Leah Libresco Sargeant is a Senior Policy Analyst in Family Economic Security at the Niskanen Center as well as a writer and journalist whose work focuses on religion and family policy. She is the author of three books, of which the most recent is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. In her book, Sargeant argues that liberal feminism — and American culture more generally — champions an ideal of freedom based in autonomy that is poorly suited to human beings as they are. Instead, she advocates for a culture that sees dignity in mutual dependence.
Sargeant agrees with feminist critiques from the left that many institutions and structures in society treat women as “defective men,” including the medical research that tests only male patients and the car safety devices that protect male bodies while accidentally injuring female bodies. But she also is critical of a kind of corporate capitalism that sees workers only as economic inputs, and a politics that denies the neediness, vulnerability, and interdependence of humanity.
In this podcast discussion, Sargeant lays out the thesis of The Dignity of Dependence. She describes her conversion to Catholicism and the ways in which her experiences as a wife and mother inform her cultural politics. She touches on the global fertility crisis and the paradoxical ways in which it may be driven by prosperity. She further addresses the struggles that many young people have nowadays in dating and forming families, and suggests that they may be helped by social policies (including the Child Tax Credit and baby bonuses) as well as by a greater understanding of the difference between “capstone” and “cornerstone” marriages. And she distinguishes her approach to feminism from other perspectives on both the left and right. She makes clear that as a pro-life feminist she has considerable differences with mainstream feminism, but nonetheless believes it to be “a good-faith tradition of trying to struggle with what it means to be just to women in a world that is often male-normed. It’s a tradition that I think has made some serious mistakes and won some significant victories.”
Transcript
Leah Libresco Sargeant: But when you see people say, “I don’t expect I’d be a good husband.” “I don’t expect I’d be a good wife,” then I think when you look at the marriage and fertility crunches, you just say, “This looks like it’s coming from a place of (at least partially) despair.” And then you have to ask: well, is that despair well-grounded?
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: And I’m Leah Libresco Sargeant from the Niskanen Center.
Geoff Kabaservice: Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. You know, Leah, this podcast typically brings on people who have written some new and significant book, and it occasionally brings on some of my colleagues from the Niskanen Center. But it’s a particular delight to be joined by you today, because you are not only one of my cherished Niskanen comrades, but you’ve also written a new and significant book. And your book is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, which was published in October 2025 by the University of Notre Dame Press. Congratulations, Leah, on having written this marvelous manifesto, which is thought-provoking, it’s elegantly written, and it really has so well deserved the wide attention it already has received.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Thank you so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: In addition to being a Senior Policy analyst in Family Economic Security here at the Niskanen Center, you also run the Other Feminisms newsletter and Substack, and many of your writings are also accessible at your website, leahlibresco.com. I should also mention that The Dignity of Dependence is your third book, following on 2015’s Arriving at Amen, which described the story of your conversion from atheism to Catholicism, and 2018’s Building the Benedict Option, which was a combination of spiritual memoir and practical guide to building communities of prayer and socialization. So tell me how this book, The Dignity of Dependence, came to be.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I feel like whenever I write a book, I’ve always secretly been writing the book for maybe three or four months before I start, and it’s because there’s some idea I’ve been reporting out or covering in essays or sneaking its way into book reviews that needs a longer treatment. The two core ideas at the heart of The Dignity of Dependence are first, that women’s equality with men is not premised on our interchangeability with men; and second, that dependence — not autonomy — is at the root of what it means to be a human person.
Geoff Kabaservice: What audience or audiences did you have in mind when you were writing this book?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Certainly a range of audiences. It has come out as part of Notre Dame Press’ Catholic Ideas for a Secular World, so it’s really meant to be a book that’s a bridge, where there are certainly ideas that Catholic and pro-life readers will recognize right away, and some that will make them a little uncomfortable. There are lots of avenues into this discussion of what it means to be just to women as women that I’m hoping I’ve left doors open for folks who wouldn’t have picked up a book elsewhere in the Notre Dame Press line.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. You say you are a feminist, this is a feminist manifesto, but your blog is Other Feminisms. So what is your feminism?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I’d say at the root it’s about saying what does it mean to be just to women as women in a world that often treats us like defective men, that when you take a very narrow idea of what it means to be human, you wind up leaving a lot of people, women in particular, feeling like they have a personal problem in not fitting into that model that they have to rectify themselves, not that there’s a structural way they’ve been left out.
Geoff Kabaservice: In your book, you quote from a number of conservative and/or religious authors like Father Richard John Neuhaus, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis. But you also quote from liberal or left-identified or harder-to-characterize writers; I’m thinking of Nobel Prize winner Claudia Golden, writers like Lewis Hyde, Matthew Crawford, and Hillary Mantel, sex advice columnist Dan Savage, musician Brian Eno… I mean, it’s a very eclectic list. So tell me, given this kind of eclectic mix that informs your interests, your writings, how would you describe your politics?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I’m a “horseshoe theorist” person. I’m very much willing to draw like a magpie from whatever I think is true, regardless of what the source is. And that really drives a lot of my sourcing in the book: that out there in the world is the truth, objective, accessible (imperfectly for us perhaps). You shouldn’t be surprised from people who are your political rivals are holding onto at least a piece of that truth very strongly and perhaps even expressing it more beautifully than you have, even though you may have a larger piece of it. So you want to celebrate, scavenge, and lift up each of those little fragments to make the whole.
Geoff Kabaservice: Lewis Hyde’s book is called Trickster Makes This World, and there is a sense in that book of being a bit of a magpie and collecting from here and there. I get that impression from your book as well. How do the concerns that animate your book relate to your work at Niskanen?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: At Niskanen, I work on the Family Economic Security team, and a lot of my focus is on how do we lay families free to make good choices? How do we avoid sandbagging them in various ways? So there my focus is on programs like expanding the Child Tax Credit and offering a baby bonus — which we don’t currently do, but we should — to families when they have a new baby, an immediate cash payment after a baby is born. Because that really gives families the freedom to make the next right choice, whether that’s with a baby bonus paying down the hospital bill, converting the back room for grandma to stay for a month or two while she’s there. What we want to do is use the power of market prosperity to allow people to make the good local decisions that only they can make.
