We hear all the time about women in the workforce in WWII but somehow this is the first time I am ever hearing about what made that possible! Near universal childcare! Perhaps relatedly, my childcare was closed yesterday because they were going to ask legislatures to support a living wage for childcare workers.
In the US, government funded childcare started in 1939. It was unveiled at the World Fair. It grew during World War II as part of the war effort. Some of the daycare centers are still running. Bloomberg recently had an article on one that just closed thanks to irregular subsidy payments. I gather Richard Nixon prevented federal funding in the 1970s.
Government funded childcare during WW2 made a comic appearance in my favorite Christmas movie, Christmas in Connecticut.
This is fascinating. I see it a lot on TikTok - how women in my generation (younger millennial) and gen z think that daycare is inherently bad? I personally don't have the tools to aid my child's development, and the idea that women did this alone, for centuries, is a lie that is very unique to American Evangelicalism. Even within my own extended family there is this belief that they can make themselves rich on a $40,000 single income stream. And you can't budget your way out of that.
I am all for social programs, and when I talk about things like universal childcare or healthcare to my more conservative, small-business owning parents, I often frame it as something easier for them. My mom's best employees are single mothers who often get caught up in daycares closing and one of her biggest line items is providing healthcare. Paying a little more in taxes would really help businesses in a way that we don't truly comprehend.
I think there are many Millenial and Gen Z women with kids who use daycare, but they aren't posting on TikTok because they have jobs. TikTok, for good and ill, can really amplify the voices of people in the minority and make you think they're in the majority.
Yes social media makes it worse! But also in talking to some acquaintances where I live in SE Wisconsin, a lot of people think that “someone else is raising your child”.
My kids go to daycare very happily! But it’s just interesting to hear out & about. My son is starting a 3k program this fall and a lot of the families have a stay at home parent.
I get it. I have a 4 year old whose grandparents take care of her during the day. I am really fortunate for that - she has gotten lots of attention, she can do the part-day preschool, they can take her swimming and to classes, etc. And it's free! But also we have been able to move to be near the grandparents, they're healthy enough to provide good care - most people don't get that.
But I think kids who go to all-day daycare/ preschool tend to have more friends, and I'm a little jealous of that.
And to me "someone else is raising your child" is a feature, not a bug! If you can send them to a reasonable daycare, they are cared for by people who know how to care for that age group. I wasn't raised around cousins, there were 3 kids in my family, I don't know what to do with a young child! I asked my friends who sent their kids to daycare how they potty trained their kid, and they all shrugged and said they let the daycare do it.
Looking at your friends, do you know who went to daycare/ preschool vs who had a SAHP? I don't! Most people end up totally fine - humans are resilient and adaptable!
I love this! Our parents all still work, and we could never afford to replace their salaries. But they are available if we need them to step in for a day or two which is so nice.
We're the oldest in our families, and the first of our friends to have kids. So we have relied on our teachers a lot to help us with "firsts" for our kids. Like right now we're struggling with potty training our son because he does great at daycare, but not so great at home.
Looking at my friends now, you're completely right, I have no idea! I love the way you framed that!
All of my 3 boys went to daycare and I think they are more adaptable, social people because of it. I loved and deeply appreciated the women and 1 man who helped me raise my boys. It was their love, time, and patience that meant the world to me and allowed me to work outside the home. There were SO MANY benefits to my children spending time with other people outside our home. They were exposed to many things they wouldn’t have been if they’d stayed home till kindergarten.
I think a big part of that “someone else is raising your child” argument for a lot of people is ideological. “Someone else is raising your child [wrong, with beliefs you don’t share].”
This suggests a rather sad article in The Onion about a working mom's TikTok feed which consists of sporadic 15 second posts of things like "I'm sitting down a quiet room now. OK, got to go." or "I never did get a chance to take my shoes off. Look at that." There's definitely some sampling bias in social media.
I don't think daycare is inherently bad and also I don't think the majority of daycare options currently available to us in the US are serving the best interests of kids, families, NOR daycare providers. But that's nuance that probably isn't captured on TikTok!
Definitely not - the daycare we wish our kids were in has an incredibly long wait list and would really stretch our budget. But we’re still grateful for teachers who really care!
I’m thinking about how if women were to stop doing the care work that makes society function, the suffering would be unimaginable.
It seems like our basic compassion has been taken advantage of. ‘Women’s labor’ disproportionately encompasses childcare but also teaching, nursing, nonprofit work. As has been explored in this newsletter (and echoed many times throughout the comments!), the work feels impossible to turn away from, because so many women know the exact people who are at stake if they do. And most of those people are the weakest in our society - the elderly and infirm, the actual, literal children.
