The Dignity of Dependence: An Interview With Leah Libresco Sargeant
Jessica Keating: Your new book, Dignity of Dependence, is, I take it, a book about the incongruity between the shape of the world and the shape of dependency, the world’s inhospitality to various forms of vulnerability and need, which is experienced in an acute way by women, but is certainly not exclusive to women. How did this book come about? What motivated you to write it, and what were the central themes that you hoped to surface in writing it?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think I always find out that I am writing a book once I am partway into writing the book. Before I have done the proposal, and before I have gotten anyone to agree to publish it. I have written a couple articles on the theme, I have started accumulating a big pile of clippings, virtual or digital, and there seems to be an idea that is bigger than just.
This book really grew out of my Substack Other Feminisms, which makes room to talk about what it meant to advocate for women as women without treating us like defective men. Where do we act, explicitly or implicitly, like we are disappointed in women for being women? How does that show up particularly with regard to pregnancy and fertility?
JK: In one sense, the book telescopes through the particular vulnerability and dependency that women experience during pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for an infant, but it extends beyond that. You draw on a range of associated examples of relationships of dependency. The book unveils the lie that dependency gives to the pervasive illusion of individualism, autonomy, and efficiency. The economic, political, and social unwillingness to acknowledge dependency as not only constitutive to human existence but also to human flourishing creates a context in which women are free to participate, but on the condition that they “fit” a “male” paradigm, which, as you point out in the book, is a dehumanizing paradigm. The paradigm of the individual, autonomous self, is one that men can fit into more easily, but certainly not for the whole of their lives.
LLS: A really big part of this is the false idea of the human person, an idea of autonomous individuals who do not need much from anyone. This is clearly not true of men, who, like everyone else, begin their lives as babies, and, like everyone else, usually die in the care of someone else, and can have periods of disability and illness.
It is an ideal that is both impossible to live up to and destructive to human beings, but men can spend more time pretending to fit it without it hurting as badly, moment to moment. And women just cannot do this to the same degree at all. It is untrue of men and of women. I think the temptation is to kind of take those brief periods when your parents are in good health, you have not had kids yet, you are doing well at your job, you are unmarried, and no one else can make demands on you, as the normative pattern of human life. You think, “I’m almost fully autonomous,” and then you take that as the pattern of human life and write off all these other normal moments as kind of a failure. But in fact, you know, we are made for dependency. We all depend on God, even in our biggest moments of strength. And we are better off when we tell the truth about what it means to be human.
JK: I detect a sort of MacIntyrean arc throughout the book. You quote him in the final chapter; what was his influence on you as you crafted the argument and on your thinking throughout the book?
LLS: Well, he has always meant a lot to me because he played a role in my conversion through his writing. His After Virtue is what convinced me to become a virtue ethicist instead of a deontologist in college. I brandished it at my Catholic boyfriend at the time, saying, “Here is what I think as an atheist.” This is my moral philosophy now, and he said, “You know MacIntyre converted, right?” I was very mad. I thought, “Well, now I will have to pick up the torch that MacIntyre left guttering in the dirt. I will have to be the atheist, virtue ethicist he failed to be. You know, and as it turns out, he had just gotten there ahead of me. Not only am I grateful for his ideas, I am very sentimental about the role he has played for me in my life, and I am glad that here I do get to pick up a baton that I think is most present in his Dependent Rational Animals, and get to carry it a little further down the field.
JK: What ideas of MacIntyre do you think you really benefited from in Dependent Rational Animals with respect to your current book?
LLS: I really like him putting “dependent” as the first thing because in some ways we know our dependency before we know anything else about ourselves. It is how we all begin our lives in the womb and afterwards. It is this inescapable fact, it is something we hold onto even when our rationality has slipped away from us. I think there is a tendency to put what we admire about being human beings first, what we think makes us closest to being God and not dependency, where we see the greatest marks of God’s love for us first.
