Healthy dependence

In The Free Press, contributor Kara Kennedy reports that about 1 in 3 pregnancies in the UK ends in abortion. The cause is often assumed to be financial, but none of the women she interviewed mentioned the cost. Their reasons included unstable relationships, feelings of inadequacy, and lack of “readiness” for parenthood. These may all be symptoms of a cultural attitude Leah Libresco Sargeant explores in The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (University of Notre Dame Press, 232 pp.). She argues that our contemporary insistence on autonomy does not readily accommodate pregnancy, childrearing, old age, or the care that all these natural life stages demand.

“Babies can’t survive a culture that despises dependence.” Nor can women, as women. In her first chapter, Sargeant shows how “The World Is the Wrong Shape for Women,” with man-size tools, vehicles, recommended medical dosages, and basketball hoops all calibrated to male size and body mass. Male ambitions also come in different sizes and shapes, in some ways comparable to women’s but not interchangeable. Women are biologically built for bearing, caring, and nurturing: “Dependence marks women more obviously and more intimately, but it is impossible to tell the truth about who men are or treat them justly without accounting for our mutual dependence. No just society can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.” A true “feminist manifesto” must begin with acknowledging the feminine.

Mutual dependence is a fact of life, but our culture treats it as an unwelcome interruption. Sergeant favors taxpayer support for normal stages of dependence, whether in the delivery room (where lay doulas can make a big difference in labor and bonding) or at home with a handicapped child or incapacitated parent. “We cannot treat the ordinary events of human life, like childbearing, education, and aging, as a surprise.” In the United States, a patchwork of state and federal laws provides a level of support, but in severely restrictive ways. Regulations that draw false distinctions between “professional” and “amateur” care, SSI guidelines that support an incapacitated employee but not his stay-at-home wife, and zoning laws that prohibit unrelated friends, and sometimes even related dependents, from living together, hinder the loving care women can most naturally give.

To truly grant dignity to dependence, we need a change of heart from worshipping autonomy to prioritizing open-handed generosity. All humans are at one time or other dependent; total independence is not only undesirable, it’s impossible, and to pretend anything else is denying reality. “Our ties to others are not an obstacle to self-actualization, but the foundation for the authentic self.” The Dignity of Dependence is a challenging read but also a thoughtful one, and a thoroughly human one.