A part of me wants a mass strike and for women to just be accelerationist and mercenary in their goals and to just Stop. And we’re not going to do that! Because withdrawing all of the care labor from society would be cruel, and people would flounder and suffer and (literally) die.
But it’s so hard to imagine a good-faith engagement with building a world that values women’s work. No one *has* to engage in good faith because everyone knows we’re just going to do the work anyway.
Idk. To win a labor struggle, we have to be willing - in ways both individual and systemic - to let an industry destroy itself if it doesn’t respect its workers. It sucks that the industry in question is all of humankind, but here we are.
Also as things squeeze more and more I do wonder how much women will simply opt-out by not getting married in the first place. Which… is not in and of itself a solution.
But it’s just been getting thrown in women’s faces that their work doesn’t matter and doesn’t get them any respect and no one will give a SINGLE shit if you need help. So why bother with the optimism of an ‘egalitarian’ marriage in the first place if you know how it plays out?
We are watching in real time how men are interested in marriage as free labor and image laundering. You can’t put the facade back after it’s been ripped down.
Yup. Am not only completely uninterested in marriage but also in a relationship with a man, period. What's the point of doing all the emotional labor, cleaning up after someone, risking your health/safety in a post-Roe v. Wade era... and why? For someone who doesn't value your time, or at least not enough to pull their weight around the house? (Yes, yes, not all men... but many. Far too many.)
I’m an 80s kid and keep having flashbacks of an after school special called ‘Moms on Strike.’ I remember being really stuck by the idea that a mom could just say, “Enough!” And that a mom would even feel the need to say that. Not sure it gave me much empathy for my mom, but it’s definitely a clear TV viewing memory from my childhood. Maybe it imprinted on me early that, “being a mom seems like a lot of work.” And, eventually, opted out of pursuing being a mom. Lol… probably not the lesson they were trying to teach!
Back to reality… there is power in the collective and it’s really disheartening and devastating how there is an explicit effort to keep us so divided. I’m looking forward (sort of) to reading this book!
What I love about this piece is the acknowledgement of the precarity of not being "poor enough." Being just above the income threshold for the limited social safety nets in our country leaves many people free to slip through the cracks. I wish the entire country could see how important it is to invest in things like education, childcare, and healthcare. Our policies and politics are too dysfunctional.
This is too true and absolutely infuriating. And how telling is it that programs that are a tad more generous on the income scale (federal and state) are often only related to the ability to control fertility? I will praise Medicaid family planning programs and Title X for all my days, but there is something VERY MESSED UP that our policies favor pregnancy prevention and preventive reproductive healthcare for people with low incomes rather than working to ensure that people’s whole health is addressed.
Waste, fraud, abuse, and general nonsense in government programs is what I do for a living. If you are eligible, take it! We mean it for you! Most of them aren’t zero sum, so don’t just think someone else needs it more. Do it without shame! No one feels shame about taking tax breaks which are just another form of assistance to wealthier people.
This was a thought-provoking read on a topic I already think a great deal about! One thing I didn't see addressed here (maybe I need to read the book!) is the topic of parental leave and childcare quality. Subsidized childcare is absolutely something that we should be doing - and also, the fact that even those of us lucky to have 6 or 12 weeks of parental leave need to find childcare when our babies are that tiny is a glaring issue.
(edit because I hit submit too soon!)
Infant childcare by its very nature is more resource intensive and expensive, and countries with more humane parental leave reduce some of the pressure on the childcare/nursery system by having children enter it later. I was completely unprepared for how absolutely wretched it felt to put my baby in daycare at 12 weeks old - and how much I struggled with it throughout the first year. and while I hear many women say they were bored on maternity leave and ready to get back to work, I have also heard from a lot of people that whole they don't want to quit their jobs entirely, they weren't ready to go back so quickly.
I also have concerns about the quality of childcare. Not saying it's great under our current mess of a system! But it's not a simple binary of yes we have affordable childcare or no we don't. Widely affordable childcare, in order to truly be a societal win, needs to be high quality including low child to caregiver ratios.
Great points all. Another thing that I think we are too narrow-minded about is that returning to work is a binary. You go from full-time leave to full-time work. Why can we not make this transition more gradual? Getting childcare for a half-day for 3 months before returning to work full-time? Or returning to work only 2-3 days a week at first?
Conceptually I know this is because of the many legal/policy definitions about 'full-time' vs 'part-time' benefits, but this is all stuff we made up ourselves.
In another newsletter I'd also like to rant about this all-or-nothing approach to retirement... Looking forward to that discussion :)
oh gosh yes. 1000 times yes. going back to work part time or any kind of a settling in period would have made a huge difference to me personally. I looked into it but would have lost benefits, just as you say. I am hoping to DIY this for myself and my family by planning to work PRN/casual (no benefits, fewer committed shifts) if we have another child. that's only possible if I can go on my wife's insurance, is going to be financially precarious, and isn't an option in most industries. TBD on if we can make it work at all. also very with you on the retirement issue!
