'A Union of Care': A Q&A with Jessica Calarco
The sociologist and author of the forthcoming book "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net" explains how the U.S. economy throws moms under the bus.
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft, a new newsletter for moms on the left! This week I spoke with Jessica Calarco, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies families and inequality. Calarco is the author of the forthcoming book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
Holding It Together is a righteous, data-driven look at the way the U.S. economy has thrown women—particularly mothers—under the bus. Crucially, rather than suggest ways women can better organize their time or game their way into better jobs, the book ends with a clarion call for collective action around care. Holding It Together is out on June 4 (you can pre-order it here). In the meantime, I spoke with Calarco about her research and how America’s mothers have wound up doing the most. (This interview transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Kelly: The subtitle of this book is “How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” but you describe this project as emerging out of research on the best-laid plans of parenting and how those can go astray. How did that data-driven project turn into this broader project on the lack of a safety net in the U.S.?
Jessica: I started the project back in 2018, and had the idea a little before that. At the time, my graduate students and I had begun gathering data for this project of following families through this early stage of parenthood. Then the pandemic hit in the middle of data collection. Seeing how the weight of Covid, and all the associated decisions and challenges, fell onto families—and within families, disproportionately onto women—and the kinds of choices women had available to them during the pandemic. It often meant ‘do I carry more of the load myself, or do I add risk and responsibility to someone else’s plate?’
Talking to journalists and my fellow researchers about the way the pandemic disproportionately affected women, particularly moms but also women with eldercare and healthcare responsibilities, helped me think of this as a bigger-picture story—as a story that needed to be told, tying together larger threads to ask how we got to this point where we could do this to families, and to women in particular. Especially in light of the Build Back Better decisions: how did we get so close and yet fail so miserably in the end?
This book is based on a mountain of research. Can you describe your methodology? How long did that take you to collect?
We followed a group of about 250 families from 2018 to 2022. It ended up being seven waves of surveys and interview data collection. We initially started with 250 pregnant people we recruited from prenatal clinics in Indiana—they all identified as women. Initially, we’d planned to check in at six months, 12 months, and 18 months postpartum. And then the pandemic hit in the middle of that data collection. I, as a mom of young kids myself, felt how the pandemic was impacting us, and we also heard that from interviews in the sample. We wanted to add more data on how the pandemic was impacting the moms and their partners, if the partners were willing to talk to us, and branched out into some of their social network contacts, too, to speak to parents of older kids and see how they were faring during the pandemic. This is a group of families that is from various socio-economic backgrounds and racial backgrounds and political leanings. Most are from Indiana and have a middle-of-the-country experience, but there’s a lot of variation in their family circumstances and the challenges they’ve faced.
This book is about women, overall, and not all the carers you describe are mothers, but so much of the burden facing women seems related to motherhood. Can you explain how expectations around motherhood can be used to keep women and girls down, even if they can’t or do plan to become pregnant?
I think we can think about how in the absence of a safety net—particularly in the absence of universal paid family leave and universal, affordable, or free childcare—that the combination of those two missing factors makes it easy to turn motherhood into a trap. Once we can push women into motherhood—either by denying them access to abortion or contraception, by stigmatizing abortion, or by socializing women to feel like they have to become mothers early on—if we can push them into motherhood and deny them those kind of resources, it becomes very easy to exploit them. To force them to be the backstop, to be the ones who fill in the gaps, to be the ones who become the default parent, for example. Given the physical recovery after childbirth, and gender inequalities around things like paid labor, it becomes very easy for moms to say, if one of us has to take time off after a child is born, it’s probably going to be me.
What the research tells us is that, once parents make that decision, it shapes all subsequent decisions because moms are the ones who know where the diaper cream is kept, or how the baby likes their milk prepared. All those decisions lay the groundwork for future inequalities to build. For lower-income mothers, in particular, being pushed into motherhood in the weak social safety net society that we have, makes it very easy for them to be exploited at home in terms of doing a disproportionate share of unpaid labor, and also pushed into low-wage jobs, especially in the caregiving sector. Our welfare system requires mothers of young children to find paid work in order to qualify for welfare. Oftentimes the only jobs accessible to women who only have childcare from, say, 8 to 3, are going to be minimum- or low-wage, part-time jobs that we need to fill in our economy. Someone has to take those jobs. There’s a benefit to our economy and to employers that we have this flexible labor force of people who can fill these jobs and will be grateful to have whatever job they can, even if that’s a job that has no benefits, low pay, and few opportunities for advancement. We know that 70 percent of the lowest-wage jobs in our economy are done by women. Many of them are mothers who are pushed into those jobs because of the punitive social safety net policies we have, that force low-income women to take those jobs.
