with complex eligibility criteria, work requirements, endless forms, and invasive procedures.
This myth also glorifies the wealthy while vilifying the poor. Most Americans have no problem with billionaires-only 29% think they're bad for the country. Billionaires like Elon Musk use the myth to paint themselves as worthy of their wealth and power, demanding "hardcore" work from employees while paying others to handle life's "soft stuff." This myth fuels resistance to taxing the ultra-wealthy, as seen when Senator Joe Manchin killed Biden's billionaire tax proposal that could have generated $250 billion annually, claiming it would unfairly "target" people who "contributed to society."
8장
Mars vs. Venus: How Gender Myths Reinforce Inequality
The Mars/Venus myth equates gender with biological sex, treats both as binary opposites, and falsely claims biology dictates gendered skills and preferences. This myth helps undermine support for strengthening social safety nets by justifying men's exploitation of women and silencing women's complaints.
Dennis and Bethany exemplify this dynamic in their "traditional" marriage. While Dennis claims to support gender equality in theory, he enjoys the "perks" of their arrangement where Bethany quit her social work career to care for their children. Dennis frames this as Bethany's choice and a logical financial decision, suggesting she should be grateful she "gets" to stay home while he uses his free time for "fun things."
Bethany's perspective reveals a more complex reality. Unlike Dennis, she believes children fare well with working mothers and supports policies like free childcare that would give women real choices. Her decision to stay home stemmed not from job dissatisfaction as Dennis claimed, but from the overwhelming burden of simultaneously working and managing childcare with minimal support.
The Mars/Venus myth establishes a rigid gender hierarchy with men's "blue box" positioned above women's "pink box" and polices this system through homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and misogyny. This myth has deep historical roots in pseudoscience. Charles Darwin, influenced by Victorian gender norms, sought biological evidence to prove male superiority.
Recent scientific studies have thoroughly debunked Darwin's conclusions. Biologist Cara Wall-Scheffler's comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies revealed that in 79% of these societies, women hunted alongside men-not occasionally but purposefully, with specialized training and tools.
Despite mounting scientific evidence debunking the gender binary, cultural acceptance of the Mars/Venus myth appears to be increasing. Many men claim egalitarian beliefs as a convenient shield while abandoning them when personally inconvenient. Men like Dennis and Tom weaponize their own incompetence and use praise for women's supposed natural talents to justify minimal involvement in care work.
Media-both traditional and social-plays a key role in reviving the Mars/Venus myth. One week of Twitter data revealed 2.9 million tweets containing gendered insults like "cunt," "slut," and "whore"-averaging 419,000 sexist tweets daily. Modern purveyors of sexism craft their hate as humor, making it seem like harmless fun.
A stronger social safety net would reduce risks for women, and most men would also benefit in absolute terms. However, what men would lose are the relative advantages they have over women. At home, policies like universal childcare, healthcare, and college would put Dennis and Bethany on more equal footing, giving her more leverage and him less room to avoid domestic responsibilities based on his higher earnings.
9장
The Supermom Myth: How Fear and Guilt Keep Women in Line
The "Supermom myth" portrays children in constant danger and mothers as their sole protectors. While seemingly empowering, this myth actually weaponizes women's fear to keep them in their "proper" place at home.
Kara, a biracial evangelical Christian mother, believes her primary responsibility is protecting her children's souls from sin and damnation. She left her $30,000/year nonprofit job to stay home and eventually homeschool her children, not for academic reasons but to ensure they learn through a "Christian worldview" away from the "worldly" influence of public schools.
Her husband Alec, who earns $80,000 as a software engineer, reinforces their belief in a strict hierarchy with "God first, then spouse, then children." Kara accepts that Alec has "the final say" while her job is to "nurture the people in the house and be a help to my husband," which justifies her doing all housework and childcare.
Not all mothers are motivated by fear of Satan-some need a different threat to don the Supermom cape. Monica, a white, college-educated stay-at-home mother of two, focuses on ensuring her children lead "happy" and "successful" lives in what she sees as a competitive, zero-sum society. She approaches parenting with scientific precision, following strict rules from parenting books like John Medina's "Brain Rules for Babies."
