Holding it Together with Jessica Calarco

Your Working Life with Caroline Dowd-Higgins

Jessica Calarco is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, June 2024). Jessica has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She also blogs at ParenthoodPhD and is a mom of two young kids.

Book synopsis:

Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences. America runs on women—women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed Sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo.

Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.

Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country’s social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women’s work maintains the illusion that we don't need a net.

Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.

Questions/topics of discussion:

· What is a “DIY society” and how does it differ from a society with a safety net?

· How does women's labor maintain the illusion that we don't need a social safety net?

· Why shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that mothers are back at work in a post-pandemic world?

· Why won’t advising women to make traditional “good choices,” like obtaining a college degree, securing a job with a high salary, or working in STEM, help solve the gender pay gap?

· How does denying women access to paid leave, and affordable, reliable childcare force them to stand in for a safety net?

· How do women keep the economy from crumbling?

· How would businesses benefit from universal paid family leave and universal childcare?

· What would a robust safety net actually look like?

Social media:

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaCalarco

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jesscalarco/

· Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jesscalarco

· LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-calarco-93085928/

Website: https://www.jessicacalarco.com/