Geoff Kabaservice: I suppose a related question is: Why did you want to come to work at Niskanen rather than a more ideologically oriented think tank?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Honestly, Niskanen was on my radar before I was looking for a job, because when I read stuff from the Niskanen social policy team, it was so clear they sweated the details. During fights about Build Back Better or other family policy programs, you’d have people say, “Well, this advances my goals, this doesn’t.” You’d have folks like Niskanen saying, “Look, this part is badly designed even for the goal it’s ostensibly targeted at.” I think there can be a defensiveness on either side of the political divide where you’ve got to stand by your team, it’s hard to correct errors. It felt like whenever I wanted to check: Is this proposal well written? Niskanen was one of the places I could go that would give a straight answer to that question.
Geoff Kabaservice: Part of the beauty of the Niskanen Center is that we never, not once in the ten years of our existence, have been able to state exactly what it is that we stand for in our particular ideological coordinates. But one of the things that undergirds a lot of the concerns of our policy departments is this idea that we have for several decades had insufficient state capacity, and this relates in some ways to the Abundance movement — which is a big thing, I think, particularly among young people nowadays. I actually felt that in your book there were some resonances between these state capacity and Abundance movement concerns, as well as what you’re laying out in terms of your view of human autonomy, dependence, and the family.
Leah Libresco Sargeant:
Absolutely. I mean, for one thing, the most pro-family policy you can have is just making housing cheaper by making it legal to build it. It’s not as exclusively pro-family in some ways as the CTC is, which depends on there being kids around, but it’s a huge part of the expenses of building a family: moving to a bigger house, et cetera. And we should just make housing legal to build as much as possible, and I think that is very much Abundance-coded.
When it comes on the state capacity side, a big concern I have is that every failure of state capacity, every place where a family tries to pursue benefits they’re legally entitled to and finds out they’re paper promises — that there’s too many broken parts of the implementation, too many hurdles — not only cuts them off from that benefit that they’re legally entitled to but erodes their confidence in applying for other benefits that may even be better administered. Because they get this sense of, “Well, this is kind of a rigged game. This is just a promise people make, but it’s not one you can actually collect on.” So not only is it important for each program’s actual users that it be run competently, you can sandbag a successful program if the people who come applying to it have had a bad experience at SNAP and then don’t actually go through the motions of applying to your program. So I’m really interested in making sure that when we pass pro-family policy, it actually reaches the families in that last mile of policy.
Geoff Kabaservice: There are points in your book where you talk about things that are policy issues that Niskanen has worked on in the past, such as Supplemental Security Income or paid parental leave. Are these things you have worked on both at Niskanen and elsewhere?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I haven’t done SSI at Niskanen, though I work with colleagues who do, and I’m really grateful for that work. So I cross-reference some things with others. I’m always happy hearing from the housing team about what they’re doing. I’m hoping the housing team will make it legal for me personally to build an ADU in my backyard, which is not currently a possibility in my neighborhood, though I don’t actually get to direct their efforts solely to my suburb in Maryland. So there’s a bit of that. What’s nice is that this Abundance and state capacity work really does unite people from across the political spectrum who just want to be sure that when I pass a law, we’re capable of doing what the law says.
Geoff Kabaservice: An ADU, in this case — perhaps you might want to explain that.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Oh, yes. As in accessory dwelling unit, a little mini-house that I could use as an extra room in my house. I’ve got three kids in one bedroom. I could use to have grandparents stay for the long-term, I could use one day for an au pair to stay in. But it’s not legal qua ADU in my neighborhood, even on my backyard that I own.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. People often ask if Niskanen is still a libertarian think tank. My answer is no, but there’s still traces of it in our DNA. In this particular case, state and particularly local restrictions against building a perfectly presentable and functional part of your house on your own property would seem to be well within the ambit of what a society should permit.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Yes. I’m not personally a libertarian, but there are definitely moments where I’m very sympathetic to, “Oh, come on, we can’t have this ridiculous barrier to good things. You’re going to embolden the libertarians.”
Geoff Kabaservice: We’ll get into the politics in a bit. This is probably as good a place as any though to ask you something about yourself. Where do you come from? Where did you go to school? What have been some of the significant turning points along your journey?
Leah Libresco Sargeant:
I grew up on Long Island in I’d say a fairly liberal neighborhood, mostly secular Jewish. Then I went to Yale for college, which was the first place I met a wide range of people with different political views who were smart and in good faith. I think until then, a lot of my exposure to different religious beliefs or to different politics came through politicians, who are not particularly adept as political philosophers in most cases. It was very interesting to find good-faith disagreement and disagreements that genuinely prompted me to say, “You know what, I need to think more to answer that objection,” not “I’ve already heard this. I’ve already dealt with this. I’m uninterested in it.”
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s interesting… I interviewed Jonathan Rauch a few months ago, who was at Yale before you and I, but he also had the experience of having a roommate who was a devout Christian and able to defend it in intelligent terms, which was not something that he had encountered before. While in Jonathan’s case he did not convert to anything, I think those kinds of interchanges informed his thinking in a way that led to some of his later writings.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I was also really fortunate in that I belonged to the Yale Political Union, which I would describe as a philosophical debating circle — just to differentiate it from competitive debate, which is I think what people picture first. In competitive debate, you argue sides chosen at random to see how well can you explore and articulate the arguments for the side, and you argue in front of judges who have to grade arguments in terms of, “Well, what did you bring up and was it answered and were you responsive to this or that?” But that’s not what we did at all. You only argued things you actually thought, and there were no judges and there were no prizes. The stakes of the debate were: Make a good argument and someone here in this room may decide to live their entire life differently based on what you said. And that someone could be you, if someone asks you a good question that collapses your argument in front of you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your book is personal in the sense that you disclose a lot about your own experiences. So I wonder if you could tell me something about your experience of religious conversion and then, frankly, your experience of becoming a mother.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Well, my experience of a religious conversion is kind of a long story, so I can only give the Cliff Notes unless we spend the whole rest of the podcast on it. But essentially, I both found that Christians were not dumb, which was my thought going in, having been growing up around the time of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism offering their salvos against what I would call Lowest Common Denominator American evangelicalism. I met a wide range of Christians, mostly Orthodox and Catholic, and I thought I had to do more reading just to be able to talk these guys out of their faith, which I wanted to do because I loved them. The more reading I did on that, the more I felt like Christianity was something I thought was not true but was coherent, in the way that you can read a really good fantasy novel where you feel like if you wandered off the main thread of the plot, there’s more world there — versus something that’s very thin and poorly constructed.
