Holding It Together

"""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 “Powerful and urgent. Jessica Calarco documents the sweeping costs of the political decision to make women responsible for the domestic work that other affluent nations cover with the welfare state - costs that not only women, but also every American family and community pay- and issues an unignorable call for change.” —Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed ""Holding It Together embodies the sociological imagination. It is urgent, important, smart, and it changes the way you understand what you thought you knew. Jessica Calarco weaves powerful narrative with compelling empirical data to give us a metaphor for understanding our economic lives: women as social safety net. It is a fundamentally sound, well-argued thesis that sharpens a reader's analytical lens. Once you see the economy the way Calarco describes it, you cannot unsee it. You will also feel compelled to do something about it."" — Tressie McMillan Cottom, Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and columnist for The New York Times"