Midway in our teaching careers, a colleague and I vowed to help each other say no—to requests to serve on another committee, advise another club, run another training session. We were finding this unpaid work hard to fend off, though planning and grading already took weekend hours.
So, despite an aversion to self-help clicking, I was baited by these Atlantic headlines, “How to Be Less Busy and More Happy” and “Overwhelmed? Just Say ‘No.’” Albert C. Brooks starts the latter by outlining what the two of us believed:
Psychologists have shown that the feeling of being harried and having insufficient time because of busyness is linked to less happiness. Almost everyone knows the sensation that comes when commitments pile up and deadlines bear down. A seemingly innocuous yes to a request is just one more thing added to the pile already weighing on you and making it impossible to pay attention to what you really want or need. The strategic use of no can truly change your quality of life.
The column takes a turn, however, that makes clear I’m not its intended audience. Nor are most teachers, more than three-quarters of whom are women. Because Brooks goes on to explain that his problem—why he keeps saying yes—is FOMO, suggesting most of the asks he gets are novel and enriching: “For neophiliacs like me, you never know when you will find the next amazing thing, so saying no always feels like a big potential missed opportunity.”
This turn was especially jarring since I had just read Jessica Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, which gives voice to a multitude of overwhelmed wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, bosses, employees. Our countrywomen are swamped by tasks often far from “amazing”—and they rarely have the luxury of saying no.
To be fair, Brooks is a psychologist, not a sociologist like Calarco, an expert in inequalities in family and education at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brooks wants individuals to understand their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sociologists help us understand the systems that influence these.
Consider the school system my friend and I worked in: though well-resourced relative to many US districts, it nevertheless functions on a lot of unpaid work, extra work that can be presented as an honor or opportunity but that educators frequently feel obligated to shoulder for the good of their school and its children. This is what we tried to self-help our way out of.
Calarco demonstrates how our broader socioeconomic system operates without the safety net of other nations by relying on the unpaid and underpaid labor of women, especially women of color and mothers. Governments can ensure citizens have decent childcare, education, healthcare, and eldercare, but the US has evolved instead into what Calarco calls a “DIY society [that] is merely an illusion. An illusion that seems real because of the magic that women perform.” America depends on women taking care for aging parents and sick kids, disproportionate housework, lower-paying, lower-benefits jobs, and tasks at work that don’t help them get ahead.
Holding it Together lays bare maddening contradictions of this system. Women who want to work in the home can find it unaffordable, but so can those who want to work outside it. Higher education is presented as the key to financial freedom, but college debt can prevent saving. Red-taped benefits have paid work requirements but additional earnings can reduce those benefits. Family planning improves well-being but reproductive health care is being stripped away.
Women must negotiate the Catch-22s of a system that too often denies them the choice to say no—or yes.
The book explains how an interactive set of powerful myths—including myths about meritocracy and motherhood—sustain a system that unduly burdens women. One of the most potent is that our good choices ensure success.
The emotional infrastructure of these myths is key to understanding how some women can champion a system they suffer under. The myth of good choices enabled one woman Calarco interviewed to ignore how a degree of privilege (college paid for by her parents) and access to social services (Medicaid, tax credits, pandemic relief) had helped her make it through tough times, insisting it was faith and hard work alone. Her resulting pride led her to refuse community with other struggling parents seeking assistance, who she saw as victims of their own failures. Pride, fueled by the myths and fuel for them, allows some to support politicians and policies that undermine the safety net even as they rely on it.
Self-help advice can imply there is something natural, universal, or inevitable about the emotions that motivate our behavior. Brooks contends emotions cause us to take on too much, but when it comes to solving the problem of overwork, he switches to the second-person:
Perhaps neither hyperbolic discounting nor regret phobia haunts you, but you still say yes too much. In that case, the problem may be that you easily fall prey to a sense of obligation or guilt. This is not necessarily a character flaw; it may simply be the cost of being a kind person. But saying yes can be costly indeed if people around you know they can ask you for nearly anything and you’ll accede.
This messaging rests on the belief that once a person recognizes their motivations, they become able to change the behavior causing the problem. Neither problem nor solution belong to the predatory or structural inequities but to those who “easily fall prey” to their emotions and fail to set boundaries.
Among other things, this focus on the individual ignores how emotions can be culturally created. When I worked in finance, I came to feel disappointment when not staffed on the big deals, though they meant less sleep and more pressure. Given my interests and ambitions, a more natural emotion would have been relief. When I moved into the female-dominated field of teaching, guilt was a key component of the emotional infrastructure, but I also felt shame and anxiety about my commitment when saying no.
Why disappointment in one field and guilt in another? The myth of the banker was that bigger is better, that only outsized success counts. The myth of the teacher is that education is a calling, that great teaching requires great sacrifice. It’s powerful stuff. It’s one reason why my colleague and I kept breaking our vow.
Recognizing emotions can be culturally created shifts the focus from “you” to “us.” It points toward systemic problems and the systems-level solutions required to tackle them. Understanding emotions is helpful; treating them as individual neuroses is not.
By making women provide the care it could more readily and fairly provide its citizens, our government is off the hook for essential services, Calarco argues, and it doesn’t just rely on culture to make that happen, it structures benefits and passes laws and institutes regulations in ways that push women—especially the most vulnerable women—to the brink.
With some of the most stressed workers in female-dominated fields—see the teacher shortage, nursing shortage, jobs subject to AI disruption—and mothers more stressed by parenthood, evidence abounds women are at a breaking point.
Having too much on our plates did more than make my colleague and I unhappy. It affected our health, families, and friendships and could make us less effective at the heart of our jobs: the quality of our time with students in the classroom. But as long as the sustaining myths persist, school budgets will be underfunded and schools will produce unpaid work, and those who end up doing it are usually women. Calarco explains how a “union of care” is needed, one that recognizes citizens’ shared responsibility and supports a strong safety net.
We can’t keep expecting women, one by one, to hold themselves, their families, and America together.