Neither education or money are absolutely necessary to become a businessman. Both of those things do help, however, as an education provides some of the information that can help and money provides capital. In the U.S., we´ve instead tried to DIY society. We left it up to individual people to manage risk on their own, as opposed to allowing them to rely on a social safety net. And in practice, that means keeping taxes low, especially on wealthy people and corporations, 1st grade math test online cutting regulations and really underinvesting in the kinds of time and resources that people would need to be able to participate more actively in care.
But the problem is that we can´t actually DIY society. That´s too much risk for individuals and families to manage on their own. What I show in the book is that families and communities have been able to weather this shift in American policy primarily by relying on women to be the ones to hold it together. A: It became very apparent very quickly how much of an impact Covid was having, particularly on families with young children and especially the moms within those families who were often pushed into these kinds of default caregiver roles.
And so at the time, Congress actually, with some pushes from a couple of women who had high profile positions in government, set up a universal child care program, set up national child care centers across the U.S., used defense spending through the Lanham Act to do so. More than two-thirds of Americans´ unpaid caregiving work — valued at $1 trillion annually — is done by women, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families based on 2023 data from the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. A: Being the default caregivers for kids and for the elderly, and for people who are sick, or destitute in our society. And then on the other side of the equation, also filling in gaps in our economy. Women hold 70% of the lowest wage jobs in our economy. And they´re also the ones who disproportionately hold underpaid jobs at every sort of level of education that they might have. Things like child care, things like home health care, things like even K-12 teaching.
We structure our economy and we structure our society in ways that push women into doing that work and then underpay them for that labor in ways that trap them in that system of exploitation, in similar ways to what we do at home. And this is deeply damaging for women and for families in terms of the cost that it has for their well-being, for their stress levels, for their economic parity. We saw this massive increase in women´s employment during the war. At the end of the war, those women almost universally wanted to keep their jobs – they wanted to stay in the paid workforce.
But the easiest short term thing to do for the economy, once men were coming back and wanted their jobs back, was to push women back home.
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