One year of leave would be great, but even mandatory 6 months would be so much better than what we have now. I choose 6 months because that is the point (in my observation) that new moms no longer constantly have dark circles under their eyes.
And one year of leave would mean women could more easily breast feed if they want without being tied to the pump at work.
Or 6 months per parent! Unequal leave between gestational and non-gestational parents (more often women and men respectively, but not the case in my family or many others) further entrenches a lot of the imbalance in who becomes tasked with the role of family/societal safety net.
I have such complicated feelings about the “unequal leaves” thing, because I think you’re right about it entrenching gender roles, but I also think the gestational parent should get leave that is focused on *their own physical healing* that is separately counted from parental leave, because holy moly if you have any birth complications whatsoever you NEED that time (says the lady who incurred 4th degree tears and couldn’t walk or lift baby until she was 5 weeks old…thank goodness for my grad school friends who figured out a rotation so that I wouldn’t be left alone after my spouse had used up his week of “sick leave/vacation” time). And I have similar thoughts regarding breastfeeding, if the gestational parent does that. In other words, there is a real physical difference between the gestational and non-gestational parent.
And perhaps this is just because I’m in academia which is a mess for all sorts of reasons, but I’ve seen so many male faculty members use parental leave to work on research/publications without teaching responsibilities…but I’ve seen literally zero gestational parents come out the other side of parental leave with extra publications the way their partners can.
Absolutely! I’m 10 weeks into my 12 week maternity leave and am SO SAD about having to go back to work in a week and half, while also knowing that I 100% do not want to be a full time stay at home mom. And I know I’m super privileged to have been able to have this much time at home with my baby already!
And the rates of homeschooling keep going up and up. I feel like at least once a week on my local mom's FB group I see a homeschooling mom ask what she can do to help make ends meet while homeschooling kids and get so frustrated. Homeschooling got popular because Evangelicals wanted to keep women in the home, tied to their partners!
Ugh, yes. I have a family member with three little ones who has decided to homeschool instead of sending her eldest to kindergarten next year. It's so hard for me to be supportive of this decision - she and her husband each already work two jobs! Her work schedule technically leaves enough hours in the day to *also* homeschool, but I truly don't understand how she's going to manage it. I see her weighing herself down with more and more responsibilities until there's nothing left for herself. And for what?!?!
Oh, yes, the time commitment to homeschool!! I have been gently reminding my friend that she could send her kids to school and with all of her free time, she could still plan the parts of homeschooling she loves (the science experiments, the art projects, the advanced math) and have some time to herself.
Gosh. So much with this. The family that decided to have the mom be "stay at home", which enabled them to get benefits but they also had reservations about claiming assistance benefits. You have ppl like Harrison Butker shaming the family for claiming govt benefits all while saying that women have been told a great lie about how life is better for women being a stay at home mom. Such hypocrisy.
And then in a business networking group I am in that is predominantly men, I was asked by the woman founder to send in a recap from the dinner we had with, you guessed it, all men.
But no one wants to support women because supporting women means giving something up that they have the privilege of having.
My clients deal with this shit all of the time. It's about figuring out small ways to establish boundaries around the emotional toll of unseen labor.
There's something about seeing so much of what you know and experience being articulated so clearly that is ... something else. The magnitude of what has to be changed is beyond overwhelming. But we need to be reminded of what's stopping that change, from powerful groups to internalized belief systems, on a regular basis.
This back story means so much to me for a million reasons! As a sociologist (who once presented on a panel with Calarco back in the day!!), as a current teaching adjunct who struggles with my role in academia, as a mother of 2- one born 6 wks before everything shut down, as someone who loves your work, and who wants these conversations about often invisible and taken for granted inequalities and injustices to be out there! Thank you and Jessica Calarco for this incredibly important work. I can’t wait to teach it to my family sociology students this fall.
I work in nonprofits, a predominantly women and non binary person space, and I can't help but think how this translates to a work place where revenue is unstable and scarce. How much of our organizations are held together by women/NB folx doing unpaid labor to ensure organizations keeping running when there is no extra money?
THIS THIS THIS. It’s not just traditional care work where women are overrepresented, it’s societal care work like nonprofits and service committees, too. And it starts so young! I work with teenagers, and it’s girls and NB kids, almost exclusively, who lead clubs, do community service, just show up to stuff. Every single club or service-related event is easily 90% girls/NB.
I started out in museum education, which has similar demographics, and the expectation was often to do the same amount year over year with less money/fewer staff. Heaven forbid we cut programs - we just had to figure out how to do it anyway.
