
Holding It Together
How Women Became America's Safety Net
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Narrated by:
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Karen Murray
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Jessica Calarco
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By:
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Jessica Calarco
About this listen
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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
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Family defined the cultural identity of Prachi and her brother, Yush, connecting them to a larger Indian American community amid white suburbia. But their belonging was predicated on a powerful myth: the idea that Asian Americans, and Indian Americans in particular, have perfected the alchemy of middle-class life, raising tight-knit, high-achieving families that are immune to hardship. Molding oneself to fit this image often comes at a steep, but hidden, cost.
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Good good
- By Wild on 08-29-23
By: Prachi Gupta
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A Thousand Times Before
- A Novel
- By: Asha Thanki
- Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she’s long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret her family has kept for centuries, one that Ayukta will be the first to share with someone outside their bloodline: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her. Ayukta invites Nadya into this lineage, carrying her through its past.
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The performance was an unpleasant listen for me.
- By Ms. Esq. on 03-10-25
By: Asha Thanki
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Invisible Rulers
- The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
- By: Renee DiResta
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Renée DiResta’s powerful, original investigation into the way power and influence have been profoundly transformed reveals how a virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists increasingly shapes public opinion. While propagandists position themselves as trustworthy Davids, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths—invisible rulers who create bespoke realities to revolutionize politics, culture, and society. Their work is driven by a simple maxim: if you make it trend, you make it true.
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the more things change...
- By Gina S. on 07-01-24
By: Renee DiResta
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Enlightenment
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
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Oddly uncompelling
- By mary on 06-16-24
By: Sarah Perry
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Catalina
- A Novel
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies.
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Monotone delivery
- By Patricia M Hart on 11-01-24
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Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
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Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
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On Our Best Behavior
- The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
- By: Elise Loehnen
- Narrated by: Elise Loehnen
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses—often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts—are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.
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Autobiography in Disguise
- By Lindsey on 06-11-23
By: Elise Loehnen
What listeners say about Holding It Together
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MelMel
- 08-08-24
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.
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- Connie
- 07-15-24
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.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-22-25
Must Read
This book should be a required read for all those wanting to get into American politics
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- krussell30
- 07-04-24
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.
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- Robin Craig
- 08-21-24
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!
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