The pervading myth of gender differences encourages men and women to vote against a stronger social safety net, thereby requiring women to fill that gap — and leave less competition for jobs with men.
That’s a big argument from Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, a 2024 book by research Jessica Calarco. In her acknowledgements, she said her publisher reached out because she had been quoted as saying “Other countries have social safety nets. The US has women.”
It’s a piercing look, and one I deeply valued — both for broad cultural criticism and for my own discovery. At all income levels, women are more likely to offer childcare, domestic work and eldercare. The book features many anonymized anecdotes to demonstrate the research. At times these feel especially uncharitable to the male characters, but then that just might be the point.
In rich households, women are far more likely to opt out of the most demanding work, and support high-earning men earn more. In poor households, couples are much less likely to be married, and so women are more likely to also be primary income earners alongside their domestic work.
Calarco also summons research on middle-earning households. Today’s husbands often feel more progressive than their fathers. Yet, as the researcher writes: “these egalitarian narratives serve as a shield, allowing men to dismiss inequalities that emerge in their romantic relationships as the result of individual preferences so that gendered outcomes are allowed to go unquestioned, thereby leaving gender inequalities intact.”
The book is unsparing, both of the system and, perhaps more concretely, of men. I’m less convinced that’s effective in securing political power, but it’s certainly important. As Calarco reminds more poignantly: “Care is noticing someone else’s needs even if they don’t ask and being there or listen when they do.”
Below my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- In 1942, the War Manpower Commission chief Burton Morley in Mobile, Alabama sent a letter requesting permission to hire women. The childcare was gap so Katherine Lenroot, suggested tapping Lanham Act funding
- But Mobile like other places didn’t put up the matching local funding (or navigate complex bureaucracy) to get the funding
- Even still, labor force participation of US mothers with young children went from 1 in 30 to 1 in 6 during WW2 — but it all changed after the war’s completion
- In contrast Europe retained women in the workplace to repair their broken economies
- Time Use Survey: women do more childcare and family care and more volunteering
- Gender wage gap: 80% of it is from mothers, the full time gap is narrower — worse overall because more women do part time work
- In the 2023 book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, authors argue that the National Association of Manufacturers pushed back against FDR new deal
- 1100 surveys sit 374 participants and 312 in depth interviews with 142 of those participants
- Miranda Wagoner: train girls to be “mother’s in waiting”
- In US, half of pregnancies are unexpected and a half of them are carried to term; in Europe and East Asia, that is 1/3 and 1/3
- Dorothy Roberts’s 2001 book Shattered Bonds: policies split Black families, 40% increase in non parental caregiving in a decade
- The US has the third highest OECD rate of pregnancy death
- “The holes in our safety net are big enough for children to fall through”
- Author: Our DIY society
- The motherhood trap: building expectation for women as mothers so they are forced to lead social safety net
- Authors PITT study in 2022: 7% stay at home mothers in $100k+ households; 75% under $50k, half under $25k. Half stay at home moms had food stamps and Medicaid; 2/3 had difficulty paying bills
- “Employers reward fathers with daddy bonuses while subjecting mom’s to motherhood penalties, limiting their wages and opportunities to advance.”
- Erin and Mark in small town Indiana: they were making similar money but his job at the mine had more chances at growth than her job at grocery store so she opted out to do childcare – and they lived on his $35k salary with benefits
- Most of the stay at home mothers were there because “they got stuck in childcare’s missing middle”
- 69% of low income mothers and 68% black mothers are primary household breadwinner— compared to 30% in richest, and 37% of white
- Even rich women are morally fraught by having low wage women do cleaning, daycare and eldercare
- Holly and Kathleen lesbian couple: the birthing mother dropped down to part time and then Covid cancelled daycare too, same forces. Even full time was $1200 monthly and 9am-4p, limiting given that she has to commute to it and then work
- They feel guilty about underpaid daycare workers but depend on them, they both had full time work and earned enough money “but also it could change at any moment in a way, when there’s not that social safety net. So you’re like do I just hoard it in a giant pile and sleep on top?”
- “The real purpose of government-work requirements may be to help low-wage employers fill hard-to-fill jobs. The rest of us have an interest in ignoring the exploitation of women because it makes our lives more affordable and helps us get ahead in our own careers.”
- “Faced with our own insecurity, it’s easy to stifle the guilt we might feel when we drop off a sniffly kid at preschool without first testing them for Covid, even if their teachers don’t get paid sick days. It’s easy to ignore the twinge we might feel using grocery pickup to save time, even if the workers who picked our groceries are paid so little they have to rely on food stamps or food pantries so their kids can be fed. And it’s easy to rationalize hiring someone to clean our house or pick up our laundry or take our elderly parents to doctors’ appointments so that we can work longer hours at the office to help our own families get ahead. Even higher-income families are swimming in so much risk that it often seems like the only way to keep from drowning is to hoard whatever lifelines are available and to dump as much of our own risk as possible downstream.”
- Invisible labor: Virginia the tenure track professor earning $75k still did more domestically than her middle school teacher husband Charles (earning $45k): she said “ there’s a real weight to being a woman in a family”
- 7% of American dads are full time stay at home; 27% of mothers
- Describes stay at home Ivan and his nurse practitioner wife Nancy who earned $125k+ and “paid for babysitters” when Ivan went to doctors appointments when he was recovering from surgery — “when men are in Nancy’s position, they very rarely go to those lengths” the author writes (But this sounds to me as very anecdotal and written to reaffirm other assumptions?)
- “Couples are best able to achieve an even split with domestic responsibilities when moms earn exactly as much as dad’s do” she says referencing research
- Candace who doesn’t want to push her husband Garrett to do more domestic work because he’ll get defensive: “To him, it feels like I’m saying he doesn’t do anything ever. I’ve got to do baby steps, that way I don’t upset him.”
