Holding It Together

How Women Became America's Safety Net

By: Jessica Calarco

Narrated by: Karen Murray, Jessica Calarco

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.

©2024 Jessica Calarco (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Holding It Together is both an authoritative indictment of current and past US social policy and an empathetic, unsettling portrait of American motherhood. Jessica Calarco has masterfully leveraged the insights of a wide range of data to reveal the institutional engines of our deeply unequal status quo."—Jennifer Breheny Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough

“Care is the cure for much of what ails us. But it is also often hard, tiring, uncompensated work that is pushed overwhelmingly onto women. Jess Calarco recounts moving, often wrenching, care stories of mothers, daughters, and wives across America, illustrating the deep injustice and short-sightedness of our current care system. Bring on the care union!”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Holding It Together is a punch in the gut and a call to action. It's beautifully and persuasively written, exhaustingly researched but never overwhelming. No one's writing makes me angrier about the way we've replaced our social safety net with the labor of women—but no one is more effective in convincing me there's a different way forward.”—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Out of Office and the Culture Study newsletter

Really hit close to home

A must read for everyone. I am going to suggest it to all of my friends. I also live in Indiana where the research took place. It was very relatable.

a must read for every human!

Well researched and thoroughly compelling. Telling it like it is but also laying out a vision of what it could be. I've always thought women did too much and men did too little but this book explained it in a way I had never thought about.

A must listen!

Carlarco’s book is well written and researched. A must read! I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to better understand gender inequality in the U.S.

Perfect balance of personal stories, research, and historical context helps it all come together

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the ways our policies, perceptions, and systems impact our every day opportunities (or lack thereof) and experiences.

It’s an excellent balance of personal stories, research, and historical context that helps clarify how we got here, what people are experiencing, and how we can build a better future for all of us. Calarco covers it all, including who stands to gain and who is hurt most by a society that continuously forces people (particularly women) into economic precarity.

Unlike many books, this one doesn’t stop at calling out the problems, the author also includes feasible policy solutions that could help the U.S. build the strong safety net we all deserve.

I love it and am recommending it to everyone I know!