Help Is on the Way
I heard the knock but couldn’t get up to answer the door. I had newborn twins on my lap and was attempting to nurse them both at the same time. It’s quite the feat, once you get the hang of it. Right then, I didn’t have the hang of it. The woman at the door poked her head in and smiled. “I’ll just put this in the kitchen for you—turkey pie.” She was in sweats and sneakers with a messy bun, but I knew she served as a judge downtown and had three kids of her own. I barely knew her, but we went to the same church, and here she was—feeding me as I tried, with mixed success, to feed my sons. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I felt loved, one mom to another.
After the birth of each of my children, our church community stepped in with meals for weeks on end. When the twins came, it seemed that every woman I’d ever met came out of the woodwork with chicken soup, casseroles, and Domino’s pizza. One sweet lady brought her cleaning caddy and scrubbed the house top to bottom while I nursed, even vacuuming the stairs (when had I ever vacuumed my stairs?). Others came by with lawn tools and, without a knock or a word, gave our shabby yard a much-needed sprucing up, skedaddling before I could put the babies down and step out to say thanks. My parents and other family members came from states away to wash dishes and hold babies so I could shower or nap.
My husband and I learned something in those magical days and sleepless nights of caring for twins round the clock with two preschoolers still in full snuggle-mode: people actually love helping and are glad to be asked. Our family’s need provided others the opportunity to do something useful and beautiful, to demonstrate that we belonged to them and they belonged to us. Far from making me invisible, my post-partum vulnerability drew tenderness towards our family like an immune system response within the body of Christ, a natural mobilization of resources where strength flows towards weakness. You’re in need? Help is on the way.
When the World Is the Wrong Shape
Leah Libresco Sargeant, creator of the Substack community Other Feminisms and a writer whose work covers religion, culture, and family policy, recently published The Dignity of Dependence. She argues that women’s equality isn’t rooted in interchangeability with men but in building a culture that welcomes women as women by honoring sexual difference and cultivating interdependence. The choice of a bright red cover with the subtitle A Feminist Manifesto was a bold one, as likely to raise conservative eyebrows as to engender secular curiosity. The book is a part of a series by the University of Notre Dame Press on “Catholic Ideas for a Secular World,” placing it on the shelf beside the work of D.C. Schindler and Erika Bachiochi. And while there is no explicit Catholic doctrine in Sargeant’s work, Catholic social teaching permeates every page. Like Marx in The Communist Manifesto, Sargeant takes aim at the devastating effects of capitalism—not on the proletariat, but on the bodies, minds, and relational support structures of women, particularly pregnant women and the mothers of young children.
Sargeant’s opening salvo—“The world is the wrong shape for women”—isn’t an indictment of nature or God’s good creation since the dawn of time. It’s a criticism of the modern world of industrial capitalism that requires unisex workers to function like interchangeable parts of a machine—an arrangement that pits autonomous individuals against each other in an endless, envious competition for scarce jobs and resources. It’s an economy at odds with sexed embodiment, one that prefers genderless people who come with few relational strings attached and no dependencies at all. Androgyny, autonomy, and fungibility are the order of the day: workers as widgets.
Sargeant takes the modern world as her starting point and describes its dark underbelly without detailing its genesis. The work of Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich in Gender, though not mentioned or cited in Dignity, provides the foundational backstory for this modern misshapen world. Illich describes the way capitalist economics and universal wage labor replaced the age-old, localized practices of subsistence—the “reign of vernacular gender” rooted in the ambiguous complementarity and interdependence of men and women as they provided for themselves (when “work” and “home” were roughly the same place). The older patterns weren’t perfect by any means, but they did assume that women’s embodiment, fertility, and maternity were a good thing, a given that ought to be accommodated if not privileged in daily life and work. But now, the world seems incapable of seeing the fertile female body as anything other than a problem to be solved. Economic development and individualism have produced an intractable form of sexism that Sargeant takes to task on every page:
I move through a world in which my body is an unexpected, unanticipated, somewhat unwelcome guest. It is as though women were a late, unanticipated arrival to a civilization that developed without them and their needs in mind. A woman’s physical capacities clash with the expectations and norms of the modern world. . . . Her positive and negative capacities both require her to actively reshape herself to move easily through the world. (1)
She acknowledges that this world isn’t a good fit for men either, but the downstream effects of the generic unisex human ideal are worse for women. She roots the misshapen world’s disparate impact on the sexes in the fact that “women’s bodies and relationships are shaped by dependence” all the way down (2). Our ability to conceive and bear children within our own flesh makes us porous, more open to the dependence of children, more easily obligated to the interruptions, surprises, and needs that come with being pregnable—a state of fuzzy boundaries that no man can experience firsthand. The “buffered” and autonomous self that men are more likely to assume by default (and which is treated as the normal state of a hardworking, reliable professional) is harder to attain for women, whose bodies are shaped by the cyclic potential for self-gift and permeability to another’s need.