This sounds like a term you use a lot in the book: the ‘DIY society.’ Can you explain what that means?
To put a more academic term on it, I’m talking about neoliberalism. Essentially this idea that we have a society where we try to pretend that we don’t need support from the government or from employers; that each of us should be able to be successful (or at least get by) without external support, and where people are judged for not being able to make it on their own. It’s an illusion. We can’t DIY society. Care is inherent in our social lives and our social processes. But it’s useful for corporations and the wealthy to maintain this illusion that we can get by without a social safety net, and that we don’t actually need each other for support, and that we don’t need institutions like the government and employers to support us. It means they don’t have to pay for employee benefits or for a stronger social safety net through higher taxes on corporations or on billionaires. They have an interest in persuading us that we can get by on the merits if we try hard enough and make the right choices. But in fact, the data always tell us that that’s not really the case.
At several points in the book, you push back on this idea that men and women have radically different brains; radically different skill sets and ways of thinking, and realms in which they’re comfortable. How are those myths used to devalue women’s work?
When we have this assumption that men and women are radically different, it makes it easy to justify the ‘separate spheres’ model of society that we have. When we assume that men and women are, by default, different, then it becomes easy to assume that women are naturally suited for caregiving because, if we see people performing different roles in society, that must be what they’re biologically suited for. It becomes an easy way to justify that there’s no reason for men to even bother trying, when in fact research tells us that everyone of every gender can be a competent caregiver, especially when they’re given the opportunity to practice. Oftentimes the reality is that women and girls are trained for motherhood from the time they’re old enough to hold a baby doll. That can help develop a sense of confidence and competence as a caregiver that young men and boys often aren’t given in our society, but it doesn’t mean men aren’t suited for that role.
And it makes it easier for men to justify pushing that work onto women. Many of the dads I interviewed would say things that sounded like praise. They’d say things like ‘I don’t know how my wife does it all! When she’s home with the kids, she manages to do the laundry, the house is immaculate, and the days I’m home with them, all I can do is keep them alive.’ It sounds like valorization, but it’s leading men to underinvest and see themselves as incapable in ways that are useful for them. It’s the perks of patriarchy.
You describe higher-earning women as being able to advance by ‘dumping risk’ downstream to less-advantaged women who pick up domestic work like childcare and cleaning. A lot of the higher-earning moms you interviewed were pretty clear-eyed in that they were participating in an exploitative structure, but they didn’t have many alternatives that would give them their own security. How does this DIY society prevent solidarity between women of different economic classes?
To have a shot at security or stability in our society, women need to be able to compete with men. The research tells us that couples are most likely to have an egalitarian division of household labor if they have roughly the same income. (It’s actually worse for women if they earn more or less than male partners.) The way to do that, oftentimes, is to have high levels of education and be competitive in male-dominated career fields. But to be successful in those fields, and because of the norms for ideal workers, people who are successful in those fields tend to be people who can commit all their energies to work, and can drop everything at their boss’s call.
What that means is that to be competitive—to have that chance of security and to have egalitarian relationships with a partner—women need to have support. Because our households are often very individualized and we don’t live in a society where people can retire early and grandparents can help, or families can live close together and collectively, the only way to do this is through things like paid childcare or support with housework. There’s an incentive for relatively affluent women to outsource as much as they can. But at the same time, because of this DIY society we have, we’re not supporting the caregivers. There’s a way to do that such that the caregivers are taken care of; where we are funding childcare systems, where we are subsidizing those care services that people need, in ways that make them sustainable for caregivers as well as for people who need care. But because we treat this as something everyone needs to figure out for themselves, we end up with a race-to-the-bottom situation in terms of caregiver salaries. It leads to a system where the higher earners are pushed to spend as much time as possible on paid work, and there’s less money on the back end for people who are doing care work to do it sustainably.
I think in an ideal world, we would be ratcheting down the expectations, even for high-income earners, in terms of the number of hours they’re expected to commit to work, so that they have more time to do informal care themselves. And then also providing government support to subsidize the kind of industries that people rely on to do any kind of paid work: things like childcare, eldercare, and healthcare.
This book describes another form of divide-and-conquer, by which Black women have been made scapegoats for seeking assistance, even when they’re often taking on a lot more work, and a larger share of underpaid work. How are myths like that of the ‘welfare queen’ used to cut the overall social safety net?
Not only do they perpetuate racist stigmas overtly against Black women, they make the equation of welfare with race. They make white people assume that this [welfare] is not something that affects them in any way. If anything, it leads to additional stigma about welfare use that makes us unwilling to invest more in supporting low-income families regardless of race. It has a negative spillover effect for all people, because it makes us less willing to invest in any form of social safety net program, if we assume the safety net is only for people who are very low-income, especially if they’re perceived as disproportionately or exclusively people of color.
