We are pleased to publish an excerpt from Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Don’t miss the replies from Richard Reeves and Aaron Renn, as well as Sargeant’s response.
Where do men and women undergo risk for the sake of someone else?
For women, pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving are some of the most visible and vulnerable ways we lend our bodies as shields for others. For men, the question of how to offer themselves for others, and when and for whom they will be invited to lay down their lives, has a more diffuse answer.
Historically, just as a woman might expect to enclose and shelter the vulnerable with her own body, a man could expect to extend his physical body over others as protection. He didn’t offer the total envelopment of pregnancy, but he could place himself bodily between the people he loved and physical danger. A man might be called up to serve in a war or to stand between his family and the immediate danger of a thief, an animal, or the ravages of nature. Even working to provide for a family is a kind of bodily extension—offering one’s labor and strength as protection against hunger and poverty. Those opportunities haven’t passed completely. I remember that when one of my friends told me she was dating someone new, one detail she shared won my immediate approval. After a major storm had hit his neighborhood, her boyfriend had picked up a machete and walked out into the wreckage, looking for debris to clear. He was confident that his strength was for sharing.
For my own part, as a woman, I’ve grown gradually grateful for the way that my body enforces self-gift and suffering for others as a regular habit of my life. It’s a relief for me that there’s vulnerability and generosity that come to me unchosen, and even sometimes unwanted. I have to make a choice to strengthen my body by going to the gym, but by nature, and without my specifically setting aside time, the limits of my body offer me deliberate practice in generosity and kenosis. The small private losses and lapses of my body remind me that my self and my strength are not utterly my own. These unchosen practices prepare me to make a more generous choice when the time for choosing comes.
For my husband, there was no direct danger during our daughter’s birth. But labor was hard for both of us, and I couldn’t have endured my part as easily without the sense that our work was shared. For me, it was a relief that I couldn’t say “no” to labor. It was like getting onto a roller coaster; I might have a tough time, but at least I didn’t have to also operate the machine. I could be bad at labor without that meaning that labor would stop, and that was a great comfort to me.
For my husband, there was, at any moment, the opportunity to step away. When he held back my hair as I threw up, when he took my whole weight against him for contractions, when he stayed attentive and present for medical discussions while I turned inward, he might at any moment have chosen otherwise. I was bound to the mast already, but he didn’t have the benefit of the biological surrender that shielded me. My body flexed and heaved without my willing—his strength came by choosing.
As more of life’s dangers become private and personal, the paradigmatically womanly kind of risk remains present, but the public, shared dangers that formed men’s character and courage become rarer. If a man needs to defend his family himself, something has gone wrong with the systems of law enforcement and international diplomacy that are meant to anticipate and deflect or deter the blow. It’s a choice for many men to expose themselves to physical danger, not something they expect to come upon them without warning. When men choose to step into danger, today it is more often as a shared competition with other men, in sports or foolish stunts. There is no beneficiary of their appetite for risk. Women are in danger because of who they are, while the masculine virtue is to choose to step into danger in order to offer their strength to others.
Even as technology and culture change, women are uniquely unable to deny that others depend on us. We can’t live fully within the lie of autonomy. Unfortunately, the culture around us persists in denying the reality of our relationships of mutual dependence. It does not nurture the robust social ties needed to support them. Men are not excluded from these concerns and burdens—every man begins his life dependent in his infancy, and most end their lives in a state of dependence. Men are also represented in other communities (e.g., the disabled) whose lives are more marked by dependency.
But for many men the lie of autonomy is a little roomier, if still restrictive. The unjust demand that men face from a society that distrusts dependence is different from the ones that women endure. Because men can more easily separate themselves from relationships with the weak, they often find that the world expects them to make this choice and that they are further expected to not have any feelings of regret.
For missionary doctor Matthew Loftus, his expectations of fatherhood were informed by the way his own infancy augured a second birth for his father. Loftus’s father later shared with him how much he owed to his son, whose unexpected conception and impending birth was the motivating force for his parents’ marriage: “At my parents’ wedding, people even took bets about whether their marriage would last until my birth five months later. My father has told me more than once that I was instrumental in helping him understand how selfish he was, because I was the first person he’d met that didn’t try to accommodate myself to his needs at least a little bit.”
