"Women Are Drowning in Responsibility"

The "DIY Society" and How Women Became America's Safety Net

Hey! We’re doing the massive ADVICE TIME thread on Friday, which usually tops 2000 comments. If you have a question in need of Culture Study advice, subscribe now so you can ask it early and get all manner of perspective and experience from this really thoughtful community

Subscribing also gets you access to the weekly Things I Read and Loved at the end of the Sunday newsletter, the massive links/recs posts, and the knowledge that you’re paying for the stuff that adds value to your life. Plus you’ll get the OTHER addictive threads, like Friday’s, where we worked through very big questions of how we’ve come to think about “free” content, plus yesterday’s Transcendent Concert Experiences which I cannot stop reading.

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Also: This week’s ep of

The Culture Study Podcast

is straight up incredible. I talk with romance writer Nisha Sharma about how romances center marginalized joy….and also answer your questions about being too addicted to romance and what’s going on with “cartoon” covers. We also unpack so many popular romance tropes (sick bed! grumpy protagonist!) and Nisha has TWENTY ONE recs (some related to specific tropes, some more general) and even if you’re not a romance reader, there’s something in this conversation that’s going to stick with you.

Click here to listen wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link below:

How Romance Novels Center Marginalized Joy

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It’s a real full circle week here at Culture Study: on Sunday, I wrote about the ten-year anniversary of leaving academia; today, I’m publishing an interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco about her new book, Holding It Together. Now, you might not think there’s anything remarkable about that — if there’s something you can expect from Culture Study, it’s a winding interview with a sociologist — but Calarco was the VERY FIRST academic I interviewed for the newsletter, and our interview is still one of the most popular pieces on the site.

This was back in the Fall of 2020, and the internet felt very different then, but it proved to me that a newsletter could go viral and more importantly that a long interview with an academic could be widely read — you just needed the right framing. I had what I felt was a particularly salient quote from our interview as the headline (“Other countries have safety nets. The United States has women”) and that’s what immediately started circulating.

Again: a deeply Fall 2020 moment, but the reaction helped convince members of the mainstream publishing industry that this was a book with the potential for an audience well beyond academia.

Culture Study is just one small part of that story — the research and genius is all Calarco’s — but I love that together, we’ve made this newsletter a welcoming home to rigorous, elaborate, and challenging ideas. This is place where writers (academic or otherwise) know that they will find readers who engage their work, take it seriously, read in good faith, and work through knotty questions. We give authors space to really good deep in their answers (and cite and contextualize). Plus, we buy a lot of books. All of things in one place — that’s not something you find everywhere or even most places on the internet.

You make this work possible and sustainable, and I’m so grateful for it — and for Jessica for agreeing to come back and answer a bunch more of my meandering questions about the new book.

You can buy Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net here, and learn more about Jessica Calarco’s work here.

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One of my arguments when it comes to the possibility for change is really straightforward: we know things could be arranged differently in society, and our not-so-distant past is proof. Proof of some things that were arranged in ways that were *more* discriminatory, *more* racist, and *more* sexist, sure, but also that we haven’t always thought of taxing the rich in the same way we do now, or the funding of infrastructure, or how we fund retirement.

So I naturally loved the way you open the book: with a story of a very different way that the United States (briefly) conceived of childcare. Can you walk us through the childcare component of the Lanham Act, and what, in hindsight, it proved possible? 

There’s this perception among many Americans that our country is too big or too diverse for sweeping safety net programs. But the reality is that we’ve already proven that the US can manage universal support. Social Security and Medicare, for example, protect millions of elderly Americans from poverty and they’re so popular that they’re almost immune to political attack.

The US could offer similar support for families with young children. And in fact, we used to have a national childcare system—one that offered high-quality, affordable, tax-funded childcare to families across the US. Congress built that system during World War II, because the War Manpower Commission figured out that, to keep the economy running while men were off fighting in battle, they needed as many women in the workforce as possible. That included mothers of young children, only one in thirty of whom were employed at the start of the war.

