Women Gave up Trying to Have It All

Now we’re just trying to hold it together

The cover

Jessica Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net contains so many lightbulb moments that when you read it, you’ll feel like you’re sitting under a flashing neon sign.

Here’s one: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” Did you see that flash of light? 

Here’s another: “America runs on women.”

Trying to have it all will make you very tired

I came of age in the 1980s believing that women could have it all. The actress in the old Enjoli perfume ad said she could “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never let you forget you’re a man.” The actress waved around a skillet and said she could also hang the wash on the line and feed the kids. Impressive!

In return, her husband’s whole job, I guess, was to buy her a bottle of perfume. She had everything else covered. If you click on that link, you’ll read a whole lot of comments after the video like this one: “We all tried to be her, but now we’re all tired” and “Glamorizing the workhorse life.”  

My mom bought the 1980s Helen Gurley Brown book, Having It All, and I read it and believed it. But Gurley Brown did not have children. She was free to flit around the offices of her magazine, Cosmopolitan, like a precursor to Carrie Bradshaw. Bradshaw didn’t have children, either. 

It turns out that adding children to the mix while doing everything else all by ourselves is a lot harder than we thought – especially when you lack high-quality, low-cost daycare.

Four decades later, we know better than to be taken in by the Gurley Brown and Enjoli messages, but we still haven’t done anything to fix our system.

Society still expects us to handle everything with no help

Remember that time when the U.S. decided to open a network of government-subsidized child care centers so women could work?

This came as news to me, but we did have affordable, government-subsidized childcare under the Lanham Act during World War II. That allowed mothers of young children to fill the jobs left by men fighting in Europe. Notably, we set this up not to help women but to serve the war effort. 

Following the war, some European countries understood they still needed the contributions of women in the workplace to help rebuild. So they invested in safety nets that included things like subsidized child care and healthcare. 

In the U.S., just as soon as the men returned home we dismantled our child care infrastructure. We decided we didn’t need a social safety net; we trusted that women would figure out how to take care of everything somehow. 

They always have.

Our DIY culture

Calarco is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She and her team surveyed more than 4,000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women in order to write the book.

Calarco refers to our “DIY culture.” Americans believe strongly in the power of the individual to take care of everything themselves. But young children can’t do it themselves. 

“And so someone has to step in and take care of that work for them. Women get tasked with filling in these gaps. ... Sexism and patriarchy become the mechanisms to fill in to force women to be the ones to fill in those gaps in the DIY system,” she said.

Why not just ask your husband to help?

“Just today on social media someone was saying if women are taking on too much work at home, they should just tell men to step up and do more.” 

But many women know that if they don’t do the work, it won’t get done. And for single mothers, “the buck completely stops with them,” even if they qualify for limited government assistance. 

“I think we have to be very mindful about telling women just to say no or to tell men to do more,” Calarco said.

“‘If you don't do it, someone else will.’ That’s not always the case. For some women, asking the men around them to do more can put them at risk of harm. There’s lots of time their partners can respond not only with neglect, but with vitriol. That’s a large risk in our country.”

Why not just hire some help?

Some of the women Calarco interviewed realized they could make it work, but only by “dumping the risk” on other, less privileged women. Some mothers realized the only way they could afford to put their child in daycare was for another woman – very often a woman of color – to work for the poverty-level wages with no benefits most daycare centers provide.

“Exploitation effectively drives a wedge between women. It disincentivizes those higher up on the social ladder from caring about those on the rungs below.” (Page 63.)

Child care, elder care and healthcare, Calarco notes, are all labor intensive services that can’t be scaled the way certain tech jobs can. Nor can these industries save money by outsourcing work to other countries. Making these part of a publicly supported safety net would have a profound effect on women’s lives, and not just on the workplace.

Many of us have first-hand experience at how the cost of child care affects the way couples divide the tasks of parenting and housework. If the mother’s job doesn’t pay enough to cover the cost of child care, it seems to make sense for her to drop out of the workforce for a few years instead.

If she does continue working, it can seem to make sense for her to choose a flexible job even if it pays less.

This incentivizes her partner to concentrate more on his or her (usually his) career. It can seem to make sense for the person whose job is supporting the family to be empowered to concentrate on that and let Mom take care of everything at home. 

When I was a young mom, it personally seemed like a great arrangement. I liked being able to concentrate on motherhood for a season and believed there was no better use of my time at that point. 

But I didn’t fully realize that focusing on motherhood for a few years, and taking a flexible job afterward, would greatly affect the trajectory of my career. I was one of millions of mothers who experienced a rude awakening after my marriage ended.

If we subsidized daycare centers, child care workers could earn higher salaries and mothers who wanted or needed to keep working could afford to do so. Some of the financial stress would be lifted from their partners, who would no longer be the only wage earner in the family.

Presumably, Calarco suggests, under such a system the partners of working women might be more willing to take on some of the load at home.

Who is served by our current system?

It doesn’t serve women or children, but it does serve employers who need to cheaply fill low-paying positions.

The narrative we hear is that “nobody wants to work anymore,” but when we give single mothers a very tiny bit of support – a jaw-droppingly low $288 a month in Indiana, according to Calarco – it’s not enough to live on. “You as a single mom, trying to raise kids, are forced to take the first job you can find.”

In some states, part of the federal money that could be used to assist low-income families is instead used to promote marriage. Getting married to a  man with a little bit more money than she has may be seen as a fast way to bring a single mother some financial stability – even if the marriage is problematic.

‘The Union of Care’ 

“The Union of Care I talk about came from this idea that all of us, at some point in our lives, will be both givers and receivers of care. We are all parts of these shared networks of care. The care we have had helps reorient people for the need of these strong safety nets.”

Calarco suggested we ask ourselves some questions.

“As a sociologist, I usually shy away from individual solutions. No one of us can fix these problems. But this is a place where I think we can take small steps as an individual. One of those steps is calling out mythical thinking. When we catch ourselves thinking in those ways, that’s a moment to either hold ourselves to account or to educate others as to where those may be flawed. … We can use that shared sense of identity to help people rethink these myths,” she said.

For the privileged women who have some time and energy, “How can we decide which of us is going to run for office? Or coordinate cars to take people to polls? We can reorient that collective energy to use those tools instead for collective energizing in ways that push back.”

There are better models out there

I’m married to a European man, so I’ve seen how much more robust the social safety net is in some other countries. I understand there is absolutely no reason U.S. families cannot have the same kinds of benefits people in other developed nations have.

Holding It Together covers a lot of ideas I’ve been thinking and writing about – how we pretend our culture is a meritocracy but is not, how our belief in toxic individuality keeps us from addressing our systemic problems, how our failure to require the wealthy to pay their taxes reduces the funds society needs to take care of those in need – even how the love and dedication we mothers feel for our children is sometimes used as a tool against us. 

Order Holding It Together here.

Subscribe to Calarco’s own Substack, The Hidden Curriculum, here.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.