JK: I was struck by a sort of recurrent phrase in the book: hostile design. The theme runs throughout the book. It is in the first chapter when you are talking about, you know, seat belts, the height of countertops, and various things that are designed for the average male, but of course leave out everybody else, especially women. You pursue the idea in terms of technology, economy, and law. Can you elaborate on hostile design and its relationship to how we think about vulnerability and dependency?
LLS: I think most traditionally hostile design is about how we use the architecture of our built environment, especially in public places, to discourage people from being there. That is everything from benches with spikes on them to keep the homeless from being in a public park, to convenience stores that play very high-pitched noises to try to drive away teenagers who can hear that sound when older people cannot.
The assumption is that there are some people who we do not want to be part of our community or to be in these spaces, and our response is to push them away physically by not making space for their needs or their comfort. I think this is actually much broader, and we notice it less when it is kind of directed at all of us at the same time as an act of hostile design. There are some parts that are more directed at women. The absence of paid parental leave in America hits fathers and mothers, but it is mothers who are still bleeding, who really cannot come safely back to work right after a baby is born, and who have something only they can do for the baby through breastfeeding, which requires a lot of time and attention.
The way we design jobs can be an example of hostile design to mothers, and therefore to all women who know that they are endangering their work if they become mothers. We wind up building something that does not leave us room to care for each other or treats need as an aberrational, aggressive act. Or that frames care for someone else as luxury consumption—a hobby— rather than a natural part of our life together.
JK: I want to pick up on this idea of how hostile design makes it more difficult to attend to need. In one of the chapters, “Illegal to Care,” you talk a lot about the ways in which labor law and policy discourages care for those who are dependent. What questions would you like employers to be thinking in terms of acknowledging the reality of dependency?
LLS: I think a big thing for an employer is: how resilient is my workplace to the sudden needs that exist in a human life? I think a lot of that is about having slack, using slightly less than maximum capacity, so that when someone loses a parent, when someone has a baby, you have people who are cross-trained who can swing in. You can pause one project, pick up another. You are not always using your people to their maximum capacity, such that when their capacity sags, everything breaks. I think it is easy for people to fall away from that, not just for reasons of profit-seeking or greediness. It is slower, it feels wasteful most of the time, until it is life-saving. It makes a big difference in how you see yourself as stewarding your employees, not spending them.
I think larger businesses often have more flexibility to treat their workers like human beings. They may or may not make that choice, but it is not because being a large business is what makes it so hard. It might be the scale that makes it hard to keep sight of the people. When you have a very large business, like Amazon, there is a much greater chance there is already someone who knows how to do this worker’s job when she goes out on maternity leave.
When you have a very small business, it is much harder. If you have a business of four people, when one person goes out on maternity leave, that is an earthquake. When one person goes out on maternity leave on a team of thirty, that is, you know, a Tuesday. We should think of big businesses as very much having the capacity to meet these needs, but perhaps lacking the will to prioritize them. It is small businesses that need greater support to manage things like how to handle paying out someone’s wages while they are out on leave, and hiring a temp, when it is now going from a four-person business to essentially a five-person business with a temp salary added. That is somewhere where I think there is more opportunity to think about how we are subsidizing this leave. A number of states have tried to do this as kind of an insurance model or a payroll tax model, where everyone is constantly paying in a little bit, the same way you do for workers’ comp, and when you need to go on leave, you receive the support to do so.
JK: I want to pull on this policy thread a bit more. What is the low-hanging fruit that you think we can do right now to prioritize vulnerability and dependency for mothers and babies? You are currently doing some work on childcare policy. What things are you considering in this area of support?
LLS: Childcare is where I am hoping to find more low-hanging fruit, but I am not sure it is there. One of the big questions is: how do you increase the supply of childcare?
That is not just about center-based care, but about improving people’s ability to offer and buy. Care from friends, family, and neighbors, which is often preferred and more likely to be available part-time. The question is really, at the state-by-state level, looking at which regulations are really essential for health and safety, and which ones are keeping people from entering this market to no good end. So that is the most basic question there.