I think the situation has been improving a tiny bit in recent years as museums have started unionizing and being more transparent about salaries, but it's decidedly a marathon, not a sprint.
Thinking of the evangelical woman’s view, it reminds me that, as a GenX-er raised in an evangelical family & fundamentalist churches, I commonly heard the belief expressed (from the pulpit & regular conversation) that the social safety net is against god because one must come to their knees to come to god. If you can live comfortably then you get self-satisfied and won’t need god. The social safety net is government trying to replace god. I mean, the message that we must allow people to starve so that they’ll find Jesus is just one of several reasons I left that religion behind, but it was a big one.
1) I will read this book and throw it across the room.
2) I had a whole assed response about Whiteness & womanhood in this country, the poisonous power of it all, that I see this exhausting bs in the most so called 'free thinking' circles and acquaintances, how so many of us Black/Brown women have double duties of caring for people being paid a pittance WHILE caring for our families, etc etc but no matter, I will still buy this book and throw it across the room.
Love that this topic is being talked about more prominently now, and Holding it Together sounds like an amazing book. So thankful it’s been written and published, but I may not read it, at least not for a couple of years, as the subject is just too fraught for me at the moment. I’m a white middle-class woman who has decided not to work outside of the home but in my community (mostly white, progressive, college educated, upper-middle class) that decision is absolutely looked down upon. Oh yes, we all know about and rail against the inequities of domestic labor and the lack of any sort of social safety net, and, and, and! But if you’re a woman and your kids are older than elementary school, by god, you should be working outside the home at the cost of all else. Sanity? Who needs it? Better to run around like a chicken with your head cut off. The social pressure is crushing. I feel it even here in the comment section.
The amount of privilege my family enjoys is enormous, but we live in a bubble surrounded by even more privilege and wealth, so we make a lot of “sacrifices” in order for me not to have a second (i.e. paying) job and I definitely feel judged for our small, rather run-down house and lack of fancy vacations. Would I have made a different choice if good quality/affordable childcare and family help had been available? Absolutely. But here we are. I have an artistic (pipe?) dream that I get maybe 3-4 hours a day to work on, if I’m lucky. It's taking so much longer than I thought it would to go anywhere. I work on it privately, so I know people wonder what I do all day. And if The Dream fails to materialize, what happens once all the kids are out of the house? Who will hire me and for what?
Last week I read an NYT article about Michelle Obama’s mother, who recently passed away. The Obamas are amazing, but when I learned that MO's mom lived at the White House with them I did rather have the urge to throw something breakable. Was this talked about at the time, but I missed it? Or did the media/the Obamas just not bother to mention how much family help matters in the United States, even to families as powerful as they are?
I am glad to hear that! And it makes sense, of course the Obamas would have acknowledged the help of Michelle's mother. Part of my reaction to that article *might* have been a bit of jealousy - MO has achieved an enormous amount of success and had all the benefits that come with living in the White House AND her mother was willing to upend her life to provide even more help? Though there are probably enough downsides to White House living that I should be careful about where I direct my envy. :)
I think you may want to read some of Michelle Obama's writing. it wasn't about extra help, it was about the kind of help she wanted... not paid people who would treat her kids like royalty and the President's kids and not set them straight but help that would treat her kids like regular kids, show/teach them the values that mattered to the family and have no fear about setting them straight. It was also always talked about at the time
Nope, not that invested in Michelle Obama, as incredible as she is. I think it was distracting to use her as an example here! It was just that learning that bit of info so recently renewed my own wishfulness for family help, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Help is help.
I think this could be a very interesting angle... help is in fact not just help. When help comes with strings attached, when help comes with people making you feel bad about it, when help belittles you etc.
Oof, yeah, you're right, no one wants that kind of help! That would be awful. I must have interpreted what you said incorrectly-I thought you were making a point about MO's reasoning behind asking her mom to help. My own takeaway from that bit of info was that help from our families can make a huge difference no matter where you stand on the social hierarchy ladder, and regardless of why or what kind of help you need. Assuming of course no one is making you feel bad about it. That is a whole other can of worms!
It was common knowledge that Michelle's mother was living at the White House with them. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while they were getting settled in, but eventually became permanent.
I’m both excited to read this book and sad about the plate glass window I’m going to kick through when I do.
I think I'm just going straight for the window.
We hear all the time about women in the workforce in WWII but somehow this is the first time I am ever hearing about what made that possible! Near universal childcare! Perhaps relatedly, my childcare was closed yesterday because they were going to ask legislatures to support a living wage for childcare workers.
I’d never heard about childcare during WWII either! all the talk about “the greatest generation” conveniently glosses over that aspect….
