"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. For the newsletter this week, I’m talking with sociologist Jessica Calarco about her recent research on...
Hasnain says:
Really great read on how the COVID pandemic affected various families and worsened pre-existing inequalities, causing harm.
“In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.
Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.
Another part of this I can’t stop thinking about is how our lack of a social safety net is putting women’s health and relationships at risk. So much of the public conversation has focused on the women who are dropping out of the workforce. Those stories are important, but to me they signal the centrality of capitalism in all of our public concerns.”
Posted on 2021-10-11T03:22:59+0000