Holding It Together

In America, women are tasked with holding it all together and fixing it when things fall apart. By sacrificing sleep, leisure, emotional well-being, and financial security, women have created an informal safety net where little to none exists. In the wake of a generational disruption to American work and life, America was given a chance to choose better--and instead, policymakers chose to look away even as the net becomes increasingly tattered.

In richly detailed and empathetic prose, acclaimed sociologist Jessica Calarco shows us the devastating consequences of the status quo and traces its root causes. Calarco draws from five years of research in which she surveyed 2000 parents and conducted 300 hours of interviews with Indiana mothers across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum. She introduces us to widowed single mothers who struggle to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs and daycare workers who take care of wealthier women's children all day, then go home to their own while wondering how to pay the bills. Despite all their effort, they constantly feel guilty for not doing more, and Calarco poignantly shows us how the US weaponizes that guilt and gaslights women into believing that they don't deserve help. Yet women's labor is the reason we've been getting by without a comprehensive public safety net, while maintaining the illusion that we don't need one.

Rigorously researched and sweepingly authoritative, Holding It Together is an unflinching account of the price women are paying to keep our society running, and a bold call for women to set aside their guilt to demand the kind of robust social safety that everyone deserves.