In the US, government funded childcare started in 1939. It was unveiled at the World Fair. It grew during World War II as part of the war effort. Some of the daycare centers are still running. Bloomberg recently had an article on one that just closed thanks to irregular subsidy payments. I gather Richard Nixon prevented federal funding in the 1970s.
Government funded childcare during WW2 made a comic appearance in my favorite Christmas movie, Christmas in Connecticut.
This is fascinating. I see it a lot on TikTok - how women in my generation (younger millennial) and gen z think that daycare is inherently bad? I personally don't have the tools to aid my child's development, and the idea that women did this alone, for centuries, is a lie that is very unique to American Evangelicalism. Even within my own extended family there is this belief that they can make themselves rich on a $40,000 single income stream. And you can't budget your way out of that.
I am all for social programs, and when I talk about things like universal childcare or healthcare to my more conservative, small-business owning parents, I often frame it as something easier for them. My mom's best employees are single mothers who often get caught up in daycares closing and one of her biggest line items is providing healthcare. Paying a little more in taxes would really help businesses in a way that we don't truly comprehend.
Can't wait to read this!
I think there are many Millenial and Gen Z women with kids who use daycare, but they aren't posting on TikTok because they have jobs. TikTok, for good and ill, can really amplify the voices of people in the minority and make you think they're in the majority.
Yes social media makes it worse! But also in talking to some acquaintances where I live in SE Wisconsin, a lot of people think that “someone else is raising your child”.
My kids go to daycare very happily! But it’s just interesting to hear out & about. My son is starting a 3k program this fall and a lot of the families have a stay at home parent.
I get it. I have a 4 year old whose grandparents take care of her during the day. I am really fortunate for that - she has gotten lots of attention, she can do the part-day preschool, they can take her swimming and to classes, etc. And it's free! But also we have been able to move to be near the grandparents, they're healthy enough to provide good care - most people don't get that.
But I think kids who go to all-day daycare/ preschool tend to have more friends, and I'm a little jealous of that.
And to me "someone else is raising your child" is a feature, not a bug! If you can send them to a reasonable daycare, they are cared for by people who know how to care for that age group. I wasn't raised around cousins, there were 3 kids in my family, I don't know what to do with a young child! I asked my friends who sent their kids to daycare how they potty trained their kid, and they all shrugged and said they let the daycare do it.
Looking at your friends, do you know who went to daycare/ preschool vs who had a SAHP? I don't! Most people end up totally fine - humans are resilient and adaptable!
I love this! Our parents all still work, and we could never afford to replace their salaries. But they are available if we need them to step in for a day or two which is so nice.
We're the oldest in our families, and the first of our friends to have kids. So we have relied on our teachers a lot to help us with "firsts" for our kids. Like right now we're struggling with potty training our son because he does great at daycare, but not so great at home.
Looking at my friends now, you're completely right, I have no idea! I love the way you framed that!
All of my 3 boys went to daycare and I think they are more adaptable, social people because of it. I loved and deeply appreciated the women and 1 man who helped me raise my boys. It was their love, time, and patience that meant the world to me and allowed me to work outside the home. There were SO MANY benefits to my children spending time with other people outside our home. They were exposed to many things they wouldn’t have been if they’d stayed home till kindergarten.
I think a big part of that “someone else is raising your child” argument for a lot of people is ideological. “Someone else is raising your child [wrong, with beliefs you don’t share].”
This suggests a rather sad article in The Onion about a working mom's TikTok feed which consists of sporadic 15 second posts of things like "I'm sitting down a quiet room now. OK, got to go." or "I never did get a chance to take my shoes off. Look at that." There's definitely some sampling bias in social media.
I don't think daycare is inherently bad and also I don't think the majority of daycare options currently available to us in the US are serving the best interests of kids, families, NOR daycare providers. But that's nuance that probably isn't captured on TikTok!
Definitely not - the daycare we wish our kids were in has an incredibly long wait list and would really stretch our budget. But we’re still grateful for teachers who really care!
I’m thinking about how if women were to stop doing the care work that makes society function, the suffering would be unimaginable.
It seems like our basic compassion has been taken advantage of. ‘Women’s labor’ disproportionately encompasses childcare but also teaching, nursing, nonprofit work. As has been explored in this newsletter (and echoed many times throughout the comments!), the work feels impossible to turn away from, because so many women know the exact people who are at stake if they do. And most of those people are the weakest in our society - the elderly and infirm, the actual, literal children.
A part of me wants a mass strike and for women to just be accelerationist and mercenary in their goals and to just Stop. And we’re not going to do that! Because withdrawing all of the care labor from society would be cruel, and people would flounder and suffer and (literally) die.
But it’s so hard to imagine a good-faith engagement with building a world that values women’s work. No one *has* to engage in good faith because everyone knows we’re just going to do the work anyway.
