Jessica Calarco – Holding it Together (Ida Beam Visiting Professor)

Jessica Calarco, a 2025-2026 University of Iowa Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, will read from her recently published nonfiction book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Publisher Penguin Random House describes Calarco’s book with a succinct summary: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences.” Jennifer Breheny Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough, praises Holding It Together as “both an authoritative indictment of current and past US social policy and an empathetic, unsettling portrait of American motherhood,” while Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, says: “Care is the cure for much of what ails us. But it is also often hard, tiring, uncompensated work that is pushed overwhelmingly onto women. Jess Calarco recounts moving, often wrenching, care stories of mothers, daughters, and wives across America, illustrating the deep injustice and short-sightedness of our current care system. Bring on the care union!” Jessica Calarco is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, an expert on families, schools, and inequalities, and a mom of two. She is the author of Negotiating Opportunities and A Field Guide to Grad School, the coauthor of Qualitative Literacy, and a contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.