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Holding It Together

How Women Became America's Safety Net

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 15, 2024
      As America’s social safety net is being dismantled, women are the ones picking up the slack, according to this eye-opening study. Sociologist Calarco (Negotiating Opportunities) asserts that post-WWII neoliberalism has left America with a DIY society grounded in the rhetoric of “good choices” that in practice relies on the unpaid labor of women. Through hundreds of interviews, largely conducted in Indiana, Calarco shows how American society preps women for a sacrificial understanding of motherhood, strands them as stay-at-home moms while their spouses build careers, and promotes a “supermom myth” that pushes women into an intensively protective role (which varies in specifics, ranging from keeping one’s kids out of Satan’s clutches to making sure they are on an Ivy League path) that also uses women’s labor to make up for government shortcomings in areas like food safety and education. To combat women’s overwork, Colarco makes an innovative proposal for a “union of care”—a singular labor union for those providing healthcare, childcare, education, and eldercare, whether professional or at-home, that would fight for change. Throughout, Calarco’s case studies boil the blood as they evoke struggling moms’ sense that they are trapped (one mother, who “sacrificed sleep” to avoid paying for childcare, was also “hesitant” to return to work “despite being unhappy” because she knew the burdens of childcare would still fall to her). This will fuel readers’ outrage.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Karen Murray narrates this detailed exploration of how women in the United States are holding together families as systems of governmental aid become less available because of greed. During WWII the nation offered childcare to women working in factories to help the war effort, as well as other assistance to help growing families in times of crisis. This new audiobook explores how women in the U.S. ended up being saddled with childcare, elder care, and community care due to damaging ideals such as meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and other flawed ways of thinking. Murray narrates this informative audiobook with steady poise and a strong tone that keeps the listener's attention. Author Jessica Calarco narrates her own introduction, giving listeners an opportunity to hear from the writer/researcher herself. V.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

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