Idk. To win a labor struggle, we have to be willing - in ways both individual and systemic - to let an industry destroy itself if it doesn’t respect its workers. It sucks that the industry in question is all of humankind, but here we are.
Also as things squeeze more and more I do wonder how much women will simply opt-out by not getting married in the first place. Which… is not in and of itself a solution.
But it’s just been getting thrown in women’s faces that their work doesn’t matter and doesn’t get them any respect and no one will give a SINGLE shit if you need help. So why bother with the optimism of an ‘egalitarian’ marriage in the first place if you know how it plays out?
We are watching in real time how men are interested in marriage as free labor and image laundering. You can’t put the facade back after it’s been ripped down.
re: opting out of a shit situation — see the marriage rates in Japan and Korea!
I was just going to say that as well as the declining birth rates.. this is how younger women are staying stop!
Yup. Am not only completely uninterested in marriage but also in a relationship with a man, period. What's the point of doing all the emotional labor, cleaning up after someone, risking your health/safety in a post-Roe v. Wade era... and why? For someone who doesn't value your time, or at least not enough to pull their weight around the house? (Yes, yes, not all men... but many. Far too many.)
I’m an 80s kid and keep having flashbacks of an after school special called ‘Moms on Strike.’ I remember being really stuck by the idea that a mom could just say, “Enough!” And that a mom would even feel the need to say that. Not sure it gave me much empathy for my mom, but it’s definitely a clear TV viewing memory from my childhood. Maybe it imprinted on me early that, “being a mom seems like a lot of work.” And, eventually, opted out of pursuing being a mom. Lol… probably not the lesson they were trying to teach!
Back to reality… there is power in the collective and it’s really disheartening and devastating how there is an explicit effort to keep us so divided. I’m looking forward (sort of) to reading this book!
What I love about this piece is the acknowledgement of the precarity of not being "poor enough." Being just above the income threshold for the limited social safety nets in our country leaves many people free to slip through the cracks. I wish the entire country could see how important it is to invest in things like education, childcare, and healthcare. Our policies and politics are too dysfunctional.
This is too true and absolutely infuriating. And how telling is it that programs that are a tad more generous on the income scale (federal and state) are often only related to the ability to control fertility? I will praise Medicaid family planning programs and Title X for all my days, but there is something VERY MESSED UP that our policies favor pregnancy prevention and preventive reproductive healthcare for people with low incomes rather than working to ensure that people’s whole health is addressed.
Waste, fraud, abuse, and general nonsense in government programs is what I do for a living. If you are eligible, take it! We mean it for you! Most of them aren’t zero sum, so don’t just think someone else needs it more. Do it without shame! No one feels shame about taking tax breaks which are just another form of assistance to wealthier people.
Does Elon Musk feel guilty he got a $500M government loan to start up SpaceX?
In a rationale world, he would, but I’m not sure he feels shame about anything!
This was a thought-provoking read on a topic I already think a great deal about! One thing I didn't see addressed here (maybe I need to read the book!) is the topic of parental leave and childcare quality. Subsidized childcare is absolutely something that we should be doing - and also, the fact that even those of us lucky to have 6 or 12 weeks of parental leave need to find childcare when our babies are that tiny is a glaring issue.
(edit because I hit submit too soon!)
Infant childcare by its very nature is more resource intensive and expensive, and countries with more humane parental leave reduce some of the pressure on the childcare/nursery system by having children enter it later. I was completely unprepared for how absolutely wretched it felt to put my baby in daycare at 12 weeks old - and how much I struggled with it throughout the first year. and while I hear many women say they were bored on maternity leave and ready to get back to work, I have also heard from a lot of people that whole they don't want to quit their jobs entirely, they weren't ready to go back so quickly.
I also have concerns about the quality of childcare. Not saying it's great under our current mess of a system! But it's not a simple binary of yes we have affordable childcare or no we don't. Widely affordable childcare, in order to truly be a societal win, needs to be high quality including low child to caregiver ratios.
Honestly this is easily solved by ACTUAL PARENTAL LEAVE that makes it so no parent has to go back to work at 12 weeks
Exactly!!
Great points all. Another thing that I think we are too narrow-minded about is that returning to work is a binary. You go from full-time leave to full-time work. Why can we not make this transition more gradual? Getting childcare for a half-day for 3 months before returning to work full-time? Or returning to work only 2-3 days a week at first?
Conceptually I know this is because of the many legal/policy definitions about 'full-time' vs 'part-time' benefits, but this is all stuff we made up ourselves.