That stigma also helps reinforce larger myths about meritocracy. The idea of race is rooted in efforts to oppress and marginalize communities to the benefit of people who racialize themselves as white. To say ‘these people are less than people’ or to say ‘these people aren’t deserving of the same rights and responsibilities.’ One of the ways that those kinds of systems is justified is by claiming that people who are racially privileged are harder-working. We see these racial inequities and ask ‘how do we justify this?’ Whether it’s welfare stereotypes or the myth of meritocracy—that success is the result of hard work—it becomes easy to assume that people of color, if they’re not seeing the same successes as white people, that they’re not working as hard. Welfare queen stereotypes and stigma are rooted in the way that we have equated whiteness with merit and morality, and the way we use that to question the work ethic of people of color, particularly Black people in our society. We’ve used that to underinvest in the social safety net and stigmatize the social safety net, too.
I was struck by this book’s accounts of mothers who benefit from welfare but also claim to oppose welfare. How does American society condition people to hold these beliefs, even when they’re in conflict with each other?
It was striking to see in the data moms who were relying on welfare or Medicaid or food stamps, but felt a sense of shame around it. I think that really gets back to the idea of this DIY society and the idea that we are supposed to be able to go it alone. We’re told that if we just make the right choices—that if we just get married and wait to have children and go to college and choose the right majors and jobs—that we will be successful and we won’t need government support. There’s this assumption that if people end up needing that kind of support, that they must have done something wrong. I think that’s deeply rooted in this neoliberal model, and it leads people to internalize shame around having to rely on these programs, because even if they’re pretty sure they did nothing wrong, they feel like they did, or they feel like other people will assume they did something wrong. So it leads to a hesitance to admit you’re relying on programs, or to say that they’re good.
In some cases, there’s an effort to morally distance or reconcile this. One of the moms I talk about in the book, she and her family rely on Medicaid but she’s highly critical of efforts to expand the social safety net. She tries to morally distance herself and her family from what she sees as the undeserving poor. She says ‘we’re trying really hard, we’re frugal with our money.’ She talks about how, in her view, her family didn’t need the Covid relief funds. She talks about how ‘we could have got by without it because I would never go spend money on manicures. I would never spend money on a babysitter to watch my kids for me. The other moms who needed that money must have been making these bad choices.’ It goes back to the myth of meritocracy: a moral distancing between people who are just a little bit better off from people who are just a little bit poorer. Research tells us that in a highly unequal society, there are psychological benefits to perceiving yourself as better-off as someone just below you because it makes you feel secure in your position and as though you deserve to be better-off. It helps us to justify inequalities.
There’s a footnote in your book that really stuck with me about the prevalence of moms in multi-level marketing schemes. Why are those schemes so appealing to moms and what does that say about women’s desire to work?
We have this perception of stay-at-home moms as going out for brunch on a Tuesday and enjoying time with their friends; affluent moms that we might see on TV. That’s not the reality for most stay-at-home moms. Instead, something like 75 percent of stay-at-home moms in the U.S. have household incomes of $50,000 or less. These are mostly women who have been pushed into stay-at-home motherhood because of something that’s often talked about as the ‘missing middle’ of childcare. Their families earn too much to qualify for childcare subsidies but they can’t afford the market rates for childcare in their communities, which might be $2,000 or $3,000 a month, especially for infant care. These are often families in which moms reluctantly leave the workforce, with aspirations to go back. Many of them are ambivalent about their work at home. Maybe they like spending time with their children, but they feel isolated or frustrated with the fact that they’re not able to increase their family’s financial stability.
Multi-level marketing schemes are a work-from-home option. Before the pandemic, work-from-home options were relatively rare, especially outside of high-level professional occupations. Those kinds of jobs, especially part-time jobs that are available to mothers who are home full-time—jobs that can be done from home in addition to childcare responsibilities—are fairly rare. That’s where multi-level marketing jobs become appealing. They’re a chance to earn money for your family. They’re a chance to have a sense of identity beyond motherhood. A lot of moms that we interviewed missed talking to other adults, or feeling like they have adult conversations to have with their partner; feeling like their lives don’t just revolve around their kids. Many of these employment opportunities are marketed as ways to have a sense of identity outside of motherhood, that also works well with mothering responsibilities.
A recurring theme throughout this book is the opinion war on daycares. You talk about several waves, including the Satanic Panic, as well as fears about daycare being less valuable than home-based care, or even stigmas about income levels of people who use daycares. Why is the DIY society so invested in denigrating daycare?