The U.S. is trying to solve a problem that most of our peer nations are not trying to solve, which is that it is just much more normal in the U.S. to go back to work soon after a baby is born than it is in peer countries. How do other countries address infant care? Infants are always the most expensive to take care of, because you have to have the lowest staffing ratios. The answer is, other countries are not trying this very much. It is much more normal for the mom to be home for the first six months to a year of a child’s life. Then countries do not have to build a childcare system that can easily and affordably offer infant care to people with low salaries.
This tracks what a lot of moms want. Some moms do want to go right back to work, but that is not the modal response from moms, and we keep trying to build systems that are not really serving what moms say their own preferences are, and it is not an approach based in biological reality. Babies do need their moms in a very particular way. There may be certain circumstances where either because of the deprivations of poverty, it is not possible for a mom to spend as much time with a baby as she would like. Or because she is taking on some hypercritical job, and she is the only one who knows how to work the what’s-it on the nuclear submarine. But for the most part, I think our goal should be how we can free more moms who want to be home with babies at the very beginning of their life to be home with them. Whether that pushes up or pushes down our GDP, I do not really care.
This is part of where my opposition to abortion comes in. If we want to value women and children together, part of that is not treating children as women’s enemies. Not making it normal to kill your child in self-defense. That is accepting an idea and teaching through the law that women and their children are essentially in competition, and we are not willing to meet both their needs. Any solution that rests on that is fundamentally unjust to both of you.
One of the simpler policies we could take up is a baby bonus. This would be a $ 2,000 payment that comes to a mother right after her child is born. It operates a little like unemployment insurance, cushioning the cost of a big transition.
JK: You draw on a really diverse set of thinkers in the book, from science and economics to philosophy, literature, and law. That was one of the things I enjoyed. You do not lean heavily into theological argumentation, but it is clear that you are drawing on a vision of the human person that is deeply shaped by the Catholic tradition. Were there any particular theological voices that were present to you as you wrote this book?
LLS: You know, I think one has to be Henri Nouwen, who just had a big heart for vulnerability in his life in L’Arche and his own attention to his own frailty. He has written deeply on disability and mutual need, but not as an observer. He has written as someone who, by being plunged into what we think of as the most visible and most desperate disability, came to know himself better as God’s creature.
JK: When we write, we often have different audiences in mind for a book. As you wrote The Dignity of Dependence, who were your prospective interlocutors and what kind of conversations do you hope the book makes possible?
LLS: Part of the way I constructed the title of the book is as a fair warning: The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. I have tried to promise the reader that I will annoy each of you somewhere in the book. I received different warnings, like, does it have to say feminist? Does it have to be as confrontational as manifesto? My agent said, “When you say ‘dignity,’ people know it is Catholic, so you might want to just do dependence.”
My goal was to create a lot of different entry points with this book. Maybe you will pick up the book as someone who is a Catholic, who has had a lot of bad experiences with the word “feminist.” Or you will read the book as a pro-choice feminist with an enormous heart for the vulnerable, but you do not feel that extends to the unborn, or cannot without imperiling women. You will have the experience, reading certain pages, of feeling seen, and on the next page there will be something that you are going to find uncomfortable to sit with.
I want the book to have those moments of fruitful tension. Now, will you close the book agreeing with me on everything? Excellent, if that happens. That is not my bet for most of those readers. But I do hope that it creates a sense of how the multiple different injustices of what we ask of women, of what we ask people to deny about their own dependence, could fit into a larger picture. Even if you are uncertain about one part of that mosaic, you now have a way to talk to someone for whom that was their entry point into the book, even if it was not yours, even if that was your point of friction.
JK: What are you hoping specifically that Catholics will be challenged by?
You know, I think one of the parts is the good in feminism. We live, in some sense, in a post-Christian world, where people enjoy the fruits of a Christian worldview without subscribing to Christianity, and then they look at the world and wonder, “Well, what do we need Christianity for? We have human rights, we care about the dignity of the human person.” But that came from somewhere, and when you try and reconstruct it without Christianity, you are going to find that there are holes in what you are doing.