In another newsletter I'd also like to rant about this all-or-nothing approach to retirement... Looking forward to that discussion :)
oh gosh yes. 1000 times yes. going back to work part time or any kind of a settling in period would have made a huge difference to me personally. I looked into it but would have lost benefits, just as you say. I am hoping to DIY this for myself and my family by planning to work PRN/casual (no benefits, fewer committed shifts) if we have another child. that's only possible if I can go on my wife's insurance, is going to be financially precarious, and isn't an option in most industries. TBD on if we can make it work at all. also very with you on the retirement issue!
Finding infant care is so hard and so expensive.
One year of leave would be great, but even mandatory 6 months would be so much better than what we have now. I choose 6 months because that is the point (in my observation) that new moms no longer constantly have dark circles under their eyes.
And one year of leave would mean women could more easily breast feed if they want without being tied to the pump at work.
Or 6 months per parent! Unequal leave between gestational and non-gestational parents (more often women and men respectively, but not the case in my family or many others) further entrenches a lot of the imbalance in who becomes tasked with the role of family/societal safety net.
I have such complicated feelings about the “unequal leaves” thing, because I think you’re right about it entrenching gender roles, but I also think the gestational parent should get leave that is focused on *their own physical healing* that is separately counted from parental leave, because holy moly if you have any birth complications whatsoever you NEED that time (says the lady who incurred 4th degree tears and couldn’t walk or lift baby until she was 5 weeks old…thank goodness for my grad school friends who figured out a rotation so that I wouldn’t be left alone after my spouse had used up his week of “sick leave/vacation” time). And I have similar thoughts regarding breastfeeding, if the gestational parent does that. In other words, there is a real physical difference between the gestational and non-gestational parent.
And perhaps this is just because I’m in academia which is a mess for all sorts of reasons, but I’ve seen so many male faculty members use parental leave to work on research/publications without teaching responsibilities…but I’ve seen literally zero gestational parents come out the other side of parental leave with extra publications the way their partners can.
Interesting. Definitely some important points.
Absolutely! I’m 10 weeks into my 12 week maternity leave and am SO SAD about having to go back to work in a week and half, while also knowing that I 100% do not want to be a full time stay at home mom. And I know I’m super privileged to have been able to have this much time at home with my baby already!
And the rates of homeschooling keep going up and up. I feel like at least once a week on my local mom's FB group I see a homeschooling mom ask what she can do to help make ends meet while homeschooling kids and get so frustrated. Homeschooling got popular because Evangelicals wanted to keep women in the home, tied to their partners!
Ugh, yes. I have a family member with three little ones who has decided to homeschool instead of sending her eldest to kindergarten next year. It's so hard for me to be supportive of this decision - she and her husband each already work two jobs! Her work schedule technically leaves enough hours in the day to *also* homeschool, but I truly don't understand how she's going to manage it. I see her weighing herself down with more and more responsibilities until there's nothing left for herself. And for what?!?!
Oh, yes, the time commitment to homeschool!! I have been gently reminding my friend that she could send her kids to school and with all of her free time, she could still plan the parts of homeschooling she loves (the science experiments, the art projects, the advanced math) and have some time to herself.
Gosh. So much with this. The family that decided to have the mom be "stay at home", which enabled them to get benefits but they also had reservations about claiming assistance benefits. You have ppl like Harrison Butker shaming the family for claiming govt benefits all while saying that women have been told a great lie about how life is better for women being a stay at home mom. Such hypocrisy.
And then in a business networking group I am in that is predominantly men, I was asked by the woman founder to send in a recap from the dinner we had with, you guessed it, all men.
But no one wants to support women because supporting women means giving something up that they have the privilege of having.
My clients deal with this shit all of the time. It's about figuring out small ways to establish boundaries around the emotional toll of unseen labor.
https://golong.substack.com/p/navigating-stress-and-emotional-burnout
And people wonder why the birth rate is going down across western societies. FFS.
There's something about seeing so much of what you know and experience being articulated so clearly that is ... something else. The magnitude of what has to be changed is beyond overwhelming. But we need to be reminded of what's stopping that change, from powerful groups to internalized belief systems, on a regular basis.
This back story means so much to me for a million reasons! As a sociologist (who once presented on a panel with Calarco back in the day!!), as a current teaching adjunct who struggles with my role in academia, as a mother of 2- one born 6 wks before everything shut down, as someone who loves your work, and who wants these conversations about often invisible and taken for granted inequalities and injustices to be out there! Thank you and Jessica Calarco for this incredibly important work. I can’t wait to teach it to my family sociology students this fall.
<3 <3 <3
I work in nonprofits, a predominantly women and non binary person space, and I can't help but think how this translates to a work place where revenue is unstable and scarce. How much of our organizations are held together by women/NB folx doing unpaid labor to ensure organizations keeping running when there is no extra money?
THIS THIS THIS. It’s not just traditional care work where women are overrepresented, it’s societal care work like nonprofits and service committees, too. And it starts so young! I work with teenagers, and it’s girls and NB kids, almost exclusively, who lead clubs, do community service, just show up to stuff. Every single club or service-related event is easily 90% girls/NB.
