Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto depicts a human ideal for the post-industrial workforce. Such a human can work any number of hours, has no personal entanglements, and suffers from no bodily needs:
Through a combination of pressure and compensation, the company has succeeded in denying basic biological reality and making that contradiction the employees’ problem. A culture where employees are rewarded for forgoing sleep as a proof of commitment and women are praised for empowering themselves by suppressing their grief over being kept apart from their babies is not a reality-based economy.
Sergeant contrasts this with actual human beings, who are embodied, unique, and networked together through relations of care. The Dignity of Dependence makes a nuanced argument not only about a better model of feminism but also about the importance of a proper anthropology to ground our politics and economics.
Dignity begins with biological distinctions belonging to women, contrasting those differences against the “shape” of the modern world—which does not welcome women. Instead, it offers women the technological possibility of acting like men and ignoring their own biological distinctives. “When a woman’s capacity appears to fall short of the modal man’s, by her being smaller, less strong, more prone to certain ailments, her weakness is not reliably accommodated. When a woman’s capacity exceeds that of a man through her ability to bear life within her, her fertility is treated as disruptive—a problem to be contained.”
Sergeant goes on to detail several examples of devices designed for the modal man that can lead to destruction when applied to women. The airbag is one such device: “During the 1990s, women petitioned to have a switch that would let a woman disable or re-arm the airbag, depending on whether she or her husband was in the driver’s seat. Car manufacturers opposed the proposed legislation.”
Modernity simply ignores the uniqueness of female biology, thus harming women because their bodies are designed for care: “Babies cannot survive a culture that despises dependence. … Women may be able to stagger on, maimed, but we cannot live a full, flourishing life when our basic biology is treated as a design flaw.” Valuing the biological differences differentiating men and women requires “putting dependence at the heart of our account of what it means to be human.” The human is not a fully self-sufficient being but rather a contingent being located within networks of care.
In considering abortion, Sargeant argues that “the fundamental question is whether our view of persons is large enough. Can we encompass both mother and baby as persons when they are joined in their pregnancy dyad of dependency?” Modernity’s false anthropology of radical individualism justifies an economy that thrives on women subordinating their biological nature to the demands of the workplace. Sargeant contends that “building a just society requires a moral revolution. When we have used a false anthropology as the foundation of our culture, dismantling that lie is costly. There are good things that have been built on that pile of tiny bodies.” Sargeant’s argument recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” suggesting that if modern economic progress depends upon a culture of abortion, a more just future requires building a society that values both mother and the unborn child.
As for “assistive technology,” Sergeant sees such devices as promising leisure but really enabling women to return to work faster. “Frequently, the aim (explicitly or no) is to make the relationship of dependence just manageable enough that it can be written off as doable alone, unworthy of larger structural support.” Breast pumps allow employers to insist that new mothers return to work at the conclusion of maternity leave. Such products “aren’t freeing women up for leisure, time with their baby, or simple recovery from labor. They exist primarily to make it possible for mothers to fit into the working world in a way that is maximally convenient for their employers.” Sergeant concludes that assistive tools are “intended to help women be men, as men are imagined to be: independent, interchangeable, immediately accessible.”
While some work lends itself to a basic economic analysis of profit, loss, and salary, Sergeant argues that there is another domain of work that in most cases falls to women: relations of care. “Women, more than men, are physically marked by relationships of care. … A world that is unwilling to acknowledge dependence as foundational to human life is unable to treat women as equal in dignity to men.” And relationships of care fall into a different kind of economy: “The language of exchange between individual, isolated equals distorts the real mutual dependency and complementarity of both marriage and many kinds of care work.” In contrast to a profit-and-loss ledger, “the radial network of need doesn’t match the balanced reciprocality of market logic. A baby cannot pay back the time and attention he needs from his mother; a mother does not need to earn or recompense the care she receives from others.”
Women, Sergeant insists, are uniquely prone to find themselves stepping into relationships of care, but the economics of care work do not reward those who perform it. Rather than a society marked by openness to human need, the status quoopposes family caring for elderly members; the medical establishment and the federal bureaucracy structures for professionalism rather than for familial care.
In big and small ways, openness to need shows how many implicit noes are embedded in our culture, how much we are expected to hire help rather than depend on the kindness of a friend. Openness to need makes us the wrong shape—with irregular, trailing ties, instead of streamlined, sleek, and unanchored.
Shifting this status quo requires changing how care work itself is perceived. “Valuing care work requires practice seeing at different scales. Care and maintenance work happens at a relational scale, often in the privacy of the home. It is sustained presence and faithfulness in small things.” Care does not happen best at the scale of a federal agency but in the nearness of home and family.
Sargeant’s solution to this devaluation of women’s uniqueness requires changes along two vectors. On the one hand, governmental agencies could pivot to be family-and-home-care friendly. On the other, individuals could open themselves to need and engage the “gift economy” rather than the “exchange economy.” This second recommendation asks readers to consider the untapped resources of the local community and to open themselves to meeting the needs of others. Each actor in a gift economy will, at one point, require the help of another. Acting with attunement to need is not done expecting reciprocity but in recognition of common human frailty. Such attunement, Sergeant argues, is a mark of maturity.
If adolescence is characterized by fear about giving ourselves away to someone or something unworthy, growing to maturity may be characterized by confidence that it is safer and more human to be swept into the flow of “uncalculated giving and grace receiving” than to hold ourselves back waiting for the right moment. The livelier and more active a gift economy, the more prudent profligacy becomes. 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.
Sergeant opposes radical individualism to a vision of individuals networked together. The individual in his self-sufficiency shrinks in significance; it is by recognizing weakness and joining other weak humans that each part joins the whole. Marriage and family formation remains the foundation of such networks. In families, both men and women find purpose beyond themselves. “For men, just as for women, the world begins with the unasked-for and unearned gift of another’s body and love. That initial gift cannot be repaid, but it can be joyously reprised.” The modern world is misshaped for human flourishing, but the seeds of a more human civilization are there to be cultivated.
Rather than teaching how to fit within a world that worships Richard M. Weaver’s “gods of mass and speed,” Sargeant describes an essential component of human nature. When we recognize that “men and women are deeply dependent creatures” who enter and exit life helpless, humility will ground how we live. Dependence becomes a source of strength and joy, allowing us to value gift over exchange and community over isolation.