Ultimately, for me, what tipped me over from non-belief into belief was pushing very hard on the weaknesses of my own atheism, particularly: How do we come to have knowledge of the good? We live in a world where — I would contend and I think most people agree to an approximation — we are able to reason about something that’s transcendent, about morality, something that’s like mathematics, that we uncover like archeologists, that we don’t build like architects. The question is: How do we reason about this thing, this immaterial thing that is beyond us in this way? I was interested in a lot of proposals for how you construct a ladder up. I didn’t find them satisfactory, and then concluded it must be something that instead has come down to me as a gift.
Geoff Kabaservice: The center for Catholics at Yale has been the Thomas More House and Chapel. Back in the days of William F. Buckley Jr., after the Second World War, it was fairly conservative, but in recent decades it has been quite liberal. Was that the tradition to which you attached when you chose to convert to Catholicism?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Well, I converted after I graduated. I would say that the Saint Thomas More Center was ideologically diverse since it was meant to serve all the Catholics at Yale. But I would also say that when I asked if I could join RCIA at the school — RCIA is the way that people come into the church, Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults — and I said, “I don’t currently want to become Catholic, but this is where you offer instruction to adults, and I would rather learn about the Church from the Church rather than just from a scattering of my friends” — the priest told me he wouldn’t let me join the class because I was part of the debate group. I said, “Well, would you let me join the class if I promised to never ever speak, to only ask my questions privately to you afterwards and to listen, and if I ever opened my mouth, you could kick me out that day?” He said no. So make what conclusions you will.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a form of conservatism, I will say.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I don’t know that it was conservatism per se, but he was very uninterested in the prospect of my converting is what I would say.
Geoff Kabaservice: So what transpired in the years after graduation?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: After graduation, I took my first job in public policy here in D.C. at the Pew Charitable Trust, working on bank reform. I kept arguing with people and kept pushing on those philosophical ideas. It was in D.C. at an AAAS meeting — American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences — after I’d been kicked out of an RCIA program I was attending, that I ran into a habited Dominican friar. I think most people can agree that consecrated religious who wear habits, whether they’re priests, nuns, friars, sisters, kind of have a “Kick me” sign on them, if the “Kick me” sign says “You can ask me your weird religious questions.” So I did and formed a book club with him, and then got sort of kicked out of my book club to talk to his superior, all of which was helpful to me in finally coming to my conclusion to enter the Church.
Geoff Kabaservice: Did you relocate to California at some point?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I did. I went to California for a year to work for the Center for Applied Rationality, which was a group that I would say taught defensive driving for your brain.
Geoff Kabaservice: What brought you back East?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I hated living in California.
Geoff Kabaservice: Some do.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: It’s nice for those who like it, but there’s no weather. People enjoy being relaxed. They talk about how they feel in their bodies. And I hated all of this.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s an interesting metaphysical and physical question if Heaven really is like California, as many people think it is. Tell me about marriage and children.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I got married in 2016 to another alumnus of my debate group, which is lovely. It meant that in some ways, the best way… This is not the traditional way chosen in this age of dating app. One of the best ways to find someone to marry is to belong to a debating circle where every week you hear people argue about what the good life consists of, and how you know, and what’s good art, and how to create it, and how to form yourself, and whether you should be a great man or a good man, or whether they’re in tension. You listen to all these and go, “I’ll marry that one.”
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s great. I’m glad it worked for you. It seems in your book that you had some difficult pregnancies.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Yes. My husband and I unfortunately suffered six miscarriages before our first child made it to term.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you now have three children?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Yes, we do.
Geoff Kabaservice: Who span the ages of?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Almost six, almost four, and 18 months.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just in practical terms, how were you able to write this book while also holding down a full-time job and having the care of three young children?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Well, I had a little sabbatical in between leaving my prior job, and I negotiated for a later start at Niskanen in part to work on the book. And then my husband and I always have done different freelancing projects outside of our main job. So while I was starting at Niskanen and pregnant with this newest baby, my husband and I are going through our calendar and saying, “Okay, you can have these two Saturdays in this month to just focus on writing, but I’m going to need this Sunday afternoon to focus on game design. Also I’m going to have to grade papers” — my husband is a high school teacher and also designs tabletop role-playing games— “so after this week, the whole weekend is just creating midterm exams.” So we just do a lot of calendar work to say what will it take to accomplish these weirdo projects we’ve taken on, and at what point do we have to say no to taking any more.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, congratulations again for writing this book under those circumstances. It’s sort of the old metaphor about doing it in high heels and backwards.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Well, I’ve gotten a lot faster as a writer ever since I’ve become a mom, because it’s so clear… I’m sure everyone has the experience in college where you’ve got to write a paper and you write a lot faster four hours before it’s due than you do it any other time in the two weeks you had to work on the paper. Having kids is basically like working under those circumstances all the time. But it means that when I say I’ve got these three hours that my husband is specifically moving heaven and earth to give me to write, I’m much less tempted to look at my email.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me quote from your book’s opening lines. You write, “The world is the wrong shape for women. I moved through a world in which my body is an unexpected, unanticipated, somewhat unwelcome guest. It is as though women were a late, unanticipated arrival to a civilization that developed without them and their needs in mind. A woman’s physical capacities clash with the expectations and norms of the modern world.”
This podcast comes way too often to the subject of Yale University, but the fact is that at Yale, most of its buildings were put up in the 1930s when Yale was still very much an all-male place. The Gothic architecture of the campus was consciously intended to project a kind of masculine, dark, fortress-like vibe, and the doors in particular of these buildings were in many cases too heavy for at least some women to open. So I’ve got to say, when I read those opening lines, I immediately thought back to that environment.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Well, I’ll say that’s less the case for me. But I think the way you could point to Yale as being not particularly hospitable to the full range of human life is just that at Yale, like at every college, there’s very little consideration for the possibility that students on these co-ed campuses will become pregnant. What it would mean to attend the school as a parent is not something covered in the same way in the opening orientation, where they’re very happy to show you where the free condoms are, but not, “And if you avail yourselves to them and they don’t work, let’s talk about what married student housing looks like, or how we would adjust your class schedule, or how leave works,” right at the beginning. That’s always treated as though it would be a one-off weird circumstance, not an ordinary thing that might happen when you bring thousands of men and women together.
