Jessica Calarco on ‘how women became America’s safety net’

CHICAGO — Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs like sick time, vacation time and health care. For decades, American women have filled the gaps, to the detriment of themselves and their families, according to sociologist Jessica Calarco.

Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies inequalities in family life and education. She is also the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” published last month.

More than two-thirds of Americans’ unpaid caregiving work — valued at $1 trillion annually — is done by women, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families based on 2023 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In an interview, Calarco discusses her book and explains why women in the U.S. bear the brunt of prohibitively expensive daycare, limited government assistance and inaccessible paid maternal leave in the wake of the pandemic.

Can you discuss what your book is about?

The gist of the book is that other countries have invested in social safety nets as a way to help people manage risk.

In the U.S., we’ve instead tried to DIY society. We left it up to individual people to manage risk on their own, as opposed to allowing them to rely on a social safety net. And in practice, that means keeping taxes low, especially on wealthy people and corporations, cutting regulations and really underinvesting in the kinds of time and resources that people would need to be able to participate more actively in care. But the problem is that we can’t actually DIY society. That’s too much risk for individuals and families to manage on their own. What I show in the book is that families and communities have been able to weather this shift in American policy primarily by relying on women to be the ones to hold it together.

In what ways are women holding it together?

Being the default caregivers for kids and for the elderly, and for people who are sick, or destitute in our society. And then on the other side of the equation, also filling in gaps in our economy. Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs in our economy. And they’re also the ones who disproportionately hold underpaid jobs at every sort of level of education that they might have. Things like child care, things like home health care, things like even K-12 teaching. We structure our economy and we structure our society in ways that push women into doing that work and then underpay them for that labor in ways that trap them in that system of exploitation, in similar ways to what we do at home. And this is deeply damaging for women and for families in terms of the cost that it has for their well-being, for their stress levels, for their economic parity.

How have women historically filled the gaps?

During World War II, while we had millions of men fighting in battle, we realized all of a sudden in the country that we needed women in the workforce in a way that we never had before. And so at the time, Congress actually, with some pushes from a couple of women who had high profile positions in government, set up a universal child care program, set up national child care centers across the U.S., used defense spending through the Lanham Act to do so.

We saw this massive increase in women’s employment during the war. At the end of the war, those women almost universally wanted to keep their jobs — they wanted to stay in the workforce.