Written for a largely secular audience, Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, focuses on love of neighbor as a fundamental human telos. Challenging a society that upholds individual freedom as the ultimate good, Sargeant argues that human beings are ordered towards mutual interdependence. From the micro level (family members supporting family members in times of need) to the macro (a government stewarding its people), we are inextricably bound by bonds of relationship and mutual self-giving. Whether it’s childhood, pregnancy, nursing, old age, sickness, injury, disability, death of a loved one, a mental health crisis, or the inevitable limits of our own capacities, all human beings exist at some point in their lives in a state of dependence on their fellow creatures. Yet it is precisely in this web of dependence, says Sargeant, that we find ourselves most fully human.

Sargeant is part of a cohort of emerging thinkers brought together by legal scholar Erika Bachiochi in Fairer Disputations, “an international community of scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists that aims to advance a sex-realist feminism.” As such, she not only acknowledges biological differences between men and women, but also believes that acknowledging them is essential for ensuring that women thrive. “A feminism that fears acknowledging difference,” she says, “will be unable to advocate fully for women.” In contrast to the prevailing “feminism of freedom,” the “feminism of care” promoted by Sargeant and her contemporaries like Mary Harrington promotes the holistic well-being of women in the context of their relationships, particularly motherhood. The Dignity of Dependence deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in this developing school of thought.

In this self-described “Feminist Manifesto,” Sargeant makes her case compellingly, drawing together personal anecdotes, snippets of research, and poetic prose to form a beautiful tapestry of ideas and evidence. She questions feminist orthodoxy (particularly birth control and abortion) but offers a real vision that pushes further than mainstream feminism, asking not how a woman can get ahead in a man’s world but rather how a world that really doesn’t work for anyone, regardless of gender, can be fixed to accommodate everyone. 

Our society adheres to a “false anthropology of independence,” Sargeant claims, and it insists on a theoretical understanding of human beings as autonomous, “frictionless,” and self-sufficient. Through this lens, being an independent adult, completely unencumbered and able to make and execute one’s own choices, is the pinnacle of self-actualization. Never mind that we all start our lives as dependent, or that most end their lives, frail and elderly and  dependent again. “We take autonomy as the pattern for human life, with childhood a brief, slightly embarrassing apprenticeship… This story of autonomy as the marker for full personhood necessarily cuts many people out of the human family,” writes Sargeant. While a lucky few can and do glide through life relatively independent of others, a culture that valorizes autonomy and self-interested choice is a culture that demonizes the dependent, marginalizes the weak and disabled, and frays the bonds of human relationships.

In her “manifesto,” Sargeant describes a world that is ordered primarily for its own efficiency—a world that, rather than accommodating the most vulnerable, is the “wrong shape” for the majority of people, and particularly the wrong shape for women. The stark reality is that women are quite often limited by biological constraints—they are, on average, smaller, weaker, more prone to certain illnesses, and, importantly, have the potential for childbearing. And despite women making up half of the population, our world is not designed to accommodate their physical capacities. From medicine dosages, airbag heights, and the size of surgical instruments, to the schedule of the 9-5 workday, women “move through a world in which [the female] 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.”