“Other Countries Have Social Safety Nets. The US Has Women.”: A Conversation with Jessica Calarco

On July Fourth, President Trump signed his budget bill into law. Americans now face cuts to our already meager social safety net. Even before last Friday, the United States already had one of the least generous social safety nets among wealthy countries, with limited access to everything from health care to childcare to family leave. Now we are seeing dramatic and cruel cuts to Medicaid—especially for women’s health—and to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP). The widening holes in our safety net fall especially hard on women, whom we have long relied on to fill them. In 2020, sociologist and Roosevelt Fellow Jessica Calarco went viral for saying, “Other countries have social safety nets. The US has women.” We sat down with Jessica to discuss her work, why that quote resonated with so many people, and how she thinks we can organize to build a more fair and caring economy and politics (hint: lots to learn from Christian moms groups).

Read Jessica’s full biography here.

This is the second in a series of interviews with Roosevelt’s care and economy fellows. The first installment can be read here.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Suzanne Kahn: Hi, Jessica. Thanks so much for doing this. I recently finished reading your book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, which really spoke to me both because of my own research interests and as the mother of a young child. Can you tell us a bit about how you came to write this book?

Jessica Calarco: This book was not the book that I planned to write. Early in my career, my research had mostly been on inequalities in schooling. That work was based on ethnographic research, where I would embed in communities and do deep observational work following kids, families, and schools over time. Then, in part because of my own childcare challenges, I wasn’t in a place to do another big ethnographic study. I started looking for a way to do a project that would allow me to have more schedule flexibility. I developed a study back in 2017–2018 that was supposed to follow 250 women from pregnancy through their first couple of years postpartum, tracking the decisions that they made about parenting and their children’s lives.

The pandemic hit in the middle of that data collection. It became painfully obvious very early on how much of an impact COVID closures and managing COVID more generally was having on these families with young children, particularly the women in those families. Women not only became the default childcare providers, when schools and childcare centers shut down, but also were tasked with making sure that grandma got her medication, that the neighbors got meals when they got sick, and that colleagues had folks to fill in for them when they had other responsibilities at home.

Because we had been in the field with this study, we had some of the earliest data on pandemic parenting. I did a decent amount of press in the early days of COVID, and in one interview with journalist Anne Helen Petersen for her Culture Study newsletter, I said, “Other countries have social safety nets. The US has women.” It went viral. It really resonated with folks, especially women and the deep frustration they had at that moment.

Suzanne: I remember that. I was taking care of my 18-month-old and working remotely full time, and it certainly resonated with me. It went viral for a reason.

Jessica: Right. That led to an invitation to write this book. Initially, my response was: I don’t have time for this. I have this other book that’s overdue; my kids are five and two; it’s not the best moment. But the stories that women were sharing with me and some of my own experiences in the context of COVID led me to think this was a moment of opportunity to help people understand not only what COVID was doing to families but also how we got here. That’s really the core question that I try to answer in the book: How did we get to this point where we rely on women to do this work?

Suzanne: I love so many pieces of that origin story, especially that it’s a project born of you trying to figure out how to structure work and care for your own family. It’s also interesting to me that the origin story has a COVID element because the book did not read to me as a COVID book. It’s much more about this long-standing problem that was made more obvious by the pandemic. I imagine that was a deliberate choice?

Jessica: I didn’t want this to be just a COVID story because it’s not just a COVID story. I think crisis moments make us aware of long-standing problems, but when the crisis starts to fade they become easy to ignore again. So, for me, showing that this wasn’t just a COVID story was a big part of the project of figuring out how to structure this book.

Suzanne: One of the things that I was fascinated by in the book was the intimate look you get of how different families are making choices about balancing paid work and care work. For people who haven’t read the book, could you share some of those stories? Because they really do get into the sort of nitty-gritty, personal negotiations families have.

Jessica: Absolutely. One of the core arguments of the book is that in our neoliberal economic model, where all the incentives are to maximize our own wealth and income, care is devalued because it’s too labor-intensive to be profitable. As a result, all of us who have even a little bit of privilege have incentive to push the work of care onto somebody who is more vulnerable than we are. That trickle-down of risk and responsibility is one of the things that I try to illustrate.

For example, I tell the story of Patricia.¹ Patricia is a low-income Black mom who at the start of the pandemic had two kids in elementary school and a toddler in childcare. Like many women, she was already the default caregiver in her family. She was working as a customer service agent for a health insurance company—a job she said she found demeaning and demoralizing—because it was the best job she could find that would allow her to work remotely, which was important even before COVID.

