Many of the messages coming from the right today are not subtle: Empathy is toxic; competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work; corporate culture needs more masculine energy. In a recent viral essay, the conservative commentator Helen Andrews argues at length that sectors of society such as business and law are being undermined by the presence of too many women, or “the Great Feminization.”
In this atmosphere, it’s remarkable to hear an influential conservative voice calling for more, not less, feminization. In her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, the writer Leah Libresco Sargeant argues that women’s lives provide a blueprint for creating a more humane society—one that’s built not on toughness and self-determination but on dependence, need, and selflessness.
Sargeant tackles questions of gender, family, bioethics, and policy on her Substack, Other Feminisms, as well as in her prolific contributions to outlets such as First Things, The Dispatch, and Fairer Disputations, where her keen mind and humanistic approach to ethical and policy debates have won her a significant following. (The commentator Rod Dreher describes her as “one of the sharpest intellectual Catholics I know.”)
The Dignity Of Dependence – A Feminist Manifesto
By Leah Libresco Sargeant
One of her central arguments is that through the experience of pregnancy, women are given a clear script for how to ask for and provide help in a moment of physical frailty and deep care. It is men, she argues, who must relearn this skill. “We’re all called to examine our lives to ask, ‘Do I seem interruptible? If no one is asking me for help, why is that? Am I asking for help enough to form deep relationships?’” Sargeant told me this fall, in the course of an email correspondence that lasted for weeks.
Like many conservatives, Sargeant takes biological sex differences as her starting point. She goes deep into debates over whether, when, and how to accommodate these distinctions, in settings both low-stakes (should women’s basketball feature a lower rim or a closer three-point line?) and high (using the average male body as the referent for airbag design endangers women).
But her acceptance of these “asymmetries,” as she calls them, does not lead Sargeant to conclude, as some conservatives do, that men should be in charge of major institutions or that women will ruin the academy. Instead, she uses an analysis of childbearing to ground her nuanced case both for treating women differently—in particular, by accommodating their needs during and after pregnancy—and, perhaps more radical, for pushing men to shed their sense of autonomy and find their own ways to be as dependent, and dependable, as women.
Although women are uniquely exposed to need through childbearing, pregnancy is “the only relationship of dependence that every single person has been on the dependent end of,” she explained to me, including, of course, men. This universal experience is a testament to the fact that all of us will need help, care, and support at various other points in our lives. “We all began utterly dependent, and that should be some encouragement that we are made to love and be loved in that circumstance,” she added.
People eventually outgrow the helpless-baby stage. But some run further and faster from this state of dependence than others; many men, in particular, grow to believe that any reliance on others makes them burdensome or weak. Rather than cultivating our individualism, Sargeant argues, we should instead focus on honing that female-coded quality of loving and being loved.
What does that look like? As Sargeant sees it, to recognize our mutual dependence is to mix more with our friends and neighbors, to ask for help and favors and reciprocate them freely, and to create a web of relationships that affirm our fundamental interdependence. Sargeant argues that even aspiring to autonomy—by, say, outsourcing our needs to paid carers such as nannies and home health aides—instead of relying on loved ones cuts us off from the opportunities for connection that deepen our humanity. We could all theoretically subsist on take-out food, but wouldn’t it be nicer, more human, to cook for our friends and family and accept their meals in turn?
I read The Dignity of Dependence with a mix of enthusiasm and no small amount of discomfort, worried about how it will land at a time of resurgent pronatalism, a rollback of women’s reproductive rights, and the retreat of American mothers from the paid workforce. Sargeant argues that more people should volunteer to help aging parents, make dinner for other families, and take care of others’ children—and I wholeheartedly agree. But the people who do these tasks are already more likely to be women than men, and the book’s hot-pink cover, which has a line drawing of a mother and child, isn’t exactly designed to leap out at the male reader. I worry that her call for more sacrifice, more interruptibility, will be heard largely by women, who, we know from data, are already socialized to give more of themselves. Sargeant, who grew up in a secular but culturally Jewish household where social-justice issues were regular dinner-table fodder, joked that my whiplash was exactly the response she was going for. “I feel like someone should feel joy, community, and, like, light nausea while reading,” she said.
Another source of the discomfort that I felt while reading her book, which is packed with a broad range of thought-provoking case studies rendered in elegant, personal prose, is the chasm between our different visions of feminism. I have no doubt that our respective commitments to the fair treatment of women are equally sincere. Her vision of a feminist future does not necessarily include a more egalitarian division of household labor, and she carefully constructs a feminist argument against abortion. (In her view, a society that doesn’t value pregnancy asks women to “pay an entry price in blood for an illusion of equality,” she writes.) When she argues that men should be more involved in care, she is not aiming to lighten women’s load or make domestic life more fair, but to ensure that men don’t miss out on this profoundly human experience.
In the penultimate chapter, “Men Into the Breach,” Sargeant observes that men have historically offered their bodies in protection of the vulnerable. Because this resource is markedly less in demand in the United States these days, men are understandably struggling to find new ways to put their strength in the service of others. When pollsters asked 18-to-29-year-old men this spring, “What qualities best describe what it means to be a man?,” the most common answer, given by 47 percent of the 1,079 respondents, was “Providing for your family.” Only 28 percent chose “Helping people who need it.” But as Sargeant argues, drawing on an essay by the conservative writer Felix James Miller, treating a husband as only a provider reduces him to a fungible funding source, rather than an integral part of a family with his own unique contributions to make. The last thing Miller wanted, she writes, “was to feel like a customer in his own home.”
In an especially moving example of what it looks like for men to embrace need, Sargeant details her husband’s distinct role during the birth of their first daughter. “When he held back my hair as I threw up, when he took my whole weight against him for contractions, when he stayed attentive and present for medical discussions while I turned inward, he might at any moment have chosen otherwise,” she writes. “I was bound to the mast already, but he didn’t have the benefit of the biological surrender that shielded me. My body flexed and heaved without my willing—his strength came by choosing.”
Sargeant offers several practical and original ideas on how to give men, including single ones, more opportunities to care. Families with children might consider having single male friends come over before putting the kids to sleep, to give them the chance to play together, or asking such friends for assistance with physically demanding tasks that the family might otherwise outsource to paid help (just think of the Ikea furniture that could be assembled by corralling all of that free-floating masculine strength). A passage romanticizing housework reimagines it as an epic battle against chaos—a framing partly intended to make it more appealing to men. Simply scolding men that they don’t do enough around the house isn’t persuasive, she told me: “There has to be something romantic and heroic you’re calling people into.”
Stepping into the breach, though, is different from being the wall. Women still do the overwhelming majority of the world’s care work, with all of its attendant humanity-enhancing benefits, and also all of its costs. I don’t think Sargeant reckons enough with the latter. But her overarching message to put others first, as women so often do, is a much-needed antidote to the celebration of the masculine and denigration of the feminine that have become a hallmark of the right. She does not want to see women pare back what she calls their “paradigmatic way of being permeable to need,” she told me; rather, she wants men to adopt that quality and make it their own. In extolling the fundamentally human quality of dependence, she said, she hopes to point men toward their own capacity for care. “I want men to find new ways to make their lives a gift of self.”
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