Is summer peak weaponization of the notion of "The Village"?
Mutual aid is a beautiful ideal--in reality is it used against us?
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Summer is here and school is out but camp isn’t open yet; do you have a network of neighbors and friends to pick up childcare hours for you? Have you organized a carousel of rotating playdates with other parents who can pitch in?
In general, do you have a community of friends and willing alloparents who can take your kid for the day when school is closed or you’re sick or pick them up from school when you’re running late? Do you have an adopted auntie or grandparent to take them so you can get an occasional date night?
No?? Oh honey, you’re doing it wrong! You’re not supposed to do it alone!!
Don’t you know that you are supposed to have access to and cultivate a system of free female labor—A VILLAGE of support among fellow caregivers and willing friends to pitch in and carry the burden?
You don’t have that? And you’re struggling? Have you considered that maybe you’re antisocial and a terrible community member just too independent and need to ask for more help? Perhaps if you stopped being a selfish bi- offered more to help others you could cultivate a reciprocal circle of caregiving.
Hmmm??
I love the concept of mutual aid and I have benefitted from it many times. I can think of times when it has been a lifesaver, actually. I live where I live because it’s a great community, and I’m so grateful for it. And still. Sometimes the talk around “the village” sounds like the above to me.
Especially when summer hits and schools close and it’s peak “lean into the village” season, the language around “the village” can sound like a cudgel to guilt and shame parents, especially women, for once again failing at “self care,” and coercing them into doing more free work.
(Including the mental load—have you ever tried organizing a carousel of rotating playdates? It’s maybe worse than trying to get a spot at the one affordable camp everyone’s trying to get into.)
Last week, Reshma Saujani, founder of Moms First, posted about her advocacy for childcare, and how CEOs and corporations that she talks to often tell her that subsidizing childcare for their employees is “just too expensive.” “What are you going to trade if we pay for childcare?” CEO’s ask her.
Which, first of all, lol. If giant corporations with millions and billions in revenue can’t afford to pay for childcare, then how the heck do they think individual families, their employees, can afford it?
(And yet capitalists also panic about declining birth rates, because capitalist economic growth has relied on population growth for a steady supply of consumers and workers…but I digress! )
As Saujani points out, employees can’t work without childcare. Childcare should be subsidized as a public good like all the other things that are necessary for society to function and allow workers to be able to work: like k-12 public schools, roads, public transit, etc. 1
Which is what every other wealthy nation that’s not the U.S does.
In the U.S., corporations, politicians, and patriarchy in general cluck their tongues and say, IT TAKES A VILLAGE! ASK FOR HELP!
Mutual aid is a beautiful idea, but I worry that in reality without structural support “the village” in the U.S. often—sometimes too often—comes down to exploiting free female labor.
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I first realized this before I had a child when I was pregnant, and somewhere along my “pregnancy journey” I was handed a special pamphlet by my OB-GYN office or at my birthing class, I forget which.
The title of the pamphlet was, “Ask A Helper!”
The pamphlet had an image of smiling babies and small children in the arms of women. “You’re not meant to do it alone!” the pamphlet, which was supposed to be a guide to avoid postpartum depression, declared.
“If you’re struggling, reach out to a friend, a grandparent, or a neighbor. “Find the helpers—don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it!”
I looked at this pamphlet and cackled aloud.
At that point in my life, every woman that I knew had a job—living in NYC and being in my 40’s, most of my friends had demanding jobs. Amongst my circle of close single girlfriends, one worked in a hospital OR, one worked as a creative director for a big home goods brand, and one was a senior editor for a major book publisher.
All my other female friends had kids of their own and a traditional job.
I imagined myself exhausted and isolated from caring for a newborn and calling one of them to take paid time off so they could come rescue me for a day. HAHAHAHA!
I would have to be bleeding or on my way to the E.R. before I made that call. It would be ridiculous and frankly rude to make that ask unless the situation was dire.
And even then, I could never ever imagine asking for more than one day of help. And I’m pretty sure that postpartum depression lasts for more than one day.
I recognized immediately that this pamphlet and whoever created it (The Medical Establishment? A Government Agency? A Patriarchal Fairytale Business?) was directing its readers to tap into what they imagined was a ready supply of free female labor, ready for the taking if you just asked!!
Do they think there are actual fairies just waiting for you to call on them to do free work? (Do they think that’s what women are? )
Imagine a pamphlet for dads full of children in men’s arms, and a declaration to “Ask for help!” If you’re struggling, call your lawyer or accountant or that drinking buddy and ask them to hold your baby for the day! Buy them a beer as payment. You just have to askkkkkk!”
