Filling in the gaps of our broken system
Jessica Calarco helps us ungaslight ourselves in 'Holding It Together," a deep dive into the labor that's expected of American women.
Jessica Calarco is an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University whose research focuses on inequalities in family life and education. I first came across her work in January 2020 as I was doing research to try to understand the finger-pointing I saw happening between schools and families. I’ve been following her ever since, and I was delighted to have the chance to speak with her about her latest book.
“Holding It Together” (out in June 2024 from Penguin Random House) reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine.
How did “Holding It Together” grow out of your research? What drove you to this particular focus for this book?
I didn’t start off with the intention of studying gender inequality. Back in 2018, I was interested in understanding what I was thinking of as the best-laid plans of parenthood. We have these ideas about the kind of parenting we want to do or the kinds of parents we want to be, but life can get in the way, and we can encounter things that can push us off course. I was interested in how families with young kids navigate those pressures.
I started by working with a team of undergraduate and graduate students to recruit 250 pregnant people from prenatal clinics in Indiana. We surveyed them when they were about 6 months pregnant, and then we followed up every six months with additional surveys, as well as in-depth interviews.
We have these ideas about the kind of parenting we want to do or the kinds of parents we want to be, but life can get in the way, and we can encounter things that can push us off course.
When the pandemic hit, we could see that this was very clearly having a huge impact, so we ended up doing three additional waves of data collection, as well as a national survey.
In the process of doing this research, a dominant theme was how much of the slack that women were expected to take up — particularly when it came to things like child care, but also elder care, caring for neighbors, caring for friends, all of the myriad ways that women were picking up the slack. And this wasn’t a new pattern, but the amplification of these patterns was where this book came from.
I wanted to weave together stories of women from different backgrounds, and show how it is simultaneously all part of the same system, but with different consequences for different groups.
Who did you write it for, and what do you hope they will take away from reading it?
My hope is that this resonates with anyone that’s been in a position of being the default caregiver. Someone who has had to fill in the gaps in our broken system, whether that’s child care, elder care, health care. Someone who’s had the experience of not having the help that they ended, while also having to be the help.
We often talk about this broken system in pieces, but the way that these systems operate compounds the challenges that women face. They echo each other, and they reinforce each other.
I hope people see in this book sort of an “ungaslighting.” The kinds of challenges we face in our lives are the product of these larger systematic forces. These are forces that are difficult to tackle on our own, but there’s also a freedom from guilt and self-blame in that.
Because these are such huge systems, the only way to solve the problem is to come together. We have to work collectively, whether we want to demand a better social safety net or even just a better outcome in our day-to-day lives. A DIY society is not possible. We’re all part of these broader systems and our fates are much more interlinked.
You and your team interviewed thousands of parents about their experiences raising kids and trying to navigate this broken system we live in. I’d love to hear if anything surprised you or defied your expectations.
One of the things that surprised me the most was how much the pandemic programs actually helped people. Whether it was little things like making school lunches universally free — the number of moms who said, I can just send my kids to school now and they’ll eat the school lunches so I don’t have to worry about packing their lunch anymore.
Even these small steps toward a better social safety net were really important.
Certainly things like the student loan payment moratorium — many families talked about that as a huge weight lifted off their shoulders. The child tax credit payment made a huge difference for so many people. This was the first time they’d ever been able to put money away for savings.
I think that was one of the pieces that was most surprising and most heartening. Even these small steps toward a better social safety net were really important.
What myths or misconceptions would you like to overturn?
If I could erase one idea, it would be that people who work harder are more deserving. That kind of myth shapes so many pieces of our society. It affects who gets to go to college, which then has lots of implications. It affects who gets jobs — who gets the kinds of jobs that have high salaries attached to them — and things like access to child care.
We structure so much of our social safety net around that idea. There’s a presumed irresponsibility that goes with needing support. Having to go through drug testing to be able to qualify for benefits. Having to prove that you are deserving. The work requirements that we wrap our welfare programs in that often force women into the low-wage jobs that no one is willing to fill — jobs without health care, jobs without time off.
There’s a presumed irresponsibility that goes with needing support. It’s just this deeply broken system.
We don’t question this. We don’t question the idea that we should force people to work even when this has huge implications for who is pushed into the lowest wage work. It’s just this deeply broken system.
To go out on a high note, I’d love to hear something wonderful about your kids.
They are deeply creative and keep me on my toes with their creativity. My 9-year-old reads a ton and just has the turn of phrases that she comes up with that are cobbling together thoughts from things she’s read or seen. She has always made me laugh and think and just encouraged me to think about the world in new and creative ways.
My younger one, he’s a very visually artistic person and loves to create these giant murals. One piece of paper is never sufficient, it’s always 10 pieces of paper for him. So finding space for all of the art is a challenge!
Seeing their creativity, seeing how they engage with the world, and how they incorporate big ideas, both literal ones and big social ideas, has been super fun. And maybe especially with my 9-year-old, seeing how confident she is, in a way that I wasn’t at that age. I was worried a lot about her when we moved, how would she do with new friends. But she has the ability to just say, I am who I am, and I’m OK with that, and I’m going to find the people who accept me for who I am. That gives me great confidence in her future and the kids that we have these days.
“Holding It Together” is out June 4, 2024, from anywhere books are sold, and you can find Jessica and her social links at jessicacalarco.com.
Thank you for this post. I look forward to checking out Jessica's book.