Now, I should note that those low pre-war employment rates weren’t a function of mothers’ aversion to working for pay. Instead, they were the product of discrimination and a lack of childcare. At the time, mothers and married women were often subject to state laws and employer policies that barred them from employment or relegated them (and especially the Black women and immigrant women among them) to the most menial and low-paying jobs. And, even if mothers did manage to find paid work, most wouldn’t have been able to find anyone to care for their kids.  

To address that second half of the problem, US Children’s Bureau chief Katharine Lenroot argued in 1941 that Congress should use funds from the Lanham Act—which was intended to fund housing and infrastructure projects in communities critical to defense production industries—to build and run childcare centers for mothers whose paid work supported the war. Congress dragged its feet in response to Lenroot’s petition, taking until 1942 to agree and until 1943 to begin allocating childcare funds. Local communities got to choose how they used the funding, but in most places, mothers working in any paid job could get up to six days a week of full-time childcare with free meals and snacks and educational programming offered in small-class-size settings—all for $10 or less per day in today’s dollars. Most centers were open at least twelve hours a day, and many communities also offered affordable before-school, after-school, and summer care for older kids.

The program was both popular and highly successful; in the wake of its implementation, the employment rate among mothers of young children increased by 400 percent. And yet, Congress dismantled the program almost as it got off the ground. As soon as the men returned from battle, Congress cut off the funds for childcare—and even allowed states and employers to reinstate pre-war bans on employment for mothers and married women—forcing millions of American women back home or into underpaid service or care work jobs or as secretaries in the postwar corporate boom.

Maybe not surprisingly, women objected to these developments. And yet, other institutions—from the media to the medical establishment—colluded to create the perception that women would have to be “crazy” (or maybe not even “real” women) to want a job when they could stay home. By the late 1940s, as historian Stephanie Coontz explains, formerly employed women who “had trouble adjusting to ‘creative home making’ were labeled neurotic, perverted or schizophrenic,” and “institutionalization and sometimes electric shock treatments were used to force women to accept their domestic roles and their husbands’ dictates.”

Meanwhile, our European allies opted for a different tack. France, for example, used the post-war period not only to expand its war-time childcare efforts into a universal, low-cost, national system, but also implemented paid family leave and universal healthcare. The lesson, then, is that we have no excuse not to make high-quality childcare free and guaranteed for all kids. Which raises questions about why we haven’t had that kind of system all along.

The answer there, as I suspect we’ll get into more with our next few questions, is that the ultra-wealthy people and corporations that run the American economic and political system calculated that it’s cheaper for them if we force families—and usually the women in families—to figure out childcare for themselves. In that kind of DIY Society, the cost of childcare gets shifted to families. And employers get to treat women, especially mothers, as a sort of reserve force — toggling their paid work up or down depending on the economy’s needs. 

I find Jacob Hacker’s theorization of “the great risk shift” so useful for understanding how the ground has absolutely moved beneath our feet but people keep telling us to calm down, there’s no earthquake, what are you freaking out about. It’s also a spectacularly useful way to avoid using the phrase ‘neoliberalism,’ a useful term that has been used without explanation so often that it just signifies a certain wonkiness. 

So: can you walk us through the great risk shift, particularly how you understand its ramifications for unpaid care work? 

In the 1930s, the National Association of Manufacturers, which represents big businesses and the wealthy people who profit from them, was looking for a way to persuade Americans to reject Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, given the higher taxes all those social programs would require. What they found was neoliberalism—a theory developed by a group of Austrian economists, who posited that societies are better off without social safety nets, because not having a net discourages people from taking risks, so, without one, they’ll make choices that keep themselves safe.

Research has shown that these assumptions are deeply flawed. But that didn’t stop the National Association of Manufacturers from going forward with their plan. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain in their book The Big Myth, members of the organization paid to endow professorships for Austria’s neoliberal economists at elite American universities, where they would train the next generation of American business leaders, policymakers, and scholars. Those trainees include economists like Milton Friedman, who became both the lead architect of a massive overhaul of American policy and the brains behind a decades-long propaganda campaign.

That campaign included popular radio and television programs like General Electric Theater, which was hosted by Ronald Reagan, and which offered fictionalized feel-good stories of Americans pulling themselves out of difficult situations simply by working hard and making the right choice. The campaign also included efforts to build and bankroll neoliberal think tanks, which could offer a veneer of scientific authority to empty and misleading claims.