Until his son was born, Loftus’s father had too much freedom in how he used his strength. The lack of external constraint meant the world was slightly unreal to him. He needed the feeling of resistance to be able to perceive himself, to test his mettle against a truth-telling part of the world. I recognized in his story the same experience described by Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft. For Crawford, motorcycle repair was a way to be grounded in truth, something he had sought but not found in his academic community of philosophers. As he describes it, trying to mend and master the mechanical world forces a confrontation with external reality. A machine can’t be flattered into pretending to be fixed or pressured into deference to your will. It offers the uncontradictable verdict of reality: the formerly sputtering motor runs, or it doesn’t. A victory won in such an arena is a victory you can trust.
In parenting, the success conditions are less clear than those of motorcycle repair, but the enforced honesty is very similar. A child can’t be conned out of his or her stark reality. A child’s existence is always and undeniably something not fully responsive to your own will. There are many paths out of an isolated, turned-in existence, but for almost all of human history, children have been the primary way that we are called to live for someone else.
Men who don’t receive this invitation, who have to cobble together opportunities for connection and kenosis on their own, often feel the lack deeply. One Other Feminisms reader wrote to me to share how hard it was, as a single man in his late twenties, to not be bound to someone. He was grateful for his friendships and the way he became an honorary uncle to his friends’ kids, but he wanted the kind of daily, almost-unchosen way of being on call that he could see family life required. As he wrote to me:
Men, broadly speaking, have characteristic drives to provide and protect. Being a single man can be hard because, since I’m not in any kind of vocational vow (as a married man, a priest, or a religious), I don’t actually have anyone whom I have vowed to provide for or protect. . . . I feel like I can’t really know if I’m “doing life right” or being as charitable toward my fellow humans as I could because there are no particular, instantiated person(s) for me to love . . . just a diffuse desire to love people that comes out in dribs and drabs with my friends and their families. . . . I would actually quite like to be a gift of self to another person/people, and not being able to do that . . . hurts sometimes.
In order to find a way of expressing the urgency of the need to pour out love and make a gift of oneself to others, he felt he had to resort to a distinctively female experience.
I’ve heard that after a certain point, breastfeeding moms just have to nurse their babies because the milk in their mammary glands builds up so much that it actually hurts. This is a particularly visible/salient physiological expression of the same “sensation” (so to speak) that is present emotionally, I think, in the hearts of men who are striving for virtue. I want to sacrifice of myself and my resources to provide and protect a wife and children, God-willing, but at the moment I actually can’t, and it’s a painful sort of loneliness.
Even within marriage, men can feel marginalized and lose the feeling of being necessary. If a man is primarily a provider narrowly construed—a recurring direct deposit in his family’s bank account—then he can be abstracted away.
When economist Melissa Kearney published her book The Two-Parent Privilege, she argued that marriage mattered deeply for children and deserved priority in public policy. She faced a storm of criticism, with many of her interlocutors quick to propose substitutes (and cheap ones too!) for the role a father plays in a family. In one conversation with a fellow economist, Kearney found that he objected strongly to her argument that family structure mattered for children. “He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded ‘socially conservative,’ in a way that implied ‘not academically serious.’ I countered, ‘You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?’”
Kearney pointed to her colleague’s sustained presence to defuse a common rebuttal she’d heard—that if men had anything to contribute as fathers, their absence could be adequately filled by a sufficiently generous bundle of public benefits. She knew that what her fellow economist valued contributing most wasn’t his paycheck, it was his physical, loving presence, day in and day out. Having a good wife who also offered sustained love to their children didn’t render him superfluous; part of what they contributed to their children was the example of their mutualism.