To be female in today’s world is to have a body that is bad for business, a body whose healthy, proper functioning is felt as a betrayal. Only by pruning herself down to size by minimizing her fertility and maternity can a woman compete against the clear-boundaried impregnability of men. Many women “lean in” and succeed in this endeavor: they feel proud of their capacity to exist in male-dominated spaces without accommodation (Sargeant identifies herself as such a woman, at least in her younger, pre-motherhood years). But she argues that the iconic Girl Boss has a sexist shadow side:
Each woman who succeeded by adapting to (or, like me, being already native to) male-coded norms could be used as a cudgel against her sisters. If it worked for me, what was the problem with you? Any barrier that wasn’t an absolute bar suggested the problem was with an individual woman who couldn’t get through. (12-13)
This “feminism of freedom,” as Mary Harrington calls it, succeeds by throwing the “feminism of care” (a.k.a. mothers) under the bus. Sargeant’s book is a sustained attempt to show that a culture which prizes autonomy above all is not only inhumane and unjust but is ultimately self-defeating: it lacks a future because it leads to endemic childlessness. Our culture is built on a false anthropology, a forced forgetting of the fact that we all begin our lives in utter dependence, and we will all end our lives that same way. We will also enter seasons of dependence with every pregnancy, every post-partum period, and every serious illness, and those with permanent disabilities will live sustained by relational dependencies for their entire lives. Sargeant sees this dependence and the love which flows towards it as a fundamental feature of being human rather than an embarrassing aberration or a temporary interruption of unencumbered “real life.” Autonomy is the aberration—perhaps even a fiction—in Sargeant’s telling. If healthy, childless, financially flourishing adults squint hard enough, blocking out of the frame the beginning of life, its countless contingencies, and its inevitable ending, they can convince themselves of their own self-sufficiency. For a time.
From “No Trouble” to “Good Trouble”
Sargeant wants women to fight for a world that welcomes us as women with all of our strings attached, as “dependent creatures, who cannot be considered apart from those who depend on us” (41). Fighting for the benefit of women has always been the stated goal of feminism, but Sargeant’s version explicitly rejects the temptation to fight for women’s wellbeing by insisting on interchangeability with men and by adopting ever-more technologically sophisticated tools to “attenuate the demands of care” and to erase the embodied realities of womanhood (60). She explores a multitude of techniques we use to prune our sprawling interconnectedness into a publicly and professionally permissible shape: hormonal contraception, period suppression, sterilization, medically unnecessary abortion, surrogacy, giving up children to adoption or safe haven “baby boxes,” paid childcare, breast pumps, milk bank services, baby formula, and the sci-fi dream of artificial wombs.
While second-wave feminism cares about securing more women a corner office, Sargeant’s vision questions why working mothers with newborns must hide in shower stalls, bathrooms, or closets for furtive pumping sessions, only to find their milk supply inevitably (and prematurely) dwindle. “Her milk supply is her problem to solve,” she writes, “and the plethora of options just increases the burden on her to find the right approach. A wider community of support isn’t on the table” (47). We have made physical womanhood a personal problem amenable to techniques and consumer purchases rather than seeing it as a communal call to virtue, wisdom, and love. “Vulnerability cannot be solved,” Sargeant insists,” it can only be shared” (102).
The level of need and dependence apparent in a newborn is inevitably taken up by its mother, and both together are “entitled to the protections and support of the network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that must exist for any human being to survive and flourish” (O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human, 181). The misshapen world would rather we attenuate our needs to the point of imperceptibility. But women require the sharing of vulnerability, the network of uncalculated giving, the recognition of concentric circles of care in which need is “spread out over layers of helpers until it becomes manageable” (134). Instead of forcing women and growing families to make themselves “no trouble” to their neighbors and employers, we can reframe need as a form of totally normal and to-be-expected “good trouble,” an invitation for all of us to lend a hand.
