A New Book Makes the Case Against the Machine and Envisions a Female-Friendly World

Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times—ironically subtitled “a story of industry, of individual enterprise, humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”—opens with an aerial shot of a herd of sheep, fading to a crowd of hats emerging from a subway tunnel. In what glorious crusade do these enterprising individuals partake? The assembly line. Chaplin’s Little Tramp works all day tightening bolts at inhuman speed. When the buzzer for the end of his shift rings, he walks off with his shoulders jerking and his hands cranking, unable to resume being a human instead of a worker.  

In the age of AI as we begin to treat tools as human, have we begun simultaneously to treat humans as tools? So argues Leah Libresco Sargeant in her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. The world, she writes, is designed for an ideal type of human, and that human is the unattached, able-bodied male. Offering and receiving special accommodations for women's biological needs is penalized in a society that worships economic productivity. Rather than honoring and supporting people in all their different capacities, we expect that people “widgetize” themselves into efficient, easily interchangeable parts of a machine. According to Sargeant, due to the interdependent nature of female fertility, this expectation of autonomy particularly harms women, but also the very young, the disabled, and the elderly.

As evidence of this culture, Sargeant lists a series of everyday objects from car safety systems to countertop heights that serve the average male while inconveniencing or seriously endangering women. She contends that women—due to an anthropology that views any deviation from the autonomous, male-coded norm as contemptible—are expected to respond to this hostile environment not by requesting special accommodations but by turning against their own bodies to “prune themselves.” 

Leah Libresco Sargeant

In her chapter “Making Women Better Men,” Sargeant describes the harms of breast pumps, abortion, and the Pill. These purport to level the playing field for women by reducing the interruptions and burdens of female fertility. In fact, she points out, they only make female life “just manageable enough that it can be written off as doable alone.” Chillingly, Sargeant observes, 

We dream of external wombs because it feels more possible to create biological support for a child in the absence of a mother than to win the social support required to sustain the presence of a mother. 

Furthermore, corporations and governments find it cheaper and more convenient to pressure women to neuter themselves rather than to meet their sexually-embodied needs. After all, if the government pays for birth control and abortion, a woman has no excuse for allowing herself to become pregnant and thereby economically vulnerable. It was her choice to bear the baby, and she must bear the consequences by herself.

Contrary to second-wave feminist thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Sargeant contends that it is not women who choose marriage and motherhood who betray the feminist sisterhood but the women who hide their sexual distinctiveness. Any woman who successfully prunes herself to fit the autonomous norm makes life harder for those who cannot do so. The goal of feminists should not be to “pass” in a male-centered society.

But how do we remove the very strong social and economic incentives for women to do just that? According to Sargeant, it will require a whole new cultural mindset. In place of male-centered autonomy, she envisions a female-friendly world, in which human beings are seen less as cogs in the economic machine and more as participants in an organic ecosystem. The “network of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” that Sargeant recommends stands in contrast to the market economy. Instead of keeping a running tab of who owes what to whom, a participant in this type of community gives to a person in need with the knowledge that when she finds herself likewise in need, a completely different person will step in to help. Favors are not paid back but paid forward. 

In place of male-centered autonomy, Sargeant envisions a female-friendly world, in which human beings are seen less as cogs in the economic machine and more as participants in an organic ecosystem.

The first practical step towards this kind of gift economy Sargeant imagines is to be willing to ask for and to receive help. But this attitude is impossible to sustain long-term as an individual. It requires collective action. Unless everyone is on board, the network grows lopsided and dysfunctional, split into a binary of burned-out givers and greedy receivers. For this reason, I’m skeptical that such a norm can be sustained anywhere except within the family, the church, and similar tight-knit communities of care (the formation of which Sargeant describes in her 2018 book Building the Benedict Option). It’s not anything resembling a top-down policy solution.  

Still, the presence of a thriving gift economy within one family or parish can serve as a light to evangelize our larger society about the dignity of dependence. In the Gospels, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, which starts as the smallest of seeds but grows until birds flock from the air to perch in its shade. As one by one, outsiders observe that happiness comes from being willing to be “defined more by our relationships than by our liberty,” as Sargeant puts it, the resulting shift in values could lead to more practical pro-female policy applications like special parking spots for pregnant women and government-funded baby bonuses. 

If this kind of charity towards one another sounds like a tall order, it is. We often prefer the anonymity of the market to the vulnerability of life together, which is, in the words of one commenter on Sargeant’s blog, “far too personal, icky and messy.” But what is the alternative? Dependency bookends each human life. We were all helpless babies once. We will all eventually grow old and frail. And any attempt to eliminate dependency ends by eliminating the dependent—aborting the unborn babies that make women into mothers and killing the elderly that make caregivers of us all.

Sargeant’s book is a must-read not only for those involved in feminist discourse, but for anybody concerned with creating a kinder and more inclusive society. Unless we take action to rehabilitate dependence as an essential part of what it means to be human, we are sure to end up defaulting—as Louise Perry observes in her First Things essay “We Are Repaganizing,”—to a world in which “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Those who are unable to meet the demands of the machine will be discarded, and those who can adapt will find themselves less human for it. However, when we “see vulnerability and do not fear it,” as Sargeant writes, we will be well on our way to a more human world.

Amelia Buzzard is a young mother who writes about community and female embodiment on Substack @ameliabuzzard. Her essays appear in World Magazine, Fairer Disputations, Christianity Today, The American Spectator, and Business Insider.