Though initially planning to return to work, Monica ultimately left her six-figure corporate job to become a stay-at-home mom, finding the idea of strangers raising her children "sad" and potentially unsafe. She redirected her career ambitions into raising children who would have the best chance at success, setting extremely high standards for nutrition and beating herself up when her son ate even organic crackers.
The Supermom myth isn't just for stay-at-home mothers. Working mothers like Chloe embrace a version that promises they can excel both professionally and domestically if they just work hard enough. As a public health director earning $50,000 annually (the same as her husband Neil, despite her advanced education), Chloe shoulders nearly all parenting "worry work" while maintaining her career.
During the pandemic, Chloe requested remote work a month before her daughter Georgia's daycare closed, anticipating the crisis while Neil continued working on-site. Left caring for Georgia full-time while working remotely, Chloe felt she was "failing on every front" with "not enough of me to go around."
The "Supermom can have it all" myth represents a corporate distortion of 1960s-70s feminism. While early feminists like Gloria Steinem argued women deserved fulfilling careers AND family life-with the crucial caveat that this required both stronger social safety nets AND men stepping up at home-corporate consultants stripped away these structural components.
Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 bestseller "Lean In" epitomizes this diluted feminism, telling women that self-doubt, not systemic inequality, holds them back. Her message encourages what might be called "Jane Henryism"-professional mothers working themselves to exhaustion to prove women can succeed, supposedly paving the way for others.
10장
Toward a Better Future: Reimagining Our Social Contract
The pandemic relief efforts provided a transformative safety net for millions of Americans. The CARES Act allocated $2.2 trillion for direct payments, expanded unemployment benefits, small business support, and more. Additional programs made free school lunches universal, expanded the child tax credit, and paused evictions and student loan payments.
For twenty-year-old Sierra, a Black single mother struggling on minimum wage, these programs were life-changing. The stimulus checks and rent relief allowed her to stay in her apartment near her son's father and spend quality time with her child without constant financial stress.
Despite the proven success of pandemic relief programs, by early 2022 Congress had cut off most pandemic support. The child tax credit payments, eviction moratorium, and relief checks ended abruptly, pushing the child poverty rate from 11 to 17 percent-higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Making social safety net programs universal amplifies benefits for the most vulnerable while leaving almost everyone better off. Universal school lunches improve nutrition and test scores for all children, with the greatest benefits for low-income kids who avoid stigmatization. Universal healthcare systems in other countries maintain consistent costs at about 9% of GDP, while US healthcare spending has ballooned to 18% of GDP by 2022.
Build Back Better would have shifted the power balance, making regular people better off while billionaires and corporations would have had slightly less. This threatened their power, which depends on economic inequality to monopolize resources and pressure workers. Using their wealth to buy political influence, opponents targeted key senators like Joe Manchin, who received $1.5 million in donations during negotiations.
Iceland's 1975 women's strike offers a powerful model for collective action. When women across Iceland took a day off from all work-paid and unpaid-men suddenly experienced the burden women had been carrying. This action catalyzed real change, helping Iceland become the first country to elect a female president and develop policies that dramatically improved life for women and children.
Care is inherently a shared project that involves noticing others' needs, planning to meet them, and putting our bodies on the line to fulfill them-far beyond just financial support. A strong social safety net doesn't replace these networks but strengthens them by ensuring everyone has their basic needs met-clean air and water, nourishing food, safe shelter, healthcare, meaningful work, rest, and opportunities for joy.
Building a sustainable care infrastructure requires expanding our definition of care industries to include those providing basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. We must also create care systems not tied to paid work-removing work requirements from welfare programs and making benefits generous enough to live with dignity.
What we need is a union of care that bridges gaps between care industries, between paid and unpaid care workers, and between caregivers and care recipients. This union would strengthen our sense of linked fate-recognizing how stress on one part of the care network affects everyone.
Imagine a world where care work is valued on par with IT. Bethany might earn as much as Dennis, likely staying in the workforce after having children, while Dennis would share parenting and housework more equally. If childcare and social work paid as well as IT, Dennis might even encourage his son toward caregiving careers rather than perpetuating the cycle.
In this world, informal caregiving would be valued equally with paid care work. Akari wouldn't need three jobs, stay-at-home parents wouldn't struggle financially, and families would have real choices about dividing energies between employment and caregiving without pitting precarity against morality. This is the world we ought to imagine-where we hold it together rather than pretending we can hold it together on our own.