Bombarded as they were with neoliberal messaging, it didn’t take long for the American public to get on board—to accept the idea of a DIY Society where people protect themselves from risk rather than relying on the government for support. Faith in that idea has waxed and waned over time. Yet, even today, most Americans continue to believe that almost anyone can get ahead if they’re willing to make “good choices” and put in the work.

Public acceptance of that rhetoric paved the way for what political scientist Jacob Hacker calls the great risk shift—a series of neoliberal policy decisions that included cutting taxes, especially on wealthy people and corporations, slashing big holes in the meager social safety net we did have, and eliminating regulations, including some campaign finance laws, which were designed to prevent big businesses and billionaires from translating their wealth directly into political power.

Billionaires and big corporations used that influence to effectively buy politicians who would embrace their vision of a DIY Society—one that shifted responsibility for risk away from the government (and thus from the big corporations and ultra-wealthy people on whose tax dollars the government would disproportionately rely for support in managing those risks effectively) and onto individuals and families instead. As billionaire Betsy DeVos, whose family has likely donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican political candidates, wrote in a 1997 op-ed, “I have decided… to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point.”

The problem, of course, is that we can’t actually DIY society. Without a sturdy social safety net, there’s just too much risk for people to manage. Which is precisely why other countries have used taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that everyone has the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care.

In the absence of that social safety net, American society is crumbling—families and communities are teetering on the edge of collapse. And yet, we haven’t collapsed because women are holding it together, filling in the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our threadbare social safety net.¹

The book is rooted in history — in explaining how we got here — but it’s animated by the stories of dozens of women currently trying (and intermittently failing) to function as one-person safety-nets for their families.

Some of these stories were deeply and maddeningly familiar, and some really expanded my stereotypical thinking, especially on stay-at-home moms. I’d love to have you share a bit about Erin’s story and what it tells us about the way women’s narrow societally-affirmed trajectory to marriage and motherhood ends up marooning them? 

If I asked you to picture a typical stay-at-home mother, you’d probably picture a wealthy white woman enjoying a boozy Tuesday brunch. That’s the image of stay-at-home motherhood that we often see portrayed in the media, but it’s worlds away from the life of the normative stay-at-home mom.

In surveys I conducted in 2022 with more than 2,000 parents across the US, I found that only 7 percent of stay-at-home moms had annual household incomes of $100,000 or more. Instead, almost 75 percent had incomes under $50,000, and half were under $25,000 a year. As a result, roughly half of the stay-at-home moms were receiving food stamps and Medicaid, and more than two-thirds reported at least some difficulty paying all their bills.

With these numbers, it’s easy to think, “These women should just get a job!” And most of them wish they could—they’ve just gotten caught in childcare’s missing middle, instead.

That missing middle reflects the fact that, unlike other high-income countries, we force most families to figure out childcare for themselves. Very low-income families can qualify for childcare subsidies, but many states set the eligibility bar so low that only a small fraction of families can qualify. Meanwhile, and without government funding to offset the high costs of childcare’s labor intensity, families who don’t qualify for subsidies could easily end up spending $1,000 or $2,000 a month or more per child. Families who can’t swing those costs may be able to rely on friends or family members. But, for many, the only option is to have one parent stay home. And, because of how gender pay gaps and motherhood penalties disadvantage women, it often makes more sense financially for moms to be the ones to sacrifice their careers.

Take, for example, a white stay-at-home mom I’ll call Erin. High tuition costs pushed both Erin and her husband Mark out of college and into low-paying jobs. Before their first child was born in 2016, Mark was working in a mine in a small town in Indiana, hoping he’d get a shot moving up the managerial ladder, and Erin was working at a nearby grocery store. Their combined income was $30,000 a year—above the cutoff line for Indiana’s childcare voucher program, but not enough to afford to pay full price for childcare. Without family nearby to help—Erin’s family lives in another state, and Mark’s parents can’t afford to retire yet—Erin and Mark had to figure out childcare on their own.