- Author criticizes the “Success sequence” of family planning for confusing causation: Do broken homes cause poverty or vice versa?
- AFDC replaced with TANF
- Author argues some college degree earnings attainment is causation problem too: does college cause high earnings or self selection?
- Declining federal investments in education
- Author says college wage premium is smaller for women, in part because of gendered job sorting ((I am reminded here of Claudia Goldin’s work on gender wage gap)))
- Rich mom’s still do more domestic work than husbands
- In 1989 economist Estelle James: ”while sending your child to Harvard appears to be a good investment, sending him to your local state university to major in engineering, to take lots of math, and preferably to attain a high GPA, is an even better private investment”
- “STEM won’t save women”
- Women In STEM majors are twice as likely to report they consider leaving college than men
- “Meanwhile, the women who do persist in science tend to make sacrifices either at work or at home. In a study of midcareer science professors, only 50 percent of the women had children at home, compared to 70 percent of the men. And among science professors who had children within five years of completing their PhDs, only 53 percent of the women got tenure, compared to 77 percent of the men.”
- Sociologist Natasha Quadlin: tech employers viewed high achieving women less likable than men
- Ben Franklin helped write the American rags to riches story: poverty “leading it driving them out of it”
- His “Way to Wealth” book (1758) led to later New Thought Movement, and then “prosperity gospel” and by 1952 the power of positive thinking
- Author: in 2022, highest wage workers worked only 4 hours more than lowest wage workers (Though this chapter has the same title, contrast this with The Meritocracy Trap book, which argues something very different)
- 2023: 10% of US workers had more than one job
- Christin Munsch research: employers don’t reward women for long hours like they do for men
- “Poverty and inequality make it psychologically soothing to believe in a definite self determined path to success”
- Declining tax rates but no trickle down gains
- The 1992 bestselling “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ book: reinforcing gender roles
- Allison Daminger research on different gender roles: author has examples of husbands who have the wife do all laundry because the husbands say they’ll “do it the wrong way”
- Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man included biological differences In gender that later proved wrong (Cara Wall Schaffer: women were hunters and gatherers)
- 2022 Pew poll on Americans 60% said biological sex is fixed at birth, a growing number from 2017 (((my note: it seems a strange these polling numbers are shared to imply Americans don’t get it, rather than that the advocates aren’t effectively messaging their stance)))
- “Americans insistence on a strict and biologically based pink/blue binary also extends to issues of gender roles.”
- Ellen Lamont research: men use egalitarian political beliefs as a shield against inequalities at home: “these egalitarian narratives serve as a shield, allowing men to dismiss inequalities that emerge in their romantic relationships as the result of individual preferences so that gendered outcomes are allowed to go unquestioned, thereby leaving gender inequalities intact.”
- Men “learned helplessness”
- Diane Felmlee: sentiment of social media posts against women
- Thomas Ford: sexist jokes advance misogyny
- Robyn Mallett: humor signals benign incongruity, so it gives us cover to imply we know sexism is wrong otherwise it couldn’t be a joke
- “The mars/venus myth also makes it difficult for women to complain about their boyfriends or their husbands so long as those men exceed the bar the myth sets”
- Hysteria comes from the word uterus and was first used by Hippocratic (in the DSM until 1980)
- 1983 daycare panic
- Author includes a lot of criticism of Christian parenting speakers/writers, such as Karis Kimmel Murray
- Author describes Chloe, a director in public health who has a “you chose this” internal pressure but (my note here), it’s never clear to me who IS creating this additional pressure on her. The trope being argued is that men (me!) throw up our hands and say “don’t put the pressure on yourself” and that these men “Don’t get it” but I can’t seem to track where this pressure is coming from
- When Chloe asks for help, Neil will do it: “Neil is quick to step in those moments. Yet like most other fathers, he rarely notices when Chloe is struggling or volunteers to help before Chloe asks.”
- Gloria Steinem to Congress: “Most American children suffered too much mother and too little father.”
- Women have two jobs
- Sandberg’s 2013 “Lean In” book was criticized by poet bell hooks (1952-2021) and philosopher Nancy Fraser as “capitalism having co-opted feminism” into an individualistic concern rather then a radical critique of careerism
- Caitlyn Collins: maternal guilt varies by country and the United States leads
- “Put differently, the super mom myth leads us to ask the wrong questions – “how can mothers best protect their children? “– Rather than: “why are women the ones tasked with protecting kids? “Or even: why do we have so much to fear?”
- In 1993, Norway introduced its “daddy quota” of father-parental leave: reduced marital domestic inequality
- Author references Europe developing its social safety net after WW2, but doesn’t cite the $133b (in today’s money) Marshall Plan of American support for Europe to rebuild, though she argues we could haves used Covid to boost safety net too
- Sociologist Erik Olin Wright: The social safety net can help employers (it’s good economic policy)
- Washington Post: Of $4trillion in federal pandemic aid, $2.3 trillion went to big companies and their executives
- Iceland Oct 24, 1975: women take day off
- “Care is noticing someone else’s needs even if they don’t ask and being there or listen when they do.”
- Quiet quitting is “work to rule”
- Tom VanHeuvelen: right to work laws made wages more unequal and median wages declined
- Evelyn Simien: “linked fate” to get more support for movement
- In 1975, Silvia Federici published Wages Against Housework, a short book that argues for recognizing and paying women for domestic labor that helped define the “wages FOR housework” movement: “We want and have to say that we are all housewives… Because as long as we think we are something better, something different than a housewife, we accept the logic of the master, which is a logic of division”
- This book got its origins when a publisher reached out because author had been quoted as saying “other countries have social safety nets. The US has women.”