Geoff Kabaservice: Very true. You do describe ways in which the world is designed for men. And sometimes this is trivial when it comes to women’s accommodating or not accommodating to male standards, such as where the three-point line is for men’s versus women’s basketball. But in other cases, the consequences are much more severe and even deadly. Can you expand a bit on this?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: One of the really notable ones, and I think this is familiar to anyone who shares a car with their spouse, is that when you get in the car and your spouse has been the other one driving, often you’ll find that you’re adjusting the seat so you can move it either further back or closer to the brakes, depending on which of you is taller. That’s a pretty easy adjustment. The car is made to suit a range of heights and let everyone use the gas and brakes no matter who they are.
But one piece of the car isn’t really tuned to accommodate a range of riders, and it’s the airbag. An airbag is essentially a small bomb that lives in your car. And if you’re in an accident, the bomb will go off explosively, and ideally will project that bag so that it’s stopping just short of your chest and you can collapse into it to arrest your forward motion, limit the shock you get from going forward and being pulled back. But when you slide yourself much, much closer to the steering wheel to reach the brakes, as many women have to do, you’re putting yourself beyond the safe range of the airbag. You’re too close to it. So when that bomb goes off, instead of stopping right in front of your chest, it’s still exploding when it hits you.
What you see is that women drivers are much more likely than male drivers on average to get serious airbag injuries in minor accidents, where the protection the airbag is supposed to offer you is outweighed by the risk it poses to you when you’re in a minor fender-bender. So they come in with bruised or broken ribs that men don’t have in similar accidents because they were out of range of the small bomb that lives in their steering wheel.
I think this is one of the examples where taking the male body as the normal body and treating the woman’s body as the abnormal or deviant body leads to us not taking very seriously that you’re trying to design for the whole range of human persons. It’s actually not until this year — or really not until one or two years from now — that we’re going to start using a female-scaled crash test dummy for part of our safety regs. So cars can pass right now and can have those dangerous to women airbags because we judge a car by how well it protects a typical man’s body in the crash test dummy.
Then, weirdly, a tiny man’s body is what’s used as the approximation for women. They put a male-proportioned crash test dummy that’s the height and weight of a fifth-percentile man. Now, I think if you look around, you’ll notice that most women aren’t exchangeable with a fifth-percentile man. Even if that was roughly the right height and weight, that’s not actually what our pelvises look like. And that’s one of those places where those injuries show up, because there’s a big asymmetry between men and women there. So around 2026, ’27, ’28, we are finally going to start using a crash test dummy that looks like half the population, and we’ll see if that prompts a shift in how we design the cars.
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s also a disparity in the pharmaceutical world and medical testing and intervention, particularly with the kinds of tests that are run on men but not on women when it comes to bringing a drug to market.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: That’s right. Women are often excluded from clinical trials, in part because of the risk that they could become pregnant and then you might be exposing the baby to the drug. But the downside of this is, first of all, very blatantly, we know very little about most drugs in pregnancy, which makes it hard to give women clear information on the trade-offs when they’re managing a chronic illness while pregnant. But also we scale medicines to, again, male proportions, where anything that’s dosed by weight is often dosed for everyone according to what an effective dose in men is, which can leave women with more side effects because they’re taking a dose that’s a little too high for the person they actually are.
Beyond that, women, even when pregnancy isn’t as much of an issue, are excluded from medical studies in many cases because the range of hormones across a normal, unmedicated female cycle complicates the study. You’ve got this different drug, essentially, being administered by the woman’s body in tandem with the precisely calibrated dose you’re giving, and it means you have to massively scale up the sample size so that you can normalize for where women are in the cycle or track their cycles at all. This is both expensive and, for many scientists, viewed as tedious and annoying, because “What are these women doing, taking all these drugs in their spare time from their own reproductive system while I’m trying to just isolate one drug?”
But of course, if you exclude naturally cycling women from your drug trials because you’re worried about the interactions their hormones will have with the drug you’re testing, what you wind up doing is releasing a drug whose interactions with naturally according hormones you don’t understand very well. So women wind up with drugs that are essentially not fully tested on our bodies as they actually exist.
Geoff Kabaservice: Another example that you used to illustrate the disparities between male and female experiences of the world is the work environment. In some cases, the professional office environment is biased against women, but in other ways it’s biased against humans, one might say. Can you just tell me a little more about your analysis here?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: When you look at the way we structure work, you hear a lot of complaints (and rightly so) about the lack of paid family leave: when you have a baby, there’s no automatic provision that you have paid leave after a child is born. You might have FMLA leave depending on whether you’ve been at your workplace for more than a year and whether your workplace employs enough people. But for folks on the lower end of the economic spectrum, FMLA leave is effectively no leave if you can’t float the money to cover it.
I think when we do this, especially around birth, we’re just participating in a falsehood about what birth asks of women and what children require after delivery. It is not realistic to say that most women can return to work immediately after a delivery. They’re not even supposed to pick up anything heavier than their baby for weeks. So you wind up just setting up a work expectation that your human workers will manage in human demands. Now, I think that’s most acute and most obviously unjust when it comes to pregnancy and delivery. But when you build up a work structure with just-in-time scheduling, without leave, you are essentially saying, “My workplace is tuned for people without dependents. My workplace is tuned for folks who don’t have kids, who don’t have aging parents, because I do not assume you will ever have something outside of this job that could interrupt your job. And on the day that you do, I’ll fire you.” And that’s not a workplace that’s about employing human beings at all.
Geoff Kabaservice: Like I said, we’ll come back to this general theme of dependence and autonomy here. But it’s interesting, because in hearing you talk about these subjects, I think some of the conservative listeners to this podcast will think, “Why, she sounds like a liberal feminist!” Your focus on the differences between the sexes, and the conclusions that you draw from what you call the asymmetries between men and women, in some ways does set you against the conservative camp. But at the same time, it also sets you against liberal feminists.
