Why can’t we have nice things? Like a functioning welfare state or universal health insurance – you know, like in any other progressive democracy?
According to sociologist Jessica Calarco, this is largely because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and have largely accepted it as a tradition—even though it is largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and was created as part of the backlash against the New Deal. She describes this process in detail in her new book, The New Deal. Sticking Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
This situation persists largely because women are forced to compensate for the lack of real social policy. Whether that has to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles as homemakers, helpmates, and mothers, or our dependence on poor women, women of color, and immigrants (and undocumented immigrants) to fill the low-paying child and elder care jobs that make American society possible, it is women who do the devalued and relentlessly strenuous work that cannot be made profitable in the market.
This neoliberal meritocratic ideology rests invisibly on the backs of working women, and is reinforced by everything in American culture so powerfully that even those who would benefit 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 child care under the Latham Act to enable women to enter the workforce during World War II, to the mobilization of funds in response to the Covid-19 pandemic—the forces of progress have been pushed back by the status quo of inequality and precarity that maintains the neoliberal order.
We spoke with Calarco about the pernicious myth-making that has brought us to this point. She spoke with 250 families struggling through the pandemic and what she’s learned about why the problem persists. She also explained how the next Democratic administration can build on the framework of Biden’s Build Back Better — and other past welfare experiments — to create a more just and equitable society for all Americans.
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You are a sociologist. This project began as a book about child rearing in Indiana and evolved from a long study you had been planning for several years. But it evolved into something completely different. How did this project evolve into this book?
I initially thought this was going to be a study of how parents form ideas about the choices they want to make for their new baby and how life gets in the way of that. So I started with a survey of 250 pregnant women from prenatal clinics that we recruited in Indiana. And we follow these families over time to see what choices they wanted to make and how things actually turned out for them in terms of parenting. And then the pandemic hit right in the middle of this data collection for this project.
Very early on, it became clear the impact that the pandemic was having on families with young children, particularly on the mothers in those families. They were often the ones who were filling not only the gaps that were created by daycares and schools closing, but also making sure that the grandmother got her medication and that their neighbors were taken care of when they got sick and needed food delivered or grocery shopping done or things like that. And so it was the women who were filling all of these gaps that were created during the pandemic.
And that really cemented for me the idea that when things fall apart, we rely on women to pick up the pieces and put it back together. And that was a story I wanted to tell.
There was a moment when I thought it was going to be a more hopeful story, when it looked like we could actually build back better, when it looked like this could finally be a moment where we learn from what we’ve done to families, what we’ve done to women, and how we could restructure our economy to provide the social safety net that we really need. And when that not only fell apart but was accompanied by attacks on reproductive freedom and voting rights and other kinds of protections that we had before, it was even more urgent to tell the story not just about how we got here, but about what it actually takes to build back better. What will it take to provide the safety net that we need?
So you’ve looked back from the pandemic response to an earlier era of strong and fairly effective large-scale policy changes that made things easier for women, families, and everyone. You’re tracing two threads; one goes back to World War II and another a little further back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Can you talk about the example of the Latham Act, or even look back to the New Deal first and explain why that didn’t take hold?
We know not only from our own history but from other countries that these social safety nets have been built to help people manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, particularly on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from uncertainty and give them a head start on economic opportunity. And they also ensure that people have the time and energy to take care of their families, their communities, and themselves. We know that’s possible today, and there have been moments in our history when we could have taken a very different path. And one of those moments was in the wake of the Great Depression, when we had the New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt implemented all of these programs to protect people from the insecurity we saw during the Great Depression. It was threatening, especially for the super-rich and corporations. A group of business elites who were part of the National Association of Manufacturers were looking for ways to push back against this broader thinking about social safety nets. They came across a group of Austrian economists who developed a neoliberal theory. This essentially says that societies without a social safety net are better off because without that net, people are less willing to take risks. They are more likely to make good decisions and stay safe.
This idea has been largely disproven over time; this is not how people really react to risk, but it was persistent in that the National Association of Manufacturers used it as a wedge to convince Americans. One way they did this was by importing these economists and entrusting them with professorships in the US, where they trained the next generation of economists: people like Milton Friedman, the architect of our modern economy. Later they also promoted propaganda campaigns like General Electric Theatera decades-long television program led by Ronald Reagan that used such stories of people who worked their way up on their own to persuade Americans and create an American ethos that says we don’t need government. We can do anything on our own.
And if everyone does that, the market should take care of everything, right?
This is the market fundamentalism that Reagan brought to the country in the ’80s, and we’re still stuck in that ’80s nostalgia. So the 1930s laid the groundwork for all of this, and what we think of as American culture is deeply rooted in messages that were explicitly constructed to convince us that we don’t need a social safety net.
This laid the groundwork for the political response we saw after World War II. During World War II, we needed as many women in the workforce as possible because so many men were fighting in the war. We needed to keep the domestic economy going and we also needed to increase war production. And one of the only ways Congress could find to do this was to use defense money through the Lanham Law To create daycare centers where mothers of young children could take on “Rosie the Riveter” style jobs.
And the centers they built were highly effective. They provided high-quality care, often 10 or 12 hours of care a day, in addition to after-school care and summer care. And they were very inexpensive, less than $10 a day in today’s dollars. And the families who benefited from them were very satisfied with the quality of care. Many of these women wanted to stay in the workforce after the war ended.
