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, Ph.D. lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo.

Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net draws on five years of research in which Calarco, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, surveyed over 4,000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. 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.

Calarco’s research focuses on education, families, and health decision-making. She is interested in the structures of power and privilege that maintain socioeconomic, racial, and gender inequalities in these settings, as well as the role that qualitative methods can play in uncovering these mechanisms.

Calarco will be in conversation with Heidi Stevens, Director of External Affairs for the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, and creative director for Parent Nation, an initiative of the TMW Center. Prior to joining TMW, Stevens worked at the Chicago Tribune for 23 years, where she wrote a daily column called “Balancing Act.” She maintains a weekly nationally syndicated column. Stevens also serves as a FAN board member.

This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.

BONUS AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Holding It Together from FAN’s partner bookseller The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Calarco and Stevens that will start immediately after the webinar. Details on the webinar registration page

“Holding It Together is both an authoritative indictment of current and past US social policy and an empathetic, unsettling portrait of American motherhood.” – Jennifer Breheny Wallace, FAN ‘23