Whether you’re lending a hand or reaching out for one ebbs and flows with life stages. My babies aren’t babies anymore. As teenagers, the way in which they need me has changed, and I have more capacity now to notice and attend to the needs of others outside of my home. Last week I delivered pork barbecue to two families whom I barely know, one from school and one from church. That widely-cast net of Meal Train emails is an invitation to practice the uncalculated giving which made my post-partum life manageable all those years ago and helped me know I wasn’t alone. It’s the most straightforward of propositions: as mothers feed their babies for the first time, we feed them. This is what Sargeant calls a “social or gift economy” that stands in contrast to the market economy of calculation and tit-for-tat exchange (140). I no longer receive meals from others, I give them—but not to the same people, as if I were paying them back. A gift economy pays it forward, exchanging favors the way we exchange birthday gifts, not the way we pay a “fee for service”:
Instead of holding on to our own selves and our own possessions carefully, we can give freely, expecting that what passes through our hands may return to us, in its proper time, after a rich and strange sea change. Our burdens and our needs are our invitation into the dance. We cannot slough them off without becoming small—an isolated node where we could have been tangled up in others. (143)
This was my take-away from The Dignity of Dependence: the realization that I would rather be tangled up in others than be an isolated node. I’d rather be porous to others’ needs than buffered against them. I’d rather be sprawling than small.
The Pain of Being Superfluous
This loving entanglement that defies our culture’s idol of autonomy and individuality is available to men just as much as it is to women, though differently. My favorite chapter in Sargeant’s book was “Men into the Breach.” It took me out of my focus on the female body and opened my heart to the difficulties men face, which is something I’ve spent a lot less time thinking about. While women’s embodiment makes responding to dependence an unavoidable necessity, men’s embodiment makes it a little easier to remain disconnected and untouched. That might seem like a blessing from an economic standpoint, but it carries moral costs:
For many men the lie of autonomy is a little roomier, if still restrictive. The unjust demand that men face from a society that distrusts dependence is different from the ones that women endure. Because men can more easily separate themselves from relationships with the weak, they often find that the world expects them to make this choice and they are further expected to not have any feelings of regret.
Women risk themselves without sufficient support, but men lose a lot when they are told they are not needed, that their spare strength is superfluous at best, a threat at worst. (150)
Women may lack the practical “luxury” of opting out of caring for others’ needs, but men lack the moral “luxury” of being physically opted in to self-gift and suffering for others’ sake (through pregnancy and labor). It has always been the case that men can walk away from need in a way that women simply can’t. Childbirth is the most risky, dangerous thing that the average woman regularly does, and there is no obvious parallel in the life of the average man. As Sargeant writes, “Women are in danger because of who they are, while the masculine virtue is to choose to step into danger in order to offer their strength to others” (149).
The opportunity for connection, kenosis, and the sharing of surplus strength is most obviously seen in men who marry and become fathers—and by all accounts, American dads are crushing it. Millennial fathers do four times the amount of childcare than Boomer fathers did, making them simultaneously more tired and more satisfied with life than their grandparents were. When I think of my own father, my husband, my older brother, and my male friends and acquaintances, I see a pattern of men who gladly give of themselves to those who depend on them, far beyond the bare minimum of bringing home the bacon. I see men who have structured their lives around usefulness, service, sacrifice, and belonging.
But as Sargeant notes, outside of being a husband and a father, it can be really hard for men to know how to give and who to give to. The drive to provide and protect is strong in many men, but without the concrete needs of one’s own family to direct it, that “diffuse desire to love people,” one single man writes, “comes out in dribs and drabs with my friends and their families. . . . I would actually quite like to be a gift of self to another person/people, and not being able to do that . . . hurts sometimes” (154). While we tend to place attention on the pain and costliness of giving to the needs of others, Sargeant opened my eyes to the pain of not being able to give or not knowing how to give within the constraints of one’s life and culture. If one of women’s deepest fears is being vulnerable with no one to help, perhaps one of men’s deepest fears is being superfluous—all that strength and love with nowhere (obvious) to go.
Permeable, Porous, and Placental
The Dignity of Dependence reminded me how all of us, women and men alike, are shaped not only by our own needs for help at different points in life, but by our need to love others in acts of uncalculating and generous self-gift. We are made for one another, made to live and work in a way that takes the vulnerabilities of our bodies for granted. “The task ahead of us is finding ways to extend and restore that network of giving and receiving,” Sargeant writes (181). That network which operates outside of (and in some sense against) the transactional and efficiency-driven marketplace is the seed of a world that is the proper shape for both women and men in all their differences. A world in which our bodies are expected, anticipated, and welcome guests—a world developed with us and our needs in mind. It’s a world in which we can easily move while maintaining our natural shape of loving permeability, parental porousness, and entangled neighborliness.
In our modern fiction, each of us ends at our own skin and addresses needs through commercial purchases rather than personal connection. But Sargeant sees the ties that bind as deeply embedded—metaphorically and literally placental—a channel of gift-giving we can’t sever without denying what makes us human. She recasts dependence, which our culture sees as a liability, into the invitation to personal love. The world will only be the “right shape” for people when the body it is shaped for is not the generic individual who produces and consumes for itself, but the communal body of men, women, and children who give and receive without counting the cost.
Image Credit: Mary Cassatt, “Mother Playing with Child” (1897)
