As guardians, women take on the role of default parent, housekeeper, kinship caretaker, health manager, budget manager, and volunteer. It is women who take care of elderly family members and other relatives who are struggling financially, struggling emotionally, or need support with caregiving responsibilities. It is women who not only take care of sick family members, but also bear the primary responsibility for all the tasks required to keep their families safe and healthy, such as screening for and avoiding potential health threats, taking them to doctor appointments, managing medications, and making sure they eat nutritious meals and get enough exercise. It is also women who do the inventory, planning, and shopping, keeping track of how much is left in the checking account or cash drawer, and figuring out how to make ends meet when money is tight.
Women also keep this country running by taking the low-paying jobs in the economy, meaning they accept low wages to keep the cost of goods and services affordable for everyone else. As of 2023, women make up 47% of the total U.S. workforce, but they hold about 70% of the lowest-paying jobs, earning just 73 cents for every dollar men earn. If we consider only women who work full-time, the picture is a little better: these women earn 83 cents for every dollar men earn (though the gap is even larger for black and Latinx women and mothers). But focusing on women who work full-time ignores the women who have been relegated to part-time, casual, and often low-paying work because those are the only jobs available.
Women shouldn't have to do so much for so little. And with real social security, they wouldn't have to. With the right investments and policies, countries can protect people from exploitation and provide dignity throughout their lives.
Instead of building such a strong social security net, America has poked holes in what little we have and let the rest wither and rot. Policymakers have kept the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour for decades, allowed states to chip away at the value of welfare benefits, imposed work requirements and time limits on government assistance, and attacked unions that could fight for basic protections like higher wages, guaranteed paid leave, safe working conditions, decent hours, retirement benefits, and overtime pay. In the process, we’ve left 40 million Americans struggling to find a place to live, 34 million without enough food, and 30 million without health insurance. We’ve also left more than 35 million American children attending underfunded schools and 9 million without affordable child care.
Without the internet, society would collapse. That's why people in the United States are more likely to be depressed, more likely to get sick, and more likely to die young than people in other high-income countries. That's why we work longer hours and produce less. That's why our poverty rates are higher. That's why our economy isn't growing as fast. And that's why we have more political unrest.
The situation would be far worse without women filling the gaps in our economy and our fragile safety net. In the absence of a strong social safety net, America has relied on women as the invisible glue that has helped it avert catastrophe and prevented our society and economy from collapsing.
DIY Association
It's easy to assume that the situation was always this dire, but there were moments in our nation's history when things could have gone differently.
Consider Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In the decades following the Great Depression, American civic and corporate leaders felt a shared duty to protect the collective well-being. They created Social Security and Medicare. They passed minimum wage laws and established the 40-hour workweek. They provided health insurance and pensions for retired workers. But after World War II, just as the government closed the child care centers it had built with Lanham Act funds, the United States put the brakes on the expansion of the social security net and began to dismantle what was already there.
As historians Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway explain: The big mythThis change was first brought about in the 1930s by a group of ultra-wealthy American businessmen. These men, many of whom belonged to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), didn't want to fund Roosevelt's Social Security program, so they started looking for ways to convince people that our country would be just as safe, or even safer, without it.
What they found was neoliberalism, the idea that people and businesses should be free to pursue and keep the benefits they can generate without support or interference from the state. In other words, neoliberalism is a belief in the survival of the fittest, socially and economically. It asserts that people and businesses should try to succeed by any means (even cheating, since rules are antithetical to freedom), that those who fall behind deserve no sympathy, and that those who succeed should be praised, regardless of the means they use to achieve their ends.
In the 1930s and 1940s, NAM members funded the training of Austrian economists who developed neoliberalism at top American universities, where they trained the next generation of American economists, including Milton Friedman, who famously argued that the only function of business was “to make as much money as possible” for shareholders and that taxes and regulations should be reduced “whenever possible, under any circumstances, on any pretext, for any reason.”
NAM then consulted Friedman and launched a massive pro-corporate propaganda campaign. They co-opted popular radio and television shows and founded neoliberal think tanks to convince Americans that society would not collapse without a safety net, and might even be better off. Their message contained two core claims that still permeate public thinking and policymaking, despite the lack of evidence to support these claims. First, if we lowered taxes on billionaires and large corporations, the money they saved would “trickle down” to the rest of us. Second, without a social safety net, people would make better choices to keep themselves safe, and so the safety net would no longer be needed.
These claims had some truth to them. With the support of respected economists and pop culture figures, the public readily accepted them. That acceptance paved the way for the election of neoliberal politicians, many of them Republicans, but also independents and Democrats, such as Ronald Reagan, a pro-union Democrat turned anti-union Republican who ran a NAM-funded campaign to turn the country into a pro-union Republican. General Electric Theatre As part of their propaganda efforts, in a spirit of mutual support, politicians like Reagan installed neoliberal economists like Friedman in powerful policy-making positions that they still hold today.
From their positions of influence, these neoliberal economists and their cronies engineered what political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “The Great Risk Shift” in his book of the same name. They shifted responsibility for Americans' well-being from governments and employers to individuals and families by cutting taxes, regulations, and social welfare spending. The United States now spends the lowest percentage of GDP on social welfare programs in its history, and that percentage is projected to fall further in the coming years.
Through budget cuts and the rhetoric of “good choices,” a major shift in risk has led us to what I call a “DIY society” — a society in which people are expected to solve their own problems rather than relying on government or employer support — and where those who cannot solve their own problems are shamed and denied help.
The architects of the Risk Shift promised widespread prosperity in exchange for our DIY efforts, prosperity that would help workers and families cope with the additional risks they were forced to take on. But that promise was not fulfilled. The U.S. economy actually grew less in the 30 years after the Risk Shift than in the 30 years before, and what growth did occur did not have downstream spillovers. Instead, billionaires and big corporations held on to all the extra money they saved from tax cuts and deregulation as tightly as possible. As a result, taking inflation into account, low- and middle-income U.S. households have less wealth today than they did 20 years ago. Only the highest-income households are better off, and they account for an increasingly larger share of total U.S. wealth.
Maintaining the illusion
That DIY society is just an illusion — an illusion that seems real because of the magic that women perform. As I show in this book, American families accepted it because they could push the responsibilities and risks that came with it onto women, and trust that women would either find a way to shoulder that burden or find someone else (usually a weaker woman) to push it onto. In essence, America decided that we could get by without a social safety net, because women would protect us instead.
That choice is drowning women and making the whole society sicker, sadder, and more stressed. But the engineers and profiteers of our DIY society refuse to acknowledge women's struggle because to do so would shatter the illusion. Ignoring women leaves us exactly as they want us to be: keeping society afloat with no buoy to hold us up, so out of breath that no one can hear us cry.
Through the magic of women, the idea of ​​a DIY society seems plausible, and it looks as if Friedman and co. were right, despite hard evidence to the contrary. If women can create something out of nothing, it's easy to assume that the free-market advocates were right all along: we really can get by without the internet.
Of course, the reality is that women don't actually fit together, or at least not as well as they seem to. As this book shows, filling in the gaps of social security has put serious strain on women and made their families and communities less safe. It also examines how we've persuaded (and in some cases forced) women to be the glue that holds it all together. And it considers why no one cares (or believes) that women are being torn apart.
Excerpted from Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net by Jessica Calarco. Published under agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Jessica Calarco, 2024.
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