At first, Erin thought they could manage by working a split shift. Erin stayed home with Carson during the day. Then, when Mark got home, Erin would work a part-time night shift at the store. That arrangement made sense financially, but the stress of it wore on Erin, who only got to sleep when Carson was napping during the day and between breastfeeding sessions after she got home late at night. By the time Carson was a few months old, she was exhausted and on edge all the time. “It was terrible,” Erin recalled. “It was really hard. I was ALWAYS tired.”

Erin also thought about trying to find a better job, but the best options available in the small town where she and Mark were living were other jobs that wouldn’t pay enough to cover childcare. So, after a few months of working a split shift and searching job ads, Erin quit and became a stay-at-home mom.  “We’re gonna have to make this work,” Erin recalled. “And my husband was full on board.”

That shift to one income pushed Erin and Mark below the cutoff for programs like food stamps, WIC, and Medicaid, but Erin was reluctant to apply. Like many of the low-income mothers I talked to, she had internalized the stigma around government dependency, saying “I know it’s for people like us, but at the same time I was like, I don’t quite feel like we’re to that point yet where we need Medicaid. I don’t wanna use it, I don’t wanna abuse the system or anything.” Erin never signed up for food stamps, but she eventually gave in and enrolled in Medicaid because that was the only way she could afford a surgical procedure that Carson needed, which would have cost $1,000 out of pocket otherwise.

Even with that support, money was still a constant stress point for Erin. Diapers, for example, ate up so much of Erin’s budget that she—like many low-income mothers—tried to stretch each one to its breaking point, even when Carson ended up getting a rash.

About a year before the pandemic, Mark finally got the promotion he’d been waiting for—into a new job that paid $35,000 a year. That shift, however, left Mark feeling as though he had to prove his worth, which meant spending even less than time helping at home. And which meant that when Erin gave birth to their second son Julian in 2019, Mark took less than a week off, even though he had a few weeks of PTO days banked that he could have used.

That left Erin alone for twelve hours a day with an infant and a super-active toddler, even while she was still recovering from child birth. The isolation and exhaustion of that period stretched Erin to where she thought she might break. “It’s difficult,” she sighed, adding, “and you don’t necessarily notice it right away. It kinda builds up slowly over time. And then you get to the point where, like, two weeks have gone by, and you haven’t really talked to another adult, and you’re emotional and you feel kinda crazy. And it’s like, I gotta get out! I need a break!” 

In those moments, Erin often thought about the freedom a paid job might offer, but she could never get the numbers to work. On top of the childcare problem, Erin worried that no one would hire her, or that she’d get a job and end up losing it, given that her responsibilities as the default parent would always come first. Erin told me, “My [whole] salary would go towards daycare anyway and you know, when the kids are sick or something, then it wouldn’t really be worth it for me to go to work. So, after the initial honeymoon period of ‘Oh, I wish I could have a job,’ I’m kind of like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m good.’”

At the end of the book, you make a compelling argument that no number of “good” choices — marriage, college, getting a job in STEM — will save women from having to be safety nets. How do you see divorce functioning in this scenario? (Like Lyz Lenz and many other people writing about divorce today, you note that most women actually end up doing less domestic work after divorce, because they’re not also picking up after their partners) 

No-fault divorce is a powerful tool for women, which is precisely why some Republicans want to close that door. Missouri, for example, has laws banning women from getting divorced during pregnancy. And Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has gone so far as to argue against divorce in the context of domestic abuse. Vance justifies those views by arguing that we should focus on the children, but the evidence suggests that exposure to frequent conflict—especially violent conflict—is worse for kids than divorce.

It's easy to see how bans on no-fault divorce would benefit husbands. Unlike women, men are generally happier and less stressed in marriage, in part because wives generally do a great deal more than husbands do to help their partners cope with emotional challenges, manage a household, and get ahead in their careers. Which gives men an interest in requiring women to stay.

Husbands, however, aren’t the only ones with incentive to trap women in marriage. The engineers of our DIY society also have reason to deny women an escape hatch, because keeping women in marriage (and often also in motherhood) makes it easier to force women into filling the gaps in our economy and in our social safety net.