The pamphlet smacked me over the head with its message of unvarnished cultural reality: “It’s important that you know that after you give birth, there’s a very real and potentially life-threatening mental health problem that can impact you and your brand-new infant. If that happens, your society has absolutely nothing in place to catch you. You have to figure it out for yourself.”
It’s like the GoFundMe approach to healthcare, but for postpartum and infant wellness.
I posted Saujani’s childcare video on social media, and a reader responded with her own current ambivalence about “the village” because she works in the home, and is beset with childcare requests from friends and neighbors as schools close for the summer.
“I have been thinking about this a lot since it’s the first day of summer here and today I am helping out some neighbors watching their kids because they both work,” she wrote. “I struggle with the concept of “the village” because all that means is women who do unpaid labor, like me, just end up doing more unpaid labor to fill in the gaps where corporations are not supporting their employees.”
She continued:
“I benefit from the village but also feel really bound by it and am usually the first person people ask because I don’t “work” in a traditional sense. The whole celebration of the village has never quite sat right with me. It seems like we aren’t asking the right questions, like, why do we need the village so badly in the first place?”
And here’s the kicker, wait for it: this reader has an infant at home. She’s the one who should, per the pamphlet, be asking others for help (“Ask a helper!!), But since she’s at home, people are tapping her to be the “helper.”
This isn’t to shame any of these individuals, but just to illustrate the point that “the village” sometimes lets corporations and the government off the hook with zero accountability to women and children, while putting strain on others, mainly women, who are already stretched thin.
This reminds me of something that Jess Calarco, author of “Holding it Together: How Mothers became America’s Safety Net,” said in a great interview with Allison a couple weeks ago. Allison asked why women can’t simply opt out of care work if they are exploited by it. “Why is it hard to say no to more caregiving and service?” she asks.
Jessica Calarco replies that basically people know that others will suffer if they stop pitching in, and someday the one who suffers might be them:
“It's very hard for people who are attentive to those gaps in the system, to say, ‘Oh no, I'm just going to not care about anybody else,’” says Calarco.
“And I think that's especially true for people who are aware of their own precarity within that system…saying no both feels morally fraught in the sense of, “Who is going to be let down by me saying no?” And also personally fraught, in the sense of, “What am I putting at risk by not saying yes right now?”
And this, I think, helps explain my ambivalence about The Village. I love mutual aid and am grateful for it, but I feel resentful that we live under a system that makes us desperate and reliant on people who are already stretched thin. Without structural support, mutual aid that could be happily given amongst people who have enough resources can become another GoFundMe asking for resources from people who can’t easily afford it.
What do you think? How is “The Village” working or not working for you? Have you figured it out, or like me are you often sending desperate last-minute pleading texts to other parents and feeling guilty about it?
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Further reading:
"Women prove they can hold it all together. We thank them by giving them more to hold."
Back in November 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, the sociologist Jessica Calarco did an interview in which she said the quiet part out loud: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” It was a time when things felt s…
Summer book club! Who wants to read Miranda July's "All Fours" with me?
I recently wrote about how women have been force fed a ridiculous amount of stories about and by men their whole lives—from religious tomes to the good old white-male literary canon. No wonder we eat up every Beyonce album and Taylor Swift easter egg (or song by
FWIW I’m not a big fan of corporations paying for childcare, I think the government needs to do it. Otherwise, as with employer-based healthcare, a few people who work for Google will get amazing childcare while everyone else continues to struggle…
I used to be a huge booster of mutual aid, especially during the pandemic when all our systems were shuttered or collapsing under the pressure of serving so many people who were so much worse of than me. But now I really see how the idea of mutual aid exists because — as you say — we don’t have adequate supports in the first place. I’m writing from England where the beloved NHS (national health service) has served wealthy and poor for a few generations — everyone uses it and everyone believes in it (even though it’s been defunded by the conservative movement led by Thatcher 40 years ago). In the U.S. we’ve been brainwashed about how sinister public support for health care is. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Systems are designed. They can be re-designed.
Agree with you re the mythical village - massive eye rolls when people talk about this bc it’s so far from our current reality. Re mutual aid though - I think this is different. The village & mutual aid are two distinct things as far as I can tell. Mutual aid is about building non-hierarchical networks outside of institutions and I think we need this now more than ever. It’s not limited to exchanging childcare, in fact it’s not even about exchanging childcare (although caring for children can sometimes be part of it.) I’m a big fan of mutual aid and not sure it should be conflated with the village - they are not the same.