When the pandemic hit, her husband was working in construction and couldn’t go remote. Like many couples, they didn’t even talk about who was going to be the one to take over childcare; Patricia just did it. Of course, it was exhausting. She had two kids who were trying to learn on Zoom everyday, she had a toddler running around, and she was still trying to do her customer service job from home. She talked about how much guilt she felt about the situation. Her son started struggling in school, so in the fall of 2020 she decided to cut back from five days a week of paid work to just four. She was hoping this extra day off would give her time to take better care of her children and herself (she was pregnant with twins and was just physically exhausted on top of everything else). But, when her extended family found out she had an extra day and a car, they started asking for her support: Her mom needed rides to the doctor. Her friends needed rides to the grocery store. And this is the height of COVID—she feels like she can’t just put her mom on a bus to go to the doctor. So she ends up using her extra day off to help the people in her community.

I want to share another story because I try to show in the book that even if things are particularly fraught for women like Patricia, things are also hard for couples with more privilege in our society. I tell the story of Holly and Kathleen, a same-sex couple who had planned to have an egalitarian relationship. They both had advanced degrees; they both wanted to be able to get ahead in their careers and be active participants at home with their daughter—but they kept running into childcare challenges. They didn’t find even a part-time spot for their baby until she was nine months old. So Holly, who made a little bit less money and had a slightly more flexible job, decided to be the full-time caregiver for her daughter while also trying to work for pay. Finally, the spot opens up in day care, but then COVID hits, and she’s right back where she started. When the day care center finally reopens, they reopen with part-time hours.

Suzanne: I had that experience myself.

Jessica: Holly goes in to complain to the director. And what she finds out in the process is that they can’t open more hours because they couldn’t find enough staff. The staff were largely low-income Latin[a] women; they didn’t get health insurance through work. And when the center closed during COVID they had to find other jobs; they couldn’t wait around for the center to reopen. Holly talked about the guilt that she felt realizing that to be able to get ahead in her career and have the kind of egalitarian relationship she wanted with her wife she needed childcare to be available at a price that was so low the women who provided it ended up being exploited.

Our system encourages us to push the work of care onto other people who are more vulnerable. It thrives on keeping women trapped in a state of precarity, because when women are in precarious positions, they have very little choice over which partner they choose or what kind of jobs they take. One of the easiest and fastest ways to push women into that kind of precarity, where their options are limited, is to have them become a mother when they’re not ready. Arguably, what we’re seeing now in terms of attacks on reproductive freedom and the welfare state are designed to push women into precarious motherhood.

Suzanne: Speaking of those attacks, in the wake of the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s second term in office, we have seen a lot of calls for Democrats to be more full-throatedly populist. That can mean a lot of different things, but in many of the conversations I have seen recently it often feels like a stand-in for embracing policies designed to get us back to an era where there were plentiful manufacturing jobs for men, and families—mostly white families—were able to be more easily structured along breadwinner–homemaker lines. That is a privileged and skewed vision of the past, at best, but I do think that is what a lot of these calls are hearkening back to. I wonder if you have thoughts on what a more feminist populism would look like?

Jessica: I think it’s important to start by noting that that kind of life was never one that the majority of Americans were able to live. It was a very middle- to upper-middle-class white lifestyle. Also, it was certainly not particularly great for the women in those families, who often had very few choices. At the same time, we should recognize that those manufacturing jobs could support those family arrangements because of social policies: The highest marginal tax rate in the 1950s and early ’60s was above 90 percent, and corporate tax rates were substantially higher than they are now. That allowed us to build so much of the infrastructure that we take for granted. Additionally, workers had unions that won living wages and provided pensions as opposed to 401ks. So it’s not that manufacturing jobs are necessarily the ticket to a better life in America. It’s the policy structure that makes those manufacturing jobs good jobs. We could rebuild that policy structure and apply it to any kind of job.

A feminist reimagining of our policy structure that would start by thinking of care not as a problem but as a solution. How do we structure a society where care is at the center? A society where we ensure dignity for all people? A society where everyone has access to meaningful economic activity and civic life? How do we make sure that everyone has the time and the incentive to take care of their families, their communities, and themselves? That could mean policies like four-day work weeks or 35-hour work weeks; generous paid leave benefits, not only for parents with young children; and vacation and sick time that allow people to have the energy, time, and space to engage in that kind of care.

