If you don't want to be a social safety net, at some point you have to say so
When can we hold women accountable for being the change, instead of being angry that we're not getting more? Bringing the science of transformation and recovery to Culture Study
This week, I read Culture Study’s Themes of a Year:
Most of the time, the labor to make things work — to make society work! — is un- or underpaid. Whether as teachers, as social workers, as child care givers, as home health aides, as nurses, as librarians, or as non-profit workers: women pick up the slack, because it is what is expected of us, because it is the way things are, because we don’t know another way. Some people call it Girlbossing or being a Strong Mama. Others call it an enduring feature of today’s misogyny.
Any form of resistance is construed as weakness (“the job was too much for her”) or laziness (“no one wants to work”) or selfishness (particularly directed at people who opt not to have children) — instead of what it is: the replacement for the American safety net, now largely of the invisible and undervalued work of women, breaking before our eyes.
I know that Petersen is exaggerating to make point—any form of resistance?—but it seems patronizing to suggest that the only reason women were picking up the slack is because it’s expected, the status quo, and "because we don’t know another way."
Which led me to another post, an interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco:
"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."
“My coauthors and I are especially concerned about the mothers who, because they are unemployed or make less money than their husbands/partners, have been left in a position with limited power to demand that their husbands/partners do more at home.
She talks about the emotional strain felt by women blaming themselves for everything: blaming themselves for failing during the pandemic, for not being a perfect mother/worker/wife/etc. Forces like capitalism and patriarchy, Calarco argues, "create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges."
As a sociologist, it’s easy for me to see how that blame is deeply misplaced — how women should be blaming our government for failing to stop the spread of the virus, for failing to pay people to stay home.
Calarco then gives a litany of things that women “should” be blaming: society, laws, employers, etc. It matches nicely with this model I love from “Advancing resilience: An integrative, multi-system model of resilience,” showing the many layers of resilience that can protect people from catastrophes or terrors, like the pandemic:
Safety Nets
Government, geography, education, work, social groups... the pandemic continues revealing our weaknesses, a lack of social safety nets that’s been passed down for generations, including a government that has yet to subsidize childcare. Employers are only now starting to take the idea of flexible work arrangements seriously.
Here are two examples of women picking up the slack:
Their children’s school and child care center reopened in fall 2020, but Erica and Gabe kept them home.
Adrienne could have asked Reggie to continue working from home. And yet, like many other mothers in her position, Adrienne did not seem to feel entitled to that support, seeing her frustrations with her husband as a “me issue” instead.
My entire problem with framing this as society’s fault is this: to what extent can we blame society for the emotional turmoil of women who discovered that their husbands are dismissive assholes? How is that a systemic issue?
It’s true that there aren’t a lot of resources for them:
It’s easy for people on the outside to tell Audrey that she should leave her husband, or that she should demand he treat her better and do more at home. But because of the lack of social support for mothers in the U.S., and because of Audrey’s own limited support network, leaving is a risky prospect — it would leave her without income or health insurance or a place to live, while pregnant, in the middle of a pandemic. Because of her limited power within her own home, demanding that her husband do more could also put Audrey at risk for further abuse. To support mothers like Audrey — and all mothers — we argue that policymakers should ensure that families can access financial resources that aren’t predicated on employment. More specifically: making TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] less restrictive, funding universal healthcare and childcare, and extending unemployment relief.
Always look at your part and do what you can
When you’re in recovery and need to change your life in order to save it, one thing that’s constantly drilled into you is to look at the part you have played in the situation. We play a role in every single event in our lives—everything that’s ever gone on, everything that will happen, everything you can't let go of and everything you fear. Unless we can claim responsibility and own up to the ways that we’ve created our experience, we’re bound to repeat these patterns. In order to break a cycle, we first must acknowledge that it exists, and what we did to find ourselves there again.
Constantly asking myself What’s my responsibility? What part am I playing, here? is one of the most transformative lessons from recovery and a question I ask myself whenever possible. Because there is always something I can do to make my situation better.
Transformational, lasting change only takes place from “consistent patterns of transaction between the individual and his or her environment.” A tweak in the system is insufficient for real change to take place: we must also begin to interpret the situation differently, reframing it in a more useful way. (That’s why things like a digital detox, meditation retreat, etc. are short-lived: eventually, we go back to our old ways.)
Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.
My main problem with this sociological analysis is that it completely ignores exercising the one thing that would actually improve women’s lives: agency. Taking responsibility over their own lives.
The problem is that at some point, it does become a psychological issue of agency; some people will never see enough safety nets to take the leap to independence. At some point, we have to contend with the fact that the political becomes personal. In order to make these changes, women need to have conversations that feel difficult. Expecting someone else to come in and magically create sweeping change is the kind of paternalistic transmission of helplessness that allows self-destructive (or any non-optimal) behavior to continue. Eventually, women need to jump—regardless of how many safety nets they think they have. Women need to normalize the behavior we want to see. You can’t change others—all you can do is change yourself and inspire others by being a power of example.
Certainly, people have agency. But that agency is enhanced or constrained by their social status and by the larger contexts in which they live.
I think it’s precisely this rhetoric of powerlessness and victimization that perpetuates the problem—presenting women’s thoughts and views of what they see as capable as entirely externally determined. Here, the sociologist is (rightfully) angry that government programs aren’t coming in and offering more support to families. But if childcare was available, how many grandmothers would try to stop it, reciting the claim “you only get this opportunity to care for them when they’re young just once!” And how many husbands/fathers would push back, saying that despite the fact that the mother’s job is able to pay for the childcare, the stress of dealing with chores/errands/transportation isn’t worth it?
Like anything in life, it’s a two-way street: outside forces do structure our perceived affordances (opportunities for acting) and constraints (limits on our ability to do so). But getting ideas and cues from the world around us is merely the beginning of cognition—they’re not exhaustive limiting factors. And saying “yes, but women shouldn’t have to be creative or ask for help or do these things on their own is ignoring the benefit of doing all of these things in the first place: exercising your own agency actually builds agency.
Doing things that encourage and build self-worth create an upward spiral of personal effectiveness. I’ve been observing this in recovery for the past 4+ years, first-hand. It’s the people who come in, helpless, feeling that they’re victims of circumstance and the system who never take the time to look at what they could be doing to improve their circumstances.
It’s this change in habitual thinking—powerlessness to a personal sense of power and agency—that’s needed for long-lasting change.