There are benefits to our economy having a flexible workforce: people who can be pulled into or pushed out of the economy, or pushed into lower-wage and part-time jobs. Denying women access to childcare means that there are a lot of women for whom those are the best jobs available to them.
Working part-time in retail, for instance. Because of the way the Affordable Care Act is structured, employers don’t have to provide health insurance for anyone who works part-time instead of full-time hours. So there’s a huge incentive for any retail company to retain a mostly part-time workforce. Denying women access to childcare makes it very easy to force women into those kinds of jobs, and also to get women to fill jobs in childcare, in part-time nursing positions, and as teachers, for example, that are very often lower-paid but have schedules that conform to school schedules. The economy can also benefit from this flexible labor force in downtimes, when we need layoffs. As we saw during the pandemic, the first people to lose their jobs were women, and especially moms of young kids. Then as soon as we needed more people in the economy and needed employment numbers to rise, we said ‘let’s invest in childcare. Let’s make sure moms have what they need.’ It’s like a toggle switch that we can turn on or off to make it easier or harder for women to join the workforce, depending on the economy’s needs.
I think the most extreme example in the book was the case you opened on, during WWII wartime efforts, when the U.S. said ‘we need women building ships. We can get them into the workforce by providing free childcare.’ It struck me as interesting that childcare is viable. It’s not a pie-in-the-sky notion, but something we can and have done before.
That’s part of why that case struck a nerve with me, and I hope it’s resonant with readers. We have done this before and are choosing not to. It raises the important question of, if this is a viable possibility, and we know that increasing access to affordable, full-time, high-quality childcare is one of the strongest predictors of women’s employment, especially for mothers, then why aren’t we doing this? That raises harder questions about what is getting in the way of us achieving these kinds of social safety net investments that we know are necessary for all of our wellbeing.
You mention politicians and public figures who acknowledge women’s precarity, but frame it in terms of personal responsibility, like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan emphasizing ‘not stronger safety nets but stronger families,’ or more recently Sheryl Sandberg calling on women to ‘lean in’ to corporate life. Why do these proposals fall short?
I think they’re attractive because they make it seem like we have agency; that we could change the problem tomorrow if everyone did the same thing simultaneously. But they fall short because they ignore the structural inequalities that prevent people from making those choices in the first place, or prevent those choices from having the payoff that they might have for the most privileged among us.
Getting married, for example: there have been a number of books in recent years that promote marriage as a solution to poverty and precarity. But there are lots of reasons to question whether pushing people to get married would actually improve the lives of people who do not get married. It’s a correlation-is-not-causation problem, in that, yes, the lives of people who are able to get and stay married might look better than the lives of people who are unable to get or stay married. But that’s in part because marriage is a hard relationship to maintain. If you are in the context of economic precarity, if you’re faced with a lot of trauma or hardship, that’s going to create lots of stress that will make a marriage hard to sustain. It makes it hard to even get married in the first place, in terms of feeling like you’re in a place where you can make a long-term commitment to someone. So does telling people ‘you should get married and stay married’ solve a problem, or does it put a band-aid over larger structural inequalities that shape who’s able to make those choices in the first place.
At the end of this book, you very explicitly refuse to veer into self-help. You say, instead, these are issues we have to address on a system-wide level. To that end, you suggest the idea of a ‘union of care’ that would support both paid and unpaid work. Can you unpack how you envision that union working?
The idea is as a starting place to bring people together. Unions are a wonderful tool for getting people to see their shared interests and to negotiate collectively, either with employers or to think how to push society in strategic ways that will benefit all of us. At the same time, most union organizing happens in the context of paid labor, and around particular industries or particular jobs. There are a couple problems with that. One is that it tends to pit paid labor against unpaid labor. We know that, historically, unions have fought for things like the ‘family wage,’ to argue that workers should be paid to the point where they can support a family on one income, which then sort of devalues the work that is done at home.
We have to think about how it would look if instead we thought about a union around the notion of a shared responsibility for care; if that is what united people instead of their relationship to a particular employer or industry. The relationship we’d center this union around is our role in the shared project of care, and the dependency we have on one another. A breakdown in one part of the care system can affect people in far distant parts of the care network. If one childcare provider gets sick, for example, this can have huge ripple effects on who is able to do their jobs and who is able to get the care we need. If we focus on care as a shared project and try to unite around that, it can help us strip away the artificial divisions that the engineers and profiteers of the DIY society have tried to drive between us in terms of divisions between race, class and gender. We can focus instead on how care unites us and how that shared relationship to care can act as a decision-making tool; as a way to fight for policies that would better support care needs as opposed to economic needs, and prioritizing those, instead.