In the same way we live in a world that was built by several waves of feminism that responded to real, deep injustices and a neglect of women’s dignity and rights. It can be easy to sit here, able to open your own bank account, able to get custody of your kids when your husband beats you, and say, “What was the point of feminism? Isn’t it just about hating men?”
No. I would love to be able to join those together and provoke real gratitude, for Christianity and for feminism. Whether you come to the book as a Christian, a feminist, both, or neither, I want you to ask: what is the urgent good being pursued that I am grateful for here? And where is that work incomplete without being fully rooted in truth?
JK: Speaking of men, what does the book have to say to men?
LLS: One of my favorite parts of writing the book was engaging the question of vulnerability from the perspective of men who often get left out and set to the side as the not-so-necessary periphery person.
The asymmetries between men and women are what point us towards that question, what are men for? We live in an age of real prosperity, which I am grateful for, which means that men really cannot count on either being necessary for providing their family with an income just by themselves. Or protecting their family from harm. We are lucky in both those things. I am very grateful that my husband is not called on to defend us physically, and that we live a comfortable and safe life. But that then prompts this question of, “what is the distinctive role of men in marriage and in society?” Part of how I frame it in the book is that men are less exposed to need, or less intimately exposed than women. Every woman, whether she hopes to have children or not, knows that her body is oriented towards pregnancy, whether that is something she hopes for, which you may or may not succeed at, or whether it is something she fears. Women go through a lot of effort to make sure it does not happen, and the more effort you are putting into it, the more you are aware that it is hanging over you as a possibility. But men have to make an active choice to extend their bodies over someone in protection and love.
The real challenge is how to talk more about the almost excess strength men have. Not only that they are tall and able to reach things or big and able to lift things up. But their strength will not be naturally called out of them in the way women’s is through pregnancy. We have to ask them.
That is something that the experience of being married and having a baby really drives home. My husband and I are always partners, but the nature of our partnership changes during pregnancy and nursing. We spend time practicing and sharing tasks—passing things back and forth so that I can trust him with a lot more during pregnancy and feel great about having another baby, because I know how much he will take on. When you have fewer and fewer marriages, later and later children, fewer men have that sense of, “I am utterly necessary to my family because my wife is turning her strength inward towards the baby, and I get to extend my strength outward over her and any other children we have.”
But that is very much the gift of what men are for. I think one of my most concrete hopes is that people might read the book or read this interview and think about how to extend care for the vulnerable. It would be great for more parishes to keep a list of young men who are single, who will shovel people out in the winter. Anyone who is elderly should be able to kind of call up a young man from church, both so that they are taken care of and taken care of by their community, rather than a paid stranger with a snowblower and so that these young men, who are wondering what their strength is for, get an answer right away. There are people around you who are distinctively vulnerable. They are waiting for you to offer, and without you, sure, maybe they will solve this problem another way, but they will not solve it through this particular form of love.
JK: A lot of books end with pithy lists—“Six things you can do now.” I really appreciated that your book did not end this way because people’s lives and circumstances are so diverse. But I am curious, are there particular questions you hope readers engage with as they read the book or after they’ve finished it?
LLS: This book, like my last book, Building the Benedict Option, I want you to put down before you finish reading it, because I want it to prompt you to call a friend and ask them for help, or offer to do something for them. You do not have to get to the end of the book before you do that. You can pick it up later, after you have had them over for dinner.
I think a question that is great to finish with is: When is the most recent time I asked for help, and what was it? And what am I going to ask for next? Because building up a society that is humane, that responds to need, does not start with offering to help people, which always puts you in the superior position, the magnanimous position. It begins by putting yourself in the abject position of the petitioner, asking people for help yourself, and thereby proving to them. I am someone who thinks it is okay to ask other people for help. Even when you could have paid someone to do this for you, or gotten help from a stranger as equals, and it frees your friends to come to you when they also have a need because you have proven you think that is okay.