Yet, divorce alone is not a panacea, because it doesn’t solve all the precarity that women face. That’s what we saw with Patricia, and it’s also what kept some of the women I interviewed from leaving marriages that were less than ideal. That included a white, college-educated mom that I’ll call Candace, who works as a public school teacher and whose husband Garrett works as a supervisor at a distribution center. They each earn about half of their $75,000-a-year household income.

When their first child was born in 2018, and while Candace was on maternity leave, Garrett started spending longer and longer hours away from home—up to 14 hours a day. Garrett told Candace that he was working overtime to make up for what she wasn’t earning, given that her leave only came with half-pay. But Candace was suspicious and eventually figured out that he wasn’t spending all that time working. When Candace confronted Garrett, he admitted he was meeting up with friends after work and promised to come home straight away.

Garrett started coming home earlier after that, but it didn’t change the larger dynamic in their marriage; even after she went back to teaching, Candace was still the one responsible for the vast majority of the childcare and the chores at home. The stress of that arrangement also became particularly acute during the Covid-19 pandemic, by which point Candace had given birth to a second child and was back to teaching full-time. The closure of schools and childcare centers left Candace teaching remotely while caring for a newborn and a toddler while Garrett continued leaving the house for work every day.   

Candace didn’t want to upset Garrett because she had caught him messaging other women on Snapchat and asking for “dirty” photos, and she worried he would leave. She did approach Garrett about what she had seen on Snapchat, but he gaslit her, insisting it was all innocent fun and accusing Candace of being too jealous and too controlling and not wanting him to have any friends. Faced with that pushback, Candace retreated but stayed, afraid she wouldn’t be able to give the kids the kind of life she wanted for them if she had to raise them on her own. 

On some measures, Candace’s life would probably improve if she and Garrett split up. Compared to married moms, unmarried moms spend less time on housework, get more sleep, and have more free time — because they’re not taking care of their husbands in addition to the kids.

Candace is right, however, to worry about financial precarity. Her income alone is too high to qualify for government assistance like welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, or subsidized housing or childcare. And even she got some money from Garrett in child support, it might be difficult for Candace to maintain her current standard of living, especially without a sturdy social safety net and with more than $50,000 in various debts on things like student loans, credit cards, vehicles, and medical expenses, plus $250,000 still outstanding on the mortgage for her and Garrett’s home. In essence, and even with no-fault divorce still an option, our lack of a social safety net can persuade American women to stay with partners they might otherwise leave.

One of the goals of the book is to make women feel *seen* — because when people feel seen, when the particularities of their struggles feel understood, then they can actually pool their anger and affect change. I so want to believe this! I know readers of this newsletter do too, but I also feel like we’re in an ideological stalemate, anchored in an intransigent, geroncratic government deeply invested in preserving the status quo. Where can the work begin? 

My hope is that this book will not only help women to feel seen but also to better see each other. The weakness of that cabal that I talked about earlier is that it’s tiny—there are far more of us than there are of them. And so, if the rest of us are willing to fight together, we could demand that politicians commit to building back better, and we could hold them to the promises they make.

The cabal, however, knows its own weakness. And so, rather than allow the rest of us to come together to fight them, they’ve promoted myths to delude and divide. Take, for example, the myth of meritocracy, which promotes the claim that most people can ahead if they’re willing to work hard, and that people who are struggling don’t need more support than what the government already provides.  Ideas like this aren’t rooted in evidence. Sure, hard work may play some role in helping people to get ahead, but especially in the absence of a sturdy social safety net, the hard-work-to-success path is far from guaranteed. Despite that reality, most Americans accept meritocracy’s promise of prosperity, because those ideas are psychologically reassuring, and because of the myths we’ve been sold.

As I show in the book, the engineers’ myths—including the myth of meritocracy, the myth of Mars and Venus, and the myth of the supermom—delude us into believing that we don’t need a social safety net. And they also divide us by gender, race, class, religion, and political party in ways that prevent us from achieving a sense of linked fate. As political scientist Evelyn M. Simien explains, linked fate is our awareness of the fact that “what happens to the group will also affect the individual member.” And that sense of linked fate is rare not only between American men and women but also among married women and moms.