Let me talk about the conservative side first. I suspect many people will have seen or listened to your recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast on the New York Times website. You appeared there alongside Helen Andrews, who made a big splash with an essay in Compact magazine a few months ago, arguing that business, law, higher education, and other critical sectors of the American workplace are being ruined by too many women entering into them. Now, I’ve known Helen since she too was a Yale undergraduate, and you both are highly intelligent, religious conservative writers and mothers of young children. In fact, you quote Helen approvingly at one point in your book. Nonetheless, you two disagreed sharply in that discussion on Ross’s podcast. So I wonder if you could tell me what you disagreed about and what you thought about that encounter in retrospect.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Sure. I would say that there’s a version of Helen’s “Great Feminization” argument that I think is a helpful lens through which to view our employment, and that’s that the composition of workers has changed in a lot of domains. There are more women either at parity with men or in some cases exceeding them. Then you can ask productively, “Well, as that’s changed, have our laws always kept pace with what can go wrong here?” We always are fighting the last war, right? So we’ve spent more time policing excesses of male groups than the female groups. How should we think about catching up? How should we think about if men are now very a small percentage of elementary school teachers? Well, we can’t just think about getting more women to every field. We have to think about what are the barriers to men in entering here and how can we make this a more hospitable job for them, especially when you want young boys to see men teaching throughout their young years. I think Richard Reeves takes what I think is best about Helen’s argument in many ways and frames it in a way I can agree with more: When a discipline is female-dominated, you have to be more thoughtful about what the pipeline looks like for men, in the same way you want to do that for women in male-dominated jobs.
Now, where I disagree substantially… That’s all kind of saying that as you get these shifts, people who are on the losing end of the shift may have a harder time navigating whatever the norms become. Agreed. Helen makes a stronger claim and says women are temperamentally ill-suited for a lot of jobs that are truth-seeking. She says explicitly in her argument that when we reach a point of female lawyers being the majority in American, and female judges being the majority of judges, we will lose our grasp on the rule of law. That’s a very big claim. That’s very different from, “I feel uncomfortable when I’m the only person in this room or one of the 30% in this room.” It’s a claim about women’s ability to do these jobs, not about men and women’s ability to exist alongside each other while doing them. I think it’s a claim that requires a lot more evidence than she provides to support it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Politics has a somewhat orthogonal relationship to the truth. But conservatives can make a lot of hay by pointing to a particular heinous crime committed by somebody who had been released on parole far too many times under far too lenient circumstances. And if the judge happens to be a woman, they can point and say, “See, this is the consequence.”
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think what’s funny is when you argue from anecdote, it’s not as though we don’t have larger forms of data. There is a study looking at roughly equivalent cases assigned to male and female judges, and it turns out that women gave harsher sentences in those cases. Now, that itself does not tell you, “Well, does that make women better or worse judges?” Because to answer it, you have to say, “Okay, which of these sentences were better?” When you argue about the law, you have to bring values and justice into it right away. That’s one reason in our discussion, I wanted to frame some of these questions through some of the more objective professions where women have surged and where I think it’s easier for people with different interpretations about where truth-seeking should lead you to judge whether women are doing it successfully.
Women have become a majority of vets, and their numbers are only growing in veterinary medicine. This is something where if you think women have trouble applying clear rules fairly, where they’re swayed by sentiment, where they devolve into backbiting and gossip, et cetera, to the point where it compromises their ability to do their job — which is Helen’s claim — then I think you should see more dead pets. And if you don’t, then there’s a question of: If Helen’s claim is true, what is the protective factor here that’s leading women to do a good job in veterinary medicine but a bad job in the legal professions? Could you either port that protective factor over in some way, or be curious about why it’s working here and not there, et cetera?
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s, I think, the correct approach. Let me pose to you though the question that it seemed to me Helen either had difficulty answering or didn’t want to answer: What are the sources of excellence that women as a group have brought to the professions into which they have entered in significant numbers?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: So this is a little bit where Helen and I disagree. I don’t think there are strongly male vices or female vices. She takes that framing more and she fills out essentially three boxes in a two-by-two grid. What are the typically male virtues? She talks about the typical male vices, she addresses the typically female vices she covers. And then there’s a lacuna when it comes to typically female virtues. I don’t have the grid myself. I think there are universal virtues of generosity, courage, fortitude, and charity that everyone is called to. And because of your particular circumstances… I’m a married woman who works. Someone else might be a single man pursuing religious life. Someone else might be someone working at SpaceX who’s decided to forego family to just make rockets, right? How we live out those virtues will depend prudentially on what responsibilities we’ve both accepted and found that we must accept, rather than “Well, women are good at caring and men are good at bravery, and women are bad about gossiping and men are bad about sexually harassing people.” That’s really not the framework I use to think about it.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have to ask… One of the ideas put forward is that when men quarrel, they come to blows or shout at each other and then it blows over and they shake hands and all is well, whereas women hold grudges or use passive aggression against each other. Did you and Helen conclude your discussion by shaking hands?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: We did, and we saw each other socially that weekend.
Geoff Kabaservice: Fantastic! Glad to hear it. But I suppose then the question is also raised: Do you think that when it comes to the question about diversity and the need to have differing viewpoints, that it is important to have women and men represented in critical discussions since they bring different viewpoints?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think it is important to think about sampling frames, essentially. I’ve got a data science background, so that’s what I care about. Sometimes gender is the important variable of diversity that you want to focus on. Sometimes it’s less important. If you want to have a conversation about why aren’t men entering elementary school teaching professions, you probably want to have some all-male discussion groups with male facilitators so that guys will feel as comfortable as possible raising their objections and concerns without fear of giving offense. So gender is one among many important factors to say, “Am I capturing all the information I need here?” But it’s not the only one, and not everything needs everyone’s input.
Geoff Kabaservice: Becca Rothfeld in the Washington Post I suspect is not a conservative, and she had a sort of combined review of your book and a review of your dust-up with Helen. She referred to you as “the paradoxically conservative-feminist writer Leah Libresco Sargeant,” and she called your approach to the debate topic “altogether subtler and more slippery” than Helen’s. Rothfeld granted that you made an impressive showing, but she concluded that “Sargeant is to Helen Andrews and various anti-feminist social media personalities what [Scott] Galloway hopes to be to [Andrew] Tate: a moderating — but not altogether leavening — influence. Sexism has two pillars: the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior. Andrews accepts both pillars. Sargeant challenges the second but accepts the first. True flourishing lies in a rejection of both.” How would you respond to that?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I really appreciated that paragraph, though obviously I disagree with parts of her interpretation. But I liked her laying out those two pillars and accurately saying which of them I roughly align with and which I don’t. It’s true. I think being embodied human beings shapes our lives. We are not intellects puppeting meat sacks or, as Mary Harrington would say, operating meat Lego systems where we can snap off different parts at will — but we are our bodies. We’re not simply using or trapped in our bodies. And because of that, the major physical asymmetries, particularly around fertility between men and women, have a lot to do with what it means to treat us each justly.
