Last year’s theme for chapel talks at the Lutheran university where I teach was “That Time I Asked for Help.” Most of these talks narrated a similar cycle: feeling a need, requesting help, and finding it ready. A few speakers confessed DIY dispositions or called out sins of self-reliance. Overall, the talks aimed to encourage students—who apparently don’t ask for help because they think they shouldn’t need it—to seek assistance from others.
That is a good lesson. But it seemed a surprising one to address to a population that looks to me fairly comfortable accepting aid, fresh as most are from 18-odd years of dependence on parents and quick as they are to avail themselves of college counseling and dining services, accepting due-date extensions or the occasional box of classroom donuts. Maybe their obstacle was not undue self-reliance but a misunderstanding of help itself as something narrow one accepts only in certain life stages (childhood), from certain authority figures (teachers or bosses), or after financial transactions (paying an Uber to take you to the airport rather than asking a friend for a ride).
A story Leah Libresco Sargeant recounts in her excellent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto echoes this misunderstanding. An elderly veteran was unable to visit his wife at a nearby nursing home because he could not clear his driveway after a sudden California snowstorm. When at last he conceded his inability to remove the snow by himself, the abashed post he circulated on Facebook—“I never thought I would have to do this. … This is very embarrassing for me to even ask for help”—drew eager neighbors with shovels and a tractor. To Sargeant, the man’s reluctance to ask for help reveals the “sustained, bitterly cold cultural climate” we inhabit.
Our cultural climate is bitter. But can it really be true that a 79-year-old man never before asked for help or received it? It seems at least plausible that his wife gave him some help, asked or unasked for, through years of marriage. It seems plausible too that the daily life of a septuagenarian might have been laced with helps throughout: a server who remembered his special coffee preference, the nurse gentle at a blood draw, the driver who yielded right of way at a four-way stop. It’s just that he didn’t recognize these acts as the help they had always been. “Help” instead had become exceptional, something uncommon and extraordinary rather than constitutive of existence.
The normal condition for humans is dependence—we start and finish there, and by gradations we depend on others throughout our lives. A system presupposing independence has a “false anthropology,” Sargeant writes. She argues that society should do better to recognize human need. She argues that women, sometimes treated as inferior because of bodily realities, should not have to “prune themselves” to win equality.
The hinge connecting those arguments most directly is women’s proximity to dependence. All humans start life by depending on a female body for gestation, protection, and nourishment. Assuming independence as a norm degrades all but especially women, because biology and culture regularly situate women in service of others. As women care for the young, old, or sick, they depend, in turn, on others to assist them.
Though humans are fundamentally dependent creatures, another fundamental trait—fallenness, sin, plain selfishness—motivates us to pretend otherwise. The fallout isn’t limited to women. But the reality of sex differences over centuries has produced distortions.
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On the first page, Sargeant observes that as a woman, “I move 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.” Her observations carry undertones of surprise, implying that builders of this world neglected to remember women would need to use it too. She identifies dangers from poorly designed structures, like medical research tested only for male patients or car safety devices that protect male bodies and incidentally injure female ones.
In fact, some builders of this world not only did not expect women’s arrival but also precluded it, letting their female counterparts in as guests if at all. Earlier voices in American feminism faulted that bitterly cold hospitality, and we now live in its aftermath.
It is a testimony to their achievements that some women readers may feel surprised to stumble on this warp in the world’s shape. The design flaws Sargeant impugns arose partly through overconfident haste in efforts to reverse sexist exclusion, slotting women into educational and corporate and public spaces made by and for men.
Some institutions still demand that women neutralize their femaleness as a price of entry, Sargeant finds, and she critiques manners that discipline women’s menstrual cycles or lock lactation behind closed doors. Invisible breast pumps and pills to suppress periods may be marketed as considerate gestures but effectively become tools for “helping women be better men.”
Builders of the world Sargeant moves through today knew about the female physical capacity to nurture dependence. They realized that women have periods and feed babies. But they treated that capacity as debility. Priority given to autonomy codes dependence as negative, subordinating and submerging a great source of flourishing.
It seems to me that these world builders thought nonsensically about dependence; assuming independence as our default condition is an irrational judgment about ourselves. That miscalculation ushered in a cascade of others. Seeing help as unusual takes a trick of the mind that recasts it as entitlement or commercial transaction. A faulty definition of help minimizes and monetizes; it devalues care work and excuses some from caring on the grounds that “I don’t need help and therefore you shouldn’t either.” But humans need and take help all the time.
The problem with the world Sargeant navigates is not just that dependent bodies do not fit into molds made for independent ones—because in fact the molds were not made for independent individuals. They were made for individuals trailing support systems behind them, systems providing domestic, relational, and organizational assistance, often from women. These helps could be hidden in plain sight or taken for granted—an underrated figure of speech that stings in this case since whatever is taken is not received as a gift.
The key terms in this book’s title—dependence, dignity, feminist, manifesto—find relation to each other in ways that can repair faulty definitions of help. Dependence is a fact of human life. It is a feminist concern because denying it disadvantages women distinctively. Sargeant’s feminism seeks redress not mostly through balancing scales or leveling playing fields or valuing diversity. Instead, it goes beyond those, recognizing that women’s salient contributions to common thriving come through the biological fact of help.
That is the other hinge linking dependence and feminism: What humans can know by observing motherhood is a detail not to derogate but to claim as an ideal. What Sargeant makes manifest is the reality of human dependence and the good of serving it. Dependence is a basis of dignity as we embrace what we are and grow into service.
Sargeant also shows that dependence stimulates growth. Those who serve expand their capacities. Those who are served fill out the truth of our creatureliness. The body of all together, as community or church, grows through mutual aid. In Sargeant’s reimagination, even unglamorous tasks often classified as women’s work blaze into occasions of agency and virtuosity. Some of the most dazzling sections of the book feature Sergeant reframing tasks of repair or housekeeping as “refactoring,” finding radiant creativity in the mix of skill and care.
The book’s focus on women affords a conclusion important for men too. Appreciating dependence does not mean nodding its approval in a category of humane concepts nice for people who like that kind of thing. Sergeant beckons men to join in this nurture so they don’t miss out on “opportunities for connection and kenosis.”
The truth Sargeant makes manifest inspires her manifesto. For sure, there is a lot of work to do refitting spaces to be friendly for disabilities, encouraging young adults to befriend seniors, and handing babies to dads to hold. But a revolution is not requisite to get people to do these things. People already are doing them, as her pages illustrate.
What Sargeant invites is fundamentally a change of mind first before a practical set of actions. Her book appears in a series, Catholic Ideas for a Secular World, translating insights from Christian traditions to make them accessible to readers beyond. Her insight deserves an especially wide hearing, especially if Christians can proclaim it with right emphasis: less servant leadership as claimed by people more interested in the “leadership” part, and more outright service. Less self-sufficiency and more self-gift. We all bear dignity. We all need help.
Agnes R. Howard teaches humanities at Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University. She is the author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human; her forthcoming book is Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times.
