How women became America's safety net

Sociologist Jessica Calarco on why the U.S. rejected a welfare state, how that left women holding it together, and what we can learn from missed opportunities to build a better society

Why can’t we have nice things? Like a functional welfare state or universal health care — you know, like every other advanced democracy?

According to sociologist Jessica Calarco, a big part of it is because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal. It’s a process she details in her new book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.

This neoliberal meritocratic ideology rests invisibly, on the backs of women workers and is reinforced so strongly by everything in American culture, that even those who would stand to benefit the most from a more humane system reject the prospect of real change. So much so that at every opportunity to do better — from the New Deal itself to the temporary provision of childcare under the Latham Act to allow women to enter the workforce during World War II to the mobilization of funding in response to the Covid-19 pandemic — the forces of progress have been beaten back by the status quo of inequality and precarity that maintains the neoliberal order. 

We talked to Calarco about the pernicious myth-making that got us here, what she learned about why the problem persists from speaking with 250 families struggling through the pandemic, and how the next Democratic administration can build on the framework of Biden’s Build Back Better — and other prior experiments with social welfare — to move towards a more just and equitable society for all Americans.

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You're a sociologist. This project started as a book about parenting in Indiana, growing out of a long study you’d planned for several years, but it became something very different. How did this book develop out of that project?

I initially thought of this as a study of how parents develop ideas about the kinds of decisions they plan to make for their new babies and how life gets in the way. That's where I started, with a survey of 250 pregnant women from prenatal clinics that we recruited in Indiana. And we're following those families over time to see what decisions they planned to make, how things actually turned out for them in terms of their parenting. And then the pandemic hits in the middle of this data collection for this project.

It became so obvious so early on how much of an impact the pandemic was having on families with young children and especially on the mothers within those families, who were often the ones not only filling in the gaps with things like childcare centers and schools shut down but also figuring out how to make sure that grandma got her medications and how to make sure that their neighbors were taken care of when they got sick and needed food delivered or needed groceries set up or things along those lines. And so it was women filling in all of these gaps that were left during the pandemic. 

And this, for me, crystallized this notion that when things break down, we rely on women to pick up the pieces and put it all back together again. And so that was a story that I wanted to tell.

There was a moment where I thought it was going to be a more hopeful story, where it seemed like we might actually build back better, where it seemed like this might finally be a moment where we would learn from what we did to families, what we did to women, and how we could restructure our economy to provide the social safety net that we actually need. And when that not only fell apart, but was coupled with attacks on reproductive freedom and attacks on voting rights, and other types of protections that we had in place before, it felt even more urgent to tell the story of not only how we got here, but what would it actually take to be able to build back better? What would it take to get to that safety net that we need?

So you've looked back from the pandemic response at a previous era of strong and fairly effective large-scale policy changes that made it easier for women and families and everyone. You follow two threads; one goes back to World War II, and another a little further back to F.D.R. Can you talk about the example of the Latham Act, or even start by going back to the New Deal, and why this didn’t take hold?

We know not only from our own history but from other countries that have built these social safety nets that help people to manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from precarity and to give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunity and also just make sure that people have the time and the energy to take care of their families, their communities, themselves. We know this is possible today, and there were moments in our history when we could have gone a very different way. And one of those moments is in the wake of the Great Depression, we had the New Deal. 

Franklin Roosevelt put in place all of these programs to help protect people from the precarity that we saw during the Great Depression. That was threatening, especially to ultra-wealthy people and corporations. And so a group of business elites who were part of the National Association of Manufacturers were looking for ways to push back against this broader social safety net thinking, and what they found was a group of Austrian economists who were developing neoliberal theory, which is basically the idea that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don't have that net to fall back on, they'll be less likely to take risks. They'll be more likely to make good choices and keep themselves safe instead.

This idea has been widely debunked over time; that's not really how people respond to risk, but it was sticky in the sense that the National Association of Manufacturers used it as a wedge to persuade Americans. They did so in part by importing these economists, installing them in professorships in the U.S., where they went on to train the next generation of economists: folks like Milton Friedman, who architected our modern economy. Later, they also promoted propaganda campaigns, like General Electric Theater, a decades-long television program hosted by Ronald Reagan that used these sorts of up-by-their-own-bootstraps stories to persuade Americans, to create an American ethos that we don't need government. We can do it all on our own.

And once everyone does, the market should take care of everything, right? 

This is the market fundamentalism that Reagan got the country into in the '80s, and we're stuck in that '80s nostalgia still. So the 1930s just laid the groundwork for all of this, and what we think of as American culture is deeply rooted in messaging that was explicitly manufactured to persuade us that we didn't need a social safety net. 

That then laid the groundwork for the policy response that we saw in the wake of World War II. During World War II, we needed as many women in the workforce as possible because we had so many men fighting in battle. We needed to keep the domestic economy running, and we also needed to ramp up the wartime production efforts. And so one of the only ways that Congress was able to figure out how to do this was by using defense funding through the Lanham Act to create childcare centers, which allowed mothers of young children to take Rosie the Riveter types of jobs. 

And the centers that they built were highly effective. They offered high-quality care, often 10 or 12 hours a day of care, in addition to aftercare for school-aged kids and summer care. And they're very low priced, less than $10 a day in today's dollars. And the families that benefited from this were deeply happy with the quality of care. Many of these women wanted to stay in the workforce when the war ended.