Now, I think Becca frames that as though because men and women are different, once I acknowledge that it’s embodied and it’s important and it can’t be fully transcended, inequality sort of has to follow. If we’re different, then one must be lesser, and it’s probably the person whose life is more interruptable by pregnancy. That’s where we disagree. I really reject the second pillar she discusses of inferiority. As I said, the key argument of my book is that you don’t need to be interchangeable to be equal in dignity. I think any attempt to push past the importance of being embodied ultimately does disadvantage women. Because it takes this reality and asks women to, as you said, backwards and in high heels put the effort into obfuscating it, to make it a pure trivial while taking the cost upon ourselves and making it invisible.
Geoff Kabaservice: You referred to the famous interview that Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, gave to Betty Friedan in the 1970s, where she essentially said that women shouldn’t really have the option of staying home rather than choosing to work — because difference will automatically be construed as inferiority. It seems to me that that was a major strand of American feminism as it came to be, and ultimately this proved part of its liability in political terms. Would you agree, disagree, refine that?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think a major issue for mainstream feminism is it frames — sometimes explicitly as de Beauvoir did and sometimes inadvertently — a number of pretty ordinary women as traitors to their sex. We know a reasonably large proportion of moms of young kids want to either stay home with their kids or do part-time work, but they’ll often find that in the mainstream feminist discourse, they’re only discussed as though they are moms longing to return to work whose children are primarily an obstacle. That’s not descriptively true. You have to first acknowledge that you’re not speaking for the full range of good-faith women there, and if you want to convince them otherwise, you’ve got to actually convince them rather than leave them out of the conversation.
I think it’s relatively unlikely you’ll succeed, because the reason people become parents — when they’re doing it on purpose, anyway — is because they look forward to the experience of having children. I’ve worked part-time for about three years. I’m full-time at Niskanen right now. Part of the payoff for that wasn’t just, “Well, it makes things easier, I’m paying less for childcare” — though those are all bonuses. It’s that I had kids because I liked kids and I wanted more time with them.
Geoff Kabaservice: Would you say that your view is: For those who want to work, great; for those who want to stay home with kids, also great?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Yes. I’m a pluralist on this. I think it’s good for there to be more space for different balances of choices — also keeping in mind that most people don’t have the economic freedom, even under my preferred laws, to make what they may feel as the absolute best choice. But I think they should have a better range of tradeoffs.
Geoff Kabaservice: Becca Rothfeld seemed to suggest that being a conservative feminist is a contradiction in terms. But one actually can hear this on the right as well as on the left. I wonder what kind of pushback you’ve had from both left and right on your overall position, if you identify as a conservative feminist.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: It’s not the framing I use. I just say I’m a feminist — because I am. I say I’m a pro-life feminist, because that’s the tag in front that does the most to easily distinguish what do I mean by that. That might be different than what you expect. But it is framed more around what I care about rather than a political orientation. Now, as for the pushback from both sides… As pro-life feminists would suggest, it’s that: it’s the emphasis on both the reality of the child in the womb, and the idea that advocating for children before birth could be compatible with advocating for women rather than making women losers in a zero-sum game. That is the most controversial claim I’m making for friends on the left.
On the right, I certainly got a lot of pushback for using the word “feminist” at all. And I’m happy to make the case, both because it’s genuinely what I identify as — I have a definition of it, I’m very comfortable with advocating for women as women, neither as defective men nor as generic humans — but also because although obviously mainstream feminism doesn’t particularly want me identified with it and there’s parts of it I can’t swallow, I think it’s a good-faith tradition of trying to struggle with what it means to be just to women in a world that is often male-normed. It’s a tradition that I think has made some serious mistakes and won some significant victories. I’d be lying if I said, first of all, I wasn’t a tremendous beneficiary of some of those victories and that I respect and admire a lot of the women who have identified with this movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: You wrote a book referencing “the Benedict Option,” which of course is associated with Rod Dreher, a conservative writer who now lives in Hungary, who was kind of calling for a withdrawal from an irredeemable American society — or at least that’s one way to read his book.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I’m going to dispute that that’s his claim, but go for it. Or shall I jump right in there?
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I guess what I’m wondering, more than the specifics of Rod Dreher’s position, is how you relate to the conservatives including Rod Dreher but also including the natalists and maybe even someone like Patrick Deneen, who’s considered to be a post-liberal thinker, or Adrian Vermeule with the Catholic integralists.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: What I really appreciate about Rod’s “Benedict Option,” to start with, was his emphasis on person-to-person community, and that you’ve got to build things where you are even as you may be working for things on the larger national level. I don’t think the book is about retreat. I think it’s about what you’re rooted in, because you can’t go out into the world without something to give. Rod was certainly responding to a period where Christians were so focused on the political scuffles of the day that they were losing their rootedness in Christ.
So the way I frame it in my book is I say the point of the Benedict Option, especially as I’m covering it, is that you’re trying to be a pipe, a conduit that’s open at both ends. You’ve got to be open and deeply rooted in God and Christian community to be able to go out into the world and do good — both ends — but you’ve got to have the first end open first. My book is focused really on the short- and near-term — what can you do in the next two weeks to two months, wherever you are — to live deeper into that Christian community.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me just interject here. You paint a very appealing portrait of some of the Christian communities in which you yourself live and thrive. There’s some similarity to what Tim Carney has written about Catholic communities also in the D.C. area, or Seth Kaplan about Jewish communities (particularly Orthodox Jewish communities) also in this area. I suppose there’s a question as to whether these kinds of communal thrivings and interchanges are possible outside of a tight community, or at the very least a religious community.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think you can do it outside a religious community. I’ve certainly seen people building similar things in California, in Berkeley, in the rationalist group-house scene where it can be less family-centered. In some cases, there are communities that are really centered on groups of families and children, but in other cases it’s kind of an archipelago of group houses, of people working in similar fields throwing parties together, taking things on, taking on big things for each other. I think the Supernuclear Substack is actually a great example of the broad range of people choosing to live deeply in community with each other. Religion helps, obviously, and without it, you really need some sense of a shared sense of the good life that can animate how you resolve your disputes and what you’re directing your house or group of houses towards.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me push back a little more on you about your relations with the conservative community. I would say that there are large swaths of conservative thought out there that are not just not your kind of feminist, they’re anti-feminist.