The family is the smallest society and the first one where we enjoy the duties and privileges of membership. With good reason, Saint John Paul II argued in his 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio: “The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. The self-giving that inspires the love of husband and wife for each other is the model and norm for the self-giving that must be practiced in the relationships between brothers and sisters and the different generations living together in the family.”
It is hard on the children and their mother if she shoulders the work of parenting all alone. But the children don’t just suffer for the lack of the actual help (bedtimes, sick days, roughhousing) that their father might provide. They miss out on the example of amity between the sexes, on seeing a day-in, day-out sharing of burdens, unmediated by the exchange of money. Both men and women are impoverished when men don’t know how to use their strengths to support others.
In an age of declining marriage and childbearing, many men feel adrift. In a study of Australian men who had made a suicide attempt six to eighteen months prior to their participation in the survey, three-quarters used the word useless or worthless to describe themselves during their periods of suicidal ideation. Although many of the men considered getting help, their most common reasons for not asking for support were either a lack of trust in the relationships they had (“I didn’t want to burden others,” 66 percent of respondents) or the erosion and absence of those relationships (“I had distanced myself from everyone,” 63 percent).
When the researchers asked the men what restrained them from completing a suicide attempt, relatively few cited finding hope in continuing to live (30 percent) or fear of the experience of dying (27 percent). What preserved them in a moment of temptation to self-erasure was the thought of the world and people outside themselves. The most frequently cited reason to stop a suicide attempt was “I thought about the consequences for my family” (67 percent) followed by two additional other-oriented impulses (“I didn’t want to put the burden on someone finding me,” 54 percent; and “I didn’t want the people left behind to feel like it was their fault,” 48 percent). Even when these men had lost the sense that they could hope for good in their own lives, they retained their sense that they could refrain from causing harm to others.
If men are losing many of the foundations of their friendships and their opportunities to be needed, it is good countercultural work to identify and hold open some of the gaps that required their presence. It might mean inviting a single male friend you want to game with over before your kids are in bed, so he also gets to play with them. It might mean asking your parish to assemble a list of young men that is shared with older parishioners who need physical help. Consider the physically demanding tasks that are usually delegated to paid help, and ask whether it might be something a man wants to be needed and valued for within a friendship.
In my own marriage, there have been moments of high drama, as when I badly sprained my ankle on a reporting trip and Alexi carried me bodily through JFK. “You should marry that guy,” another passenger called out, and I was able to say, with a real smile despite my pain, “I already did!” But there have also been many private, quiet moments, when there was no external obstacle that his strength could conquer. As we lost child after child through miscarriage, all we could do was mourn together for the children we loved but could not hold. I trusted to his strength, even when we both knew that there was nothing we could apply that strength to but endurance. One of the things I asked of Alexi during that time was to pray, alone, for us to have children who survived. I still hoped, but I couldn’t speak the words or hear them without crying.
Strength as a man and as a father means being prepared for many different demands—the readiness is all. Teddy Roosevelt paints a beautiful portrait of fatherly strength in his appreciation of his own father, whom he described as “the best man I ever knew.” In Roosevelt’s recollection, his father “combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.” In showing his sons a distinctively masculine virtue, he did nothing to denigrate the dignity of women, since, “as we grew older, he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded of the boys as the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.” The love that Teddy bore his father led him to a respect mingled with fear and love: “He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him.”
Teddy was in awe of his father, and I suspect that his father loved him so well because he was, in turn, in awe of fatherhood. To flourish, men, no less than women, need a purpose that stirs up both fear and love. The fear is prompted by the demand of real dependence and weakness—if men fail to prepare their strength and to offer it stalwartly in times of need, there are serious consequences to their absence or failure. The love and tenderness come from knowing you were made for this, even when you are imperfect in your duty, that offering your strength is a way of acknowledging and returning the love that made you. For men, just as for women, the world begins with the unasked-for and unearned gift of another’s body and love. That initial gift cannot be repaid, but it can be joyously reprised.
Excerpted from The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, by Leah Libresco Sargeant, published by Notre Dame Press. © Leah Libresco Sargeant, 2025. Reproduced by arrangement with Notre Dame Press.