Suzanne: Holding It Together ends by calling for “a union of care.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Jessica: The idea of a union of care is to bring people together around their shared identities as givers and recipients of care. People would come together not only, or even primarily, to push for larger social change. Instead it would start with a mutual aid model. We are in a moment where support systems are being stripped away and broken apart. To get to a place where we have a chance of fighting back against authoritarianism and crony capitalism, we need to have a way of dealing with the precarity that we’re facing in the moment. And as we are doing the daily work of taking care of the people around us, we can start to ask: “How are we going to get together to go to a protest? How can we work together to support this nonprofit that’s essential to meeting people’s needs in the community?” Maybe even, “Which one of us is gonna run for office?” The idea is starting with support and moving from there to larger political projects that are rooted in solidarity established by our shared roles in the project of care.

Suzanne: Are there examples of places where you’re seeing organizing like that happen?

Jessica: It’s so interesting. The clearest example of this that I have seen is conservative Christian moms groups. For many of the women that I interviewed in my research, those were the spaces where they found a sense of identity. Especially if they had been pushed out of the workforce and were feeling deeply isolated at home with their children, church moms groups became the place where they heard the message “your work as a mother is your most important work.” Importantly, it’s also where they found logistical and financial support. Church moms groups are highly organized to provide material things: meal trains for people with new babies, hand-me-down cribs. If you need a babysitter to have a night out with your husband, they will coordinate a babysitting swap. The groups offer identity and material support and also emotional support. The moms text each other at all hours of the day to vent. But, these groups often come with a high level of pressure to buy into conservative ideologies that valorize the gender hierarchies of deeply patriarchal families.

In the book, I tell the story of this woman, Brooke, who never wanted to be a mom herself, but, like many young women, she ended up becoming unexpectedly pregnant in college. And at first, she planned to get an abortion, but her parents, who are conservative Christians, persuaded her not to and promised that they would help her raise the baby. Ultimately, they figured out that they couldn’t afford both college and childcare, and Brooke ended up dropping out of college and moving into a shelter with her son. She ended up relying on welfare to make ends meet, which meant she also had work requirements. Initially, she took a retail job, which she hated. Then the director of her son’s childcare center offered her a job. Eventually, she became the assistant director of the center, but even then she was only making $25,000 a year, and she couldn’t afford to go back to college. Through all of this, she ended up relying heavily on Christian crisis pregnancy centers for diapers and wipes, which brought her into the church. She ended up meeting her new husband there, who then persuaded her to stay home full time and have a second child. So now she is in a very precarious position: financially dependent on her husband, no college degree, and she also feels a lot of guilt about wanting to go back to work but feeling like her place should be at home.

That underlying model—bringing people together around a shared identity of care, helping them to get their basic needs met, and then organizing them into larger community projects—that’s the origin story of Moms for Liberty, for example. I think we can imagine a different version that moves toward a more progressive version of society, but that starts with a very similar mutual aid model.

Suzanne: That’s so interesting and such a helpful example. I really hope there are people working on building a progressive version of that model. A couple last questions to wrap us up: If you’re ready to talk about it, do you have a next project you are working on?

Jessica: I don’t yet have another book project, but I have a number of article-sized projects. One set of projects has to do with evangelical Christian motherhood and the kinds of forces that are shaping decision-making within that group of mothers—the role that they’re playing in the current distrust that we’re seeing toward public institutions. I also have a whole other set of projects on health decision-making, particularly around vaccine skepticism and the appeal of MAHA,² particularly for moms who are tasked with being the family health managers.

Suzanne: I can see how those build on this research. I’m so excited to read them. Final question: Do you have any book recommendations that you want to share?

Jessica: I would strongly recommend Talia Lavin’s Wild Faith. It’s on this topic of evangelical Christianity. It’s a fascinating and troubling look into the history of the evangelical movement, mostly through the experiences of children who were raised in evangelical families and then left the faith. She does a beautiful job linking those stories to broader political and economic and social forces in ways that I think are deeply illuminating, especially for folks for whom this is a very foreign experience. It’s a very critical look, but it’s also a very human look.

If you ask Eleanor

“[W]e have to face the fact that there are married women with young children who have to go to work. In such cases, it would seem to be in the interests of the community to organize child care centers and see that they are properly run.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (September 8, 1945)

Footnotes