For various reasons, I had to do a considerable amount of research on Native American cultures in upstate New York, particularly the Iroquois Confederation. Something interesting about them was that women had considerable power under the tribal laws. The men did the fishing, the hunting, the fighting, but the women were responsible not just for the things one might expect like raising the children and cooking and making baskets, but also for farming. The land belonged to the women and they worked it collectively. Women participated in the clan and tribal councils. Older women had the power to nominate or depose chiefs. There were even some women chiefs or queens, like Queen Catharine Montour of the Seneca.
From some dim awareness of this history seems to have sprung this right-wing meme about “the Longhouse,” which is a much harsher version of the idea of “the Great Feminization.” It is that male virtues are being suppressed and persecuted, and in place is being put a kind of woke political correctness which is derived from feminine rule. I wonder to what extent you encounter this kind of thing, whether it’s online or in person or at conferences or the like.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: They’re very online, so I don’t encounter it as much in person, certainly. I think one of the things to note about these fights is you can’t have, I think, a genuine conservatism — or at least a genuine Christian conservatism — that doesn’t have a positive view of what male-female amity looks like, both inside and outside of marriage. If you’re going to start with a presumption that God created the male and female, He created them and He called it very good, you cannot jump from there (even after the Fall) to: “But women are toxic.” The left sometimes jumps to the idea of “toxic masculinity,” to the point where all the advice you have for mothers raising sons, or for men trying to be good feminists, is about making themselves smaller, as though what they are is primarily bad and they’re trying to limit the damage.
I think that kind of language can turn up on the left and the right, just with different sex valences, and it’s false from the start. We are made for excellence. As a Christian, I believe each of us are made to be saints, and the question is how best to live out that excellence. No one is called to a vocation of making yourself as small and as quiet and least harmful as possible.
Geoff Kabaservice: Maybe it’s because I’m an Episcopalian, but I don’t tend to think so much about the terms that you have just laid out.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think they’re good terms!
Geoff Kabaservice: They’re good terms. They’re good terms, but the way that I do think about these issues is the way I think about relationships between the sexes. How does that relate to my overall feelings about politics as a moderate? Moderate has a lot of different meanings and ways you can interpret it. One of the ways I guess I think about it is that men and women are different, as you say, but complementary. And they bring different things to the places where they meet and relate together. Ultimately their ways of finding accommodation with each other is part of what drives history forward.
I feel the same way, in a different vein, about politics. Part of the problem that we are encountering now is kind of a great national divorce between people who will simply take their perspective and will not go in any other direction. But one of the other ways that I feel about where my moderation comes in is that I feel that there are almost no situations where you can avoid painful trade-offs. When I was a TA for women’s history courses at Yale, I felt a little bad because I felt like the message that these young women were getting was, “You can have it all.” I didn’t want to say “You can’t have it all,” but I did say that “Often you will find that there will be various painful tradeoffs that you will have to make, and I’m sorry if we didn’t adequately prepare you for those.”
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I will say I don’t agree with the framing of men and women bring different things and then they come together, at least to a certain point, which someone has described as “fractional complementarity”: “There are some good things men have, some good things women have. One of the reasons we have to bring people together is we won’t have all the good things until they’re together.” I don’t agree with that framing, including because I’m Catholic, right? I believe men and women can have lives of sanctity, incredible transformative lives, without marriage. I believe they can do that in consecrative religious life, I believe they can do it as singles in the world, that their lives are not incomplete until marriage happens. That may not be your view, but it comes up often as a subtext once you start saying, “Well, men have these good things, women have these good things, and it’s good they bring them together because they can’t get them except through the contact with the other.” I’m not there.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. We might talk about that. There was a very interesting Fairer Disputation symposium on Chapter Eight of your book, “Men Into the Breach,” which was you relating to Richard Reeves, who we’ve mentioned already, and Aaron Renn, who was previous guest on this podcast. Aaron writes, “Sargeant’s book is obviously written for women. She is not trying to appeal to a male audience.” I wonder if you think that’s true, number one, but then what your book does offer to men?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I am trying to appeal to male readers, but I agree I won’t appeal to them as intimately as a male author handling some of these topics would. There will be more moments of recognition for a female reader, particularly one who’s also had babies and has gone through certain experiences and goes, “She said the thing I felt but I couldn’t put into words until this moment.” I don’t have any uniquely male experiences to narrate in that way. I draw on interviews with some men, and I had some male readers for the book ahead of time. But I think it’s fair to say that there will be men who will not find that this is the best way to encounter some of my ideas and they may find them more compelling through another person’s voice and experience. That’s fine.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s no secret that men are not doing all that well in American life, or indeed in many places around the world. And this is part of why Richard left Brookings to start his national center for the study of boys and men. This also is coinciding with and driving the fertility crisis which we see around the globe, as well as probably some of the struggles that young people are facing. I found very interesting the Monitoring the Future recurring survey whose data you quoted from in the book. In the years from 2012 to 2022, they found that high school seniors were becoming significantly less likely to say that they would be very good or even good as a spouse. This also correlates with recent polling finding that young people — progressives especially, but not only progressives — are less likely to find either marriage or parenthood worth pursuing. I wonder how your book fits into this phenomenon and these questions that younger people are struggling with.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I find those results really troubling. Because I think you can look at the fertility rate and say, “Well, I don’t care very much whether I have kids. People have kids. I have other solutions to the problems a fertility crunch would give.” I think those views are more defensible if you think people are not having kids out of a positive, optimistic desire for something other than kids.
But when you see people say, “I don’t expect I’d be a good husband.” “I don’t expect I’d be a good wife,” then I think when you look at the marriage and fertility crunches, you should say, “This looks like it’s coming from a place of (at least partially) despair.” And then you have to ask: well, is that despair well-grounded? Is it the case that kids who are graduating today genuinely aren’t and won’t be fit for marriage, so good riddance to them? Or do they have false beliefs about themselves and you want to give them hope? Or they may be on the bubble: They’re not quite ready for marriage, but they’re more marriageable in the future than they think, and you want them to hold on to a sense of how they can improve themselves.
I think it’s kind of a mix. I don’t think people are actually unmarriageable when they reach high school. I’d be shocked if many of the people giving those sour remarks or pessimistic remarks genuinely weren’t capable of caring for someone else as long as they decide to grow in those strengths. And I’m really troubled by it because I think we see, at a time of unprecedented prosperity and better health, people feeling like their lives are narrowing and becoming smaller and less hopeful.
