When ‘Care’ Is a Dirty Word

When equal rights aren’t equal, we’ve been thinking about caregiving all wrong.

If some headlines are to be believed, then women leaning out of the workforce was the most dire consequence of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

“How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward,” reads the title of one report. “How To Stop The Mass Exodus Of Women Leaving The Workforce Due To Covid-19,” reads another. Some workforce watchers even coined the term “she-cession” to describe the phenomenon.

The subtext of these headlines is that most of these women are mothers. When their children’s schools and daycares closed to prevent the spread of the virus, many mothers found themselves having to do two jobs at the same time: care for their children and somehow find the time to do their paid work, either remotely or in-person. After feeling pulled in two different directions for months, thousands of moms left their 9-to-5s.

On the whole, fathers weren’t affected in the same way. Data crunchers at groups like the Center for American Progress and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research wrung their hands about the disparity. The latter even warned in a March 2025 report about “occupational segregation” among parents of young children: “The gender divide in occupations is worse between parents of children ages 12 and younger than between other workers… In 2024, the occupational segregation index for mothers and fathers of children 12 and under was 0.52, indicating that 52 percent of mothers or fathers would need to change jobs to achieve gender parity.”

But if the idea of a young mother or father needing to “change jobs” for the sole purpose of achieving gender parity sounds laughable to you, then you may find yourself sympathetic to the arguments laid out in Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Sargeant (who is a Commonplace contributor) shares stories from her own life, meditations on need, and individuals’ experiences to support a single thesis: equal treatment of women doesn’t mean treating them like “the median man.” As Sargeant illustrates, this thesis matters for a wider variety of groups than just women of child-bearing age.

Sargeant is the author of two previous books, Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option, both of which are overtly Christian. The Dignity of Dependence, which touches on topics ranging from abortion to marriage, takes a different tack. Despite being part of Notre Dame Press’s “Catholic Ideas for a Secular World” series, the book does not appeal to scripture, church tradition, or even natural law (not explicitly anyway). Instead, it appeals to truth. Sargeant assumes that the reader, like herself, believes the world is an inhospitable place for women, and that this inhospitableness is wrong and must be corrected, not just for women’s sake but for everyone’s.

This inhospitableness is uncomfortable for women at best and deadly for them at worst. Sargeant shares the example of kitchen counters that are too high for the women who use them, of tools for female surgeons that are too unwieldy for their small hands, and of car safety features that save average-sized men but hurt anyone smaller. Her feminist manifesto feels a little too focused on first-world problems—after all, women around the globe suffer sexual and physical violence every day, with no access to a justice system that gives them recourse—but when zooming out, Sargeant is able to hammer home her point that our world is built for a very small class of 18-to-45-year-old able-bodied men. Eventually, even these men are no longer served by it. “With women and the elderly all cut out of the category of normal, the number of ‘standard’ humans gets pretty small,” Sargeant quips.

Defining Dignity

What kind of work bestows dignity? Is it dependent on how much you make, or who your boss is?

Sargeant ultimately argues that everyone has dignity. “Of everything that economics measures, women get less,” Ivan Illich writes in Gender, a quote that’s been invoked by feminism-critical thinkers from Mary Harrington to Anna Khachiyan. Sargeant has her own corollary for caregivers: “Working solely within the language of economics to assert value can narrow our moral vision,” she writes. Without question, the “language of economics” is ascendant in today’s America.

“Line go up” is more than a meme; it appears to be the unquestioned point of politics and the polity. And yet, we’ve focused on “line go up” so much that it’s forcing other lines to go down. Americans aren’t getting married and having children at the same rates they used to, a fact that causes a whole host of other problems, economic and otherwise. As Sargeant details in the book, robot caretakers for the elderly are not going to cut it. She imagines a different world, one in which the unseen labor of care for loved ones is valued, perhaps monetarily, but more importantly, with dignity. Such a world would be better for everyone, strong or weak, rich or poor.

Our culture exalts autonomy and denigrates dependence. We forget that need is not an “edge case,” as Sargeant puts it—it’s baked into the human experience. Women’s ability to bring life into the world can also feel like a disability at times, she writes. How can a society show that its values extend beyond the purely economic? Some of these values can be signaled financially, but such an effort will take a whole-of-culture approach.

Society has many unspoken expectations—that working moms pump instead of breastfeed their babies, that unpaid caregivers forgo wages and Social Security, that mothers should prefer full-time employment to alternatives. Sargeant demonstrates how short-sighted many of these expectations are. Surely many mothers will resonate with her frustration that “there is care that I want to provide, which is disvalued and distrusted because it is technically possible to delegate.”

Like Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Sargeant points out that mothers who take a step back from the workforce are still contributing mightily to the wealth of the nation: “My husband and I are contributing to the sustainability of the Social Security system on two fronts. We pay in to cover current benefits from our wages, and we have supplied (to date) three children whose wages will help to cover our benefits when we retire.”

If Nike’s slogan is “Just do it,” maybe parenthood’s slogan should be, “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

Save for a few Malthusians congregating on Reddit, we all agree that carrying on the human race is good. The big question is: How? Sargeant seems to place more stock in the government’s role than Pakaluk does (Hannah’s Children’s main takeaway is that only religion, not baby bonuses or tax credits, can create a baby boom). Sargeant is right to zero in on how government programs reward caregivers, but since her book focuses on philosophy just as much as policy, she doesn’t provide any specific prescriptions. She does, however, praise France for dedicating more than 10% of its pension spending to caregiver credit programs. “The size of the expenditure acknowledges the significant social value that benefits everyone and the cost of which parents no longer have to shoulder alone,” she writes. Many European countries have similar programs—and even lower birth rates than France (whose total fertility rate is 1.62 children per woman). It’s up to the reader to decide whether the caregiver credit program is a commendable societal statement or a failed effort to reach replacement rate.

Defining Dependence

In every chapter of The Dignity of Dependence, Sargeant discusses the nature of need—the need a newborn baby has for his mother, the need a postpartum woman has for rest, the need an elderly person has for companionship. But what about when two individuals’ needs conflict? Practically speaking, the opposite of dependence isn’t independence; it’s competition.

Sargeant’s goal doesn’t seem to be utopia, and she glances at the problem of conflicting needs, questioning what disability activists’ demand for a “right to care” really means—can one person really be compelled to care for another? “From whom can they demand that right?” she asks.

Perhaps the book’s weakest argument is Sargeant’s claim that “hostile architecture” (such as benches designed to keep homeless people from sleeping on them) is hostile to families, too. How can a nursing mother pause to nurse her baby if a public space, such as a train station, has no seating “by design?” Many residents of urban areas would say they oppose hostile architecture, although these residents are increasingly likely to be childless as families flee to the suburbs where they don’t have to answer their children’s questions about why someone is sleeping on the sidewalk.

Yet Sargeant’s goal isn’t to write a white paper with 50 policy proposals to boost the birth rate. Her goal is to change the way you and I see our relationships and interactions—to realize society is built on a “false anthropology.” But “false” is a loaded word in contemporary circles. If truth is relative, then we can all “define [our] own concept of existence,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. If truth is relative, then women like Corinne Low, the “economist who crunched the numbers and stopped dating men,” are doing the right thing by avoiding the heartache and headache of heterosexual marriage. And if the truth is relative, then it’s fine if parenting becomes “just a bourgeois hobby.” But if truth is not relative, as Sargeant argues it isn’t, then men and women truly need each other for not only survival but sanctification. And they need a society that sees them for what they are: fully human.