I started out in museum education, which has similar demographics, and the expectation was often to do the same amount year over year with less money/fewer staff. Heaven forbid we cut programs - we just had to figure out how to do it anyway.
I think the situation has been improving a tiny bit in recent years as museums have started unionizing and being more transparent about salaries, but it's decidedly a marathon, not a sprint.
Thinking of the evangelical woman’s view, it reminds me that, as a GenX-er raised in an evangelical family & fundamentalist churches, I commonly heard the belief expressed (from the pulpit & regular conversation) that the social safety net is against god because one must come to their knees to come to god. If you can live comfortably then you get self-satisfied and won’t need god. The social safety net is government trying to replace god. I mean, the message that we must allow people to starve so that they’ll find Jesus is just one of several reasons I left that religion behind, but it was a big one.
1) I will read this book and throw it across the room.
2) I had a whole assed response about Whiteness & womanhood in this country, the poisonous power of it all, that I see this exhausting bs in the most so called 'free thinking' circles and acquaintances, how so many of us Black/Brown women have double duties of caring for people being paid a pittance WHILE caring for our families, etc etc but no matter, I will still buy this book and throw it across the room.
Love that this topic is being talked about more prominently now, and Holding it Together sounds like an amazing book. So thankful it’s been written and published, but I may not read it, at least not for a couple of years, as the subject is just too fraught for me at the moment. I’m a white middle-class woman who has decided not to work outside of the home but in my community (mostly white, progressive, college educated, upper-middle class) that decision is absolutely looked down upon. Oh yes, we all know about and rail against the inequities of domestic labor and the lack of any sort of social safety net, and, and, and! But if you’re a woman and your kids are older than elementary school, by god, you should be working outside the home at the cost of all else. Sanity? Who needs it? Better to run around like a chicken with your head cut off. The social pressure is crushing. I feel it even here in the comment section.
The amount of privilege my family enjoys is enormous, but we live in a bubble surrounded by even more privilege and wealth, so we make a lot of “sacrifices” in order for me not to have a second (i.e. paying) job and I definitely feel judged for our small, rather run-down house and lack of fancy vacations. Would I have made a different choice if good quality/affordable childcare and family help had been available? Absolutely. But here we are. I have an artistic (pipe?) dream that I get maybe 3-4 hours a day to work on, if I’m lucky. It's taking so much longer than I thought it would to go anywhere. I work on it privately, so I know people wonder what I do all day. And if The Dream fails to materialize, what happens once all the kids are out of the house? Who will hire me and for what?
Last week I read an NYT article about Michelle Obama’s mother, who recently passed away. The Obamas are amazing, but when I learned that MO's mom lived at the White House with them I did rather have the urge to throw something breakable. Was this talked about at the time, but I missed it? Or did the media/the Obamas just not bother to mention how much family help matters in the United States, even to families as powerful as they are?
IIRC, both Michelle and Barack Obama talked in their books and elsewhere about how she moved in with them to help with the children.
I looked it up, and the NYT also did an article about it back in January 2009. I presume this was also reported elsewhere at the time.
I am glad to hear that! And it makes sense, of course the Obamas would have acknowledged the help of Michelle's mother. Part of my reaction to that article *might* have been a bit of jealousy - MO has achieved an enormous amount of success and had all the benefits that come with living in the White House AND her mother was willing to upend her life to provide even more help? Though there are probably enough downsides to White House living that I should be careful about where I direct my envy. :)
I think you may want to read some of Michelle Obama's writing. it wasn't about extra help, it was about the kind of help she wanted... not paid people who would treat her kids like royalty and the President's kids and not set them straight but help that would treat her kids like regular kids, show/teach them the values that mattered to the family and have no fear about setting them straight. It was also always talked about at the time
Nope, not that invested in Michelle Obama, as incredible as she is. I think it was distracting to use her as an example here! It was just that learning that bit of info so recently renewed my own wishfulness for family help, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Help is help.
I think this could be a very interesting angle... help is in fact not just help. When help comes with strings attached, when help comes with people making you feel bad about it, when help belittles you etc.
Oof, yeah, you're right, no one wants that kind of help! That would be awful. I must have interpreted what you said incorrectly-I thought you were making a point about MO's reasoning behind asking her mom to help. My own takeaway from that bit of info was that help from our families can make a huge difference no matter where you stand on the social hierarchy ladder, and regardless of why or what kind of help you need. Assuming of course no one is making you feel bad about it. That is a whole other can of worms!
It was common knowledge that Michelle's mother was living at the White House with them. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while they were getting settled in, but eventually became permanent.
I will buy this book.