Geoff Kabaservice: But what do you think is driving this dynamic? What is making women, probably for the first time in recorded history, less likely to be interested in getting married than men? What is driving these people’s feeling that they are not maybe worthy of becoming a spouse in marriage? What’s making marriage and parenthood generally seem less appealing to younger people?
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think one thing is that we’re a more prosperous society, and the more prosperous we are, the greater the opportunity cost of children. You’re going to have more foregone wages when you take a step back from the workplace. Because labor costs are higher, childcare will cost more. I think it’s important to be explicit that part of the reason we are seeing fewer marriages and less children is because we are richer. It’s not the only explanatory factor, but it’s one of them. You have to be honest. I don’t want us to solve that problem by just becoming poorer, but then the question is how are you going to blunt that opportunity cost?
It’s two tools. You’re going to lower the cost by offsetting it in certain ways. And that’s where programs like the CTC and the baby bonus say, “All right, you do command a higher wage in the marketplace. You will be giving up more when you have a kid. We’re going to try and cushion that loss somewhat. We’re not going to zero it out, that’s not realistic, but we are going to cushion it so it’s not as high a wall to get over.” I think you really have to raise the salience of what’s good about marriage and good about having children — because what’s worth this opportunity cost? We’re not going to zero it out. You’ve got to say there’s something so good that is worth paying this price for.
I think often when you make the pitches for marriage just in terms of, “Well, married people have more stability. When you give them Likert Scale tests, they say they’re happier. Isn’t that compelling to you?” — it’s not that compelling. I think that people don’t lie back and think of a Likert scale, right? I think it’s partly that you are trying to change people’s sexual practices so that things are more oriented towards marriage than not, but you really want to tell stories and have clear examples of what a good marriage can give you that other things cannot.
That’s why in my book, I’m really straightforward about: what does it mean to me to be married? It’s not just that our family now has diversified economic portfolios, so one of us can go to part-time or be laid off from a job and it’s not a disaster — though that’s nice. It’s that I have someone to have children with. There’s someone who I want to see more of in the world, and that’s an everyday delight. Some of the biggest strengths of our marriage have come during the hardest parts, like our miscarriages, where there’s nothing my husband can do to fix it. But I see the depth of his love and his strength in these moments that are larger problems than his love or his strength can offer.
I think part of what’s a big challenge, when people picture the future and picture themselves not being worthy of marriage, is they’re not sure what to do in those hard times. There’s a distinction between a capstone and a cornerstone marriage. A capstone marriage comes after you’ve accomplished all the things you need to do to be able to get married — you’ve now gotten the promotion, you’ve made partner, you’ve bought a house, you’ve got the stability, you have something to offer — versus a cornerstone marriage where you get married early in life, when your economic prospects are a little unclear, where you’re not sure where you’ll live, you’re not ready to buy a house. And you get married anyway, and the marriage is the thing that undergirds everything as you climb.
I have a cornerstone marriage, I favor a cornerstone marriage, and I think a cornerstone marriage indicates you don’t have to be that good to get married. If you’re aiming for a capstone marriage, it’s less clear if you’re ever going to hit that mark. But a cornerstone marriage says, “Most people are reasonably marriageable and you’re going to grow into the virtues you need.”
Geoff Kabaservice: You also come out against the tradwife model, which curiously has a way of devaluing fatherhood since everything domestic is so much in the woman’s sphere.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Yes. It’s a particular mode of the tradwife model that kind of treats the home as the woman’s sole sphere and that the man should, in some of these ladies’ terms, come home, be treated as a guest, never have to do work in the home. You’ve got a drink for him ready when he comes in. The laundry magically disappears and reappears, et cetera. I think it’s not a coincidence that some of the tradwives who most talk this up don’t in fact have kids yet. Because while I was pregnant, even if it were my goal to do all the household labor, I was too sick to do it some of the time. So is that suddenly a breaking of the marriage compact by becoming pregnant? Or is it a natural form marriage takes?
Then beyond that, even in good times where you could do all this work, I think it’s very weird to treat a husband as though he’s a guest. A guest is to a certain extent a stranger, someone held at a distance, rather than a genuine intimate who sees you when you are vulnerable, when you are not able to do the things you hoped you could do, versus someone who you have to be professional around all the time.
Geoff Kabaservice: I found rather moving the description of your husband holding you while your body spasmed and you vomited. And that is that kind of support that you’re talking about.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: And it’d be a terrible hotel experience, to be clear, if you’re taking that as your goal. “I want to be a gracious beautiful hotel” — well, you certainly can’t ever have a baby near that man!
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s true. I guess the question is… Maybe your husband is a special case, but maybe most men don’t know how they would respond in that moment. And maybe in history, nobody really knew that either. And yet most men did rise to the challenge, much as women rose to their own kinds of challenges.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think I’ve married a particularly good man in many ways, but I do kind of get accused of this: “Maybe you’ve just married the best man, Leah. Take him away and you can’t expect anyone else to have a marriage with a man as good as your husband.” I want to be really clear: I married a pretty good man, but I believe other men are capable of these virtues. I do not think I married the singular good man. Frankly, when I get this feedback, I think it borders on misandry to claim that men are not fitted for these virtues or capable of developing them, though I think it does take practice.
It does help that my husband is the oldest of four and that his youngest sister is eleven years younger than he is. So he had a lot of experience before getting married of caring for other people, of cleaning up messes, of figuring out what he would sacrifice for the good of his family. I think in smaller families, you have to get that practice somewhere else, and you may have to deliberately seek it out. But if you are willing to live for others and die to self in one domain, you’re going to be ready for marriage later.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just as a final point… I think there’s considerable overlap between your project, if I can put it that way, and that of Richard Reeves, which is also about trying to encourage men to be good men. And part of your suggestion is that they be given more opportunities to see what that would be like: Invite your single men over to see what it’s like to take care of the kids, not just to bring them over when it’s time to have beers and watch football.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: That’s right. I think if there’s one thing that would make those high schoolers feel more prepared for marriage and more prepared for kids, honestly, it’s bringing back something like Home Ec where the kids all have to babysit for one period once a week. Because it’s much harder to reason about marriage and kids when they feel abstract to you. It’s much easier to decide, “Well, am I ready for this and what would I need to develop in order to be ready for this?” if you practice as an apprentice rather than imagine it as an abstraction.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Leah Libresco Sargeant, it’s a pleasure as always to talk to you. I look forward to seeing you around the office at the Niskanen Center, and congratulations again on your great new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Thank you so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegnieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
