Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025) by Leah Libresco Sargeant, a Dispatch contributor.
Each of us begins our lives utterly dependent on one woman. Most of us die in a state of deep dependence once more. All of our lives in between are dappled with dependence, whether through disease, disability, or exposure to the needs of others. Neither men nor women are able to be fully autonomous, but it costs men less to keep up the appearance: Indeed, every month, women are vividly reminded that our bodies can be the shelter to a child’s need. A culture that is afraid of dependence will not be able to fully accommodate women as women.
When women’s vulnerability to the dependence of others makes them too large, too sprawling to fit easily into a culture of individuals, women face pressure to prune themselves. Technological “aids” can present the option of containing and compacting the demands others can make on us. These aids don’t truly reduce dependence, but they make it as invisible and unobtrusive to others as possible. Some forms of need are more easily alienated than others. But women’s own bodies are hard to fully abstract away, even as our cyclic changes and seasons of vulnerability are treated as design flaws.
Women face pressure not just to limit the way they are touched by the needs of others but also to contain the ways women are marked by and vulnerable to change and variation. The ideal autonomous human is stable, static, predictable. Even when a woman is not in a position to conceive a child, the ups and downs of the natural cycle make us disjoint from an increasingly regimented, mechanized world that expects all human beings to fit a narrow mold of normal.
A woman’s fertility and biology generate friction in a world that demands smooth stability. When she becomes aware of the way she is made differently than the imaginary, ideal woman, she must choose whether to conform or find an exit.
Our culture offers other ways to annihilate the female body in order to opt out of the way women are treated. Part of the sleight of hand relies on de-essentializing womanhood. The more the difference between men and women can be described as social, not biological, the easier it appears for women to “catch up.” Women are marked as different by customs, not by our bodies, and thus we can aspire to equivalency without having to lose anything of ourselves.
What began as a way to reject sexist, limited molds for women becomes an eagerness to trim off any part of womanhood that causes friction. It is assumed to be superfluous; a person would be freer as an unsexed human than as a woman. It reminds me of the bloodier telling of “Cinderella,” where the stepsisters each try on the glass slipper. For neither of them do their feet fit, so their mother takes out a knife and cuts off one girl’s toe and shaves down her other daughter’s heel, in the hope they will pass for the mysterious princess. Each is accepted momentarily as the genuine article, but as the prince lifts each girl onto his horse, their self-mutilation reveals itself as their blood drip drips into the road, pooling in the hoofprints.
It’s impossible for a human being to meet an inhumane demand. But it’s easy to feel like the problem is individual, a personal weakness, not an intrinsically impossible standard. The natural is suspect, assumed to be transcendable. A person is assumed to be freer and freer as there is less that she is compelled to do by her nature. Everything is best when it is chosen and could just as easily be passed up.
Starting with this sort of pseudo-blank slate makes it sound like there are infinite possibilities on offer. But ignoring reality, putting our biological needs on the same level as “lifestyle choices,” isn’t a fair playing field. It’s like smoothing out every path and distinctive feature of the landscape, ultimately erasing the paths we relied on to find our way home. Our culture develops natural grooves and smooth slopes in response to our natural needs; not every one of these natural paths is trustworthy, but scraping them all clean loses us our inheritance.
As C.S. Lewis puts it, “There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”
In a particularly stark example, Kate Shiber, a financial analyst for Centerview Partners, turned to absurd means to find an exit from her inhumane work schedule. Her office required long hours that made a normal sleep schedule impossible. She knew she couldn’t appeal to her boss by citing her own human dignity and basic, foundational needs. So she spoke to a nurse and got a note stating that “due to her mood and anxiety disorders” she needed eight to nine hours of sleep a night to keep her conditions in check.
As financial reporter Matt Levine pointed out, it’s hard to imagine any doctor who wouldn’t be willing to write a note saying you needed eight to nine hours of sleep tout court, simply because you are a human being. But the appeal to a medical condition gave Shiber legal leverage. It might be legal to make impossible demands of an “ordinary” human being, but once a potential disability was a factor, she could claim a right to reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Usually, accommodations might take the form of access to closed captioning or restrictions from lifting certain weights—but the assumption is that the “normal” form of work suits most people and that, with a little help, it can be modified to suit the employee’s different capacities.
In Shiber’s case, the problem was that the work structure was bad for everyone, but she might have found a sneaky way to claim humane treatment on the grounds of a particular frailty. It’s the equivalent of an employee who works with toxic chemicals being able to get protective gear, but only because of his asthma diagnosis, while everyone else suffers full exposure.
Initially, Shiber’s employer was willing to make an exception, allowing her “a daily nine-hour window starting at midnight where she was excused from her work duties.” But they quickly withdrew the modification and said her needs went beyond what they could reasonably accommodate. Three weeks after she began working on her restricted schedule, Shiber was fired. The company told her that she was unable to meet the core requirements of the job if she needed stretches of unbroken sleep, and added, in a treacly tone, that they were “worried about the health consequences if she stayed.”
It’s hard to imagine that Centerview could say with a straight face that their round-the-clock demands have no serious health consequences for their remaining employees. As Matt Levine summarized it, “Working investment banking hours isn’t good for anyone, and if you create a precedent like ‘you don’t have to work all night if you need sleep’ then who will work all night?” Through a combination of pressure and compensation, the company has succeeded at denying basic biological reality and making that contradiction the employees’ problem.
An economy where employees are rewarded for foregoing sleep as a proof of commitment is not an economy based in reality. It feels like we’re in the same kind of reality-denying mode as when I was growing up and saw anorexic or prepubescent models in clothes ads as the portrait of healthy womanhood.
A culture focused on expressive individualism and suspicious of the natural and the needed finds it easy to pathologize the real and idealize the pathological. As Jessica Goldstein put it in her examination of the rise of cosmetic dental veneers, which caught on first for celebrities, then for ordinary people: “Veneers are to teeth what suntans are to the skin and dye is to the hair: They are evidence that damage has been done to the body, but are frequently perceived as a sign of health, wealth and status.”
Placing a veneer requires a dentist to grind off a layer of the healthy, if irregular, enamel of the patient’s teeth. The real tooth can’t remain whole under the false facade; it has to be made slim enough to hide behind the perfect, standardized shell. As Goldstein points out, the veneers are not particularly individualized; they are a convergence of many individuals into one model of “perfect.” It’s a more permanent and damaging version of the homogenized “Instagram face” by which, through contouring makeup and injections, women squeeze into an increasingly narrow image of beauty and health.
Once a patient opts for veneers, they can never reverse the process. The tooth is too damaged to face the world again. When women have pared down our connections to others and to the reality of our own body, we retain a little more hope for restoration. What is atrophied or obstructed can often still be regrown. Openness to dependency is relational and regenerative. When the soft matter of the tooth is exposed, it cannot ever be safe again. When we give up the illusion of simulated sameness and stability, we are vulnerable to need but also, at last, open to growth.