Consider a white, Republican, stay-at-home mom I’ll call April. April, whose family gets by on the $30,000 a year her husband makes as a pastor at their evangelical Christian church, would benefit from a broader social safety net. Yet, when I asked her whether she would support policies like universal healthcare or universal childcare or universal paid family leave or free college or a higher minimum wage, April opposed every single one.

April and many other mothers like her oppose efforts to expand the social safety net because keeping the net small and stigmatized allows them to maintain a sense of superiority over other mothers who have to rely on the meager support the government provides. April talked about the Covid relief and child tax credit checks she got from the government, explaining that, although she cashed the checks, “I really felt we didn’t need the stimulus package. We weren’t eagerly awaiting that. We’re used to living off of one relatively meager salary.”

Drawing on racist “welfare queen” stereotypes, April also took aim at other mothers, implying that if they needed government support, it was probably because they were spending money frivolously on things like getting their nails done or going out partying, and insisting “I’d never do those things.” Now, April acknowledged that she rarely gets any time for herself, and that she sometimes ends up eating her kids’ scraps for her own meals when the money gets short at the end of the month. Yet, by rejecting the need to expand the safety net, April was able to remain confident in her moral superiority over other mothers whose position on the economic ladder is just a little bit lower than her own.

Drawing on sexist stereotypes like those recently proffered by certain male athletes, April also insisted that women are happier at home than working for pay. “I want to stay home,” April told me, adding “Like, even though [my parents] put me in daycare, I don’t want [my son] to be put in daycare. I would like to be more involved in his education. And more careful with, like, who he spends time with. Who watches him. And I would love to, like, teach him more about God than my parents did. Like, my parents didn’t take up an active role in that at home.”

April also linked her beliefs to what she called her Christian worldview, saying, “I think some people think that the wife stays home so that the husband can work, but in many ways, he works so that I can stay home, and I can raise our kids…. I love it. It's so sweet to get to be a part of their lives and to teach them. And it's part of the Christian worldview—it’s important for the women to be workers at home. And so that's something we feel strongly about and I actually really enjoy.”

For conservative Christians like April, myths about meritocracy and gender are quite literally gospel. They hear these ideas preached from evangelical megachurch leaders like Joel Osteen and Christian mommy bloggers like homeschooling-mom-turned-Republican-congressional-candidate Heidi St. John,  which makes belief in that myth difficult to unseat.

Those beliefs aren’t limited to conservatives like April. Even among Democrats and liberal-leaning Independents, almost half believe that hard work is enough to achieve success. And evidence suggests that sexist beliefs are also on the rise, even among young men and women who have traditionally leaned more liberal in their views. In my own surveys, for example, I asked 2,000 parents from across the US: Do you think children are better off if their mother is home and doesn't hold a job, or are children just as well off if their mother works for pay?" 52% of dads and 47% of moms said it's better for kids if their moms aren't working for pay. Those attitudes were somewhat more common among Republicans (60% of dads and 48% of moms), but they were alarmingly common among Democrats too (53% of dads and 41% of moms). 

Those ideas prevent even the liberal-leaning among us from prioritizing the need for policy change. They lead people who, in theory, support more equitable policies and practices to abandon that support when forced to make actual choices in the context of their daily lives.  

If we want to ever have a real chance at building back better, a key first step is to reject the myths the engineers have designed to delude and divide. In practice, that means catching ourselves when we fall into mythical thinking and calling it out when we hear others doing the same. By rejecting the myths, we can ungaslight ourselves and shed the guilt that plagues so many of us. And maybe even more importantly, we can stop judging each other, see past our differences, focus on the collective benefits of a stronger safety net, and fight together for the stability that net would provide. ●

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1. Of course, there are people of other genders who do some of this work. But women are disproportionately the default caregivers for the children and the sick and the elderly. And they’re disproportionately the ones who fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy—jobs, like those in childcare, eldercare, cleaning, and social services, that are too labor-intensive and difficult to outsource to generate much if anything in profit, and thus that are economically sustainable only through substantial government subsidies and/or by leaving workers deeply underpaid. 

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