Better Life Lab’s Best Books on Work-Family Justice, Care, and Gender Equity in 2024

Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back by Elizabeth Anderson

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has long wondered why work sucks for so many people. In Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, Anderson takes readers on a journey back into the seventeenth century and lays the blame squarely on the Protestant work ethic pushed by some Puritan thinkers in England at the time. But, she argues—and this is what makes her book essential reading—The “work-‘til-you drop” work ethic that dominates U.S. workplaces today was only one of two competing ideas about the meaning of work in our lives and how it should be organized. The other view, what she calls the “progressive and pro-worker” view, valued all work—called “callings”—paid and unpaid, and defined good work as not only providing one’s daily bread but by using skills and talents people enjoy, but promoting the common welfare of all society. “Child care, elder care, volunteer work for the community—any disciplined activity dedicated to promoting the welfare of other people or society at large counts as a calling. It should be honored,” Anderson explained in this Better Life Conversation with BLL Director Brigid Schulte.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Dr. Uché Blackstock

This poignant and powerful memoir seamlessly weaves personal narrative with a more extensive critique of how systemic discrimination, particularly racism, impacts the health and well-being of Black Americans. Dr. Blackstock’s story is rooted in her journey as a physician. She is one of two daughters of a trailblazing Black doctor—a woman who headed an organization of Black women doctors, consistently offered care to their Black neighbors, and hosted community health fairs—and an advocate for advancing health equity. But what drives her narrative home is her experiences navigating two profoundly influential systems: health and academia.

Education’s impact on implicit and explicit biases is relatively apparent. Children learn to devalue Blackness from an early age, and, usually, they pick up the disastrous habit in early care and education environments. People are less aware of health’s impact on implicit and explicit biases, despite systemic inequalities, harmful policies, and lack of resources, which hurt the people trying to survive without what they need to thrive. It’s a note Dr. Blackstock hits over and over. At its core, the book is a call to action framed by lineage and cultural history. In the last chapter, Dr. Blackstock implores policymakers to create policies that address inequities in housing, education, employment, and other areas that would improve Black people's health and overall well-being. This work has always been critical, but now, as attacks on programs that can somewhat level the playing field are rising, her work to care for those who have been most neglected remains necessary.

Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net by Jessica Calarco

BLL staff writer Rebecca Gale was on her way to a funeral when she made the spontaneous decision to pack Jessica Calarco’s book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, to read on the plane. Maybe deep down, Gale said, she knew that its premise that the United States relies on women to pick up the slack instead of creating a proper social safety net was spot on. Whatever it was, she read it all on that trip, typing notes into the Keep section of her iPhone to ask Calarco in a later interview. The book is both readable and relatable, especially for people who care deeply about the way our country’s policies, or lack thereof, surrounding caregiving, parenting, and support are designed.

Calarco is onto something. There is a reason that women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them, and that if they don’t hold everything together with pluck, grit, duct tape, and super glue that their worlds could fall apart. The reason is that it’s true—maybe not the part about the duct tape and super glue, but so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving because the United States does not have a robust social safety net like many other industrialized countries. We have no federal child care infrastructure nor a federal paid family leave plan. We’ve skipped over building a safety net; instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack. This book is a must-read for anyone frustrated about the status quo and hungry for ways to change it.

The Golden Years: How America Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel

So much about how we talk about America’s aging population is deeply embedded with negativity and bias. But what if we talked about aging differently? What if we saw that our aging population is a triumph of public health initiatives and medical advancements? What if we talked about it as a win for feminism? These are some of the bold narrative changes historian James Chappel introduces in his book, The Golden Years. Comprehensive and well-researched, the book sheds light on mostly forgotten social movements and influential activists who were instrumental in creating some of our county’s longest-running and most effective poverty prevention programs. This book showcases fascinating history while being instructive and timely. This work can teach today’s activists about the long game of narrative change around care and how to mobilize movements around big, nation-changing public policy asks. For more insight, read the Better Life Conversation between Chappel and BLL fellow Katherine Goldstein here.

The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma by Soraya Chemaly

In this moment of polycrisis, Soraya Chemaly calls upon us to consider interdependence as a key survival tactic. Through research and anecdotes, she shows how an ethic of care, long devalued and repressed, is a missing piece of our toolkit when dealing with individual and collective traumas. Chemaly digs into how many of our coping tendencies are rooted in masculine notions of “self-sufficiency,” which often only tend to lead to more isolation. She encourages us to reimagine society with a different vision of resilience—one in which we see ourselves as buttressed by relationships through which we give and receive. In this framework, we are liberated from capitalistic expectations of efficiency and productivity, expectations that often push us to bury complicated feelings. Instead, we are encouraged to slow down, connect, collaborate, and find our way to the other side. Together.

Never Not Working: Why the Always-on Culture is Bad for Business and How to Fix it by Malissa Clark

From her earliest days, Malissa Clark remembers being driven to overachieve. She was always cramming her schedule full and wrestling with perfectionism, never feeling she was doing enough or that what she was doing was good enough. That drive led Clark to become a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia, director of the Healthy Work Lab, and author of Never Not Working: Why the Always-on Culture is Bad for Business and How to Fix it. She’s one of the world’s leading—and one of the few—scholars of workaholism, what drives it, how it can damage health, relationships, and even, ironically, work quality and productivity, and what to do about it. The book is filled with evidence-based research and practical strategies. Schulte spoke to Clark for a Better Life Conversation about the difference between being an engaged worker and a workaholic and some of the uneven ways workaholism plays out across gender and socioeconomic class.

Everything No One Tells You About Parenting a Disabled Child by Kelley Coleman

If parents of children without disabilities routinely complain about how overwhelmed, ignored, and unsupported they feel by society overall, imagine how parents of children with disabilities feel. In her new book, Kelley Coleman offers an empathetic and intuitive how-to for parents of children with disabilities. She offers them a mixture of practical advice and reassurance that they aren’t alone, and that managing both the care and the paperwork really is this hard for everyone. Coleman will save parents quite a bit of time by breaking down how to manage doctors, diagnoses, financial planning, and disability rights. Amidst this advice is a call for building a world in which parents of disabled children can spend less time managing care and more time caring for their kids “exactly as they are.”

The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy by Natalie Foster

Natalie Foster has a bold vision for a new kind of economy in America that would guarantee a floor through which no one could fall. Imagine—an economy where everyone has access to good health care, education, stable housing, time, and support for caregiving. Where Baby Bonds invested in every child at birth would grow and provide economic opportunity, help close racial and gender wealth gaps, and unleash ingenuity. And where jobs would be big enough to support human life. Creating a “Guarantee Economy” is not pie in the sky, she insists. The pandemic unleashed new waves of investment, creative public policy responses, and a better understanding that the way the economy has been set up hasn’t worked for far too many people for far too long. And that, unlike the weather, the economy is a choice. Filled with real-world and hopeful stories, Foster writes, “For those who say guarantees are impossible in America, we say: We’re already doing it.” The Better Life Lab, alongside our partners in New America’s Family Economic Security and Wellbeing cluster, hosted a book event with Foster. You can also read the conversation between Foster and Schulte.

What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill

There's no getting around it: we've got a lot of healing to do as individuals, in our families, across our communities, and really all across the whole country if we're going to move towards a just and caring society. Lucky for us, Prentis Hemphill's What It Takes to Heal offers a collective path for healing that seems less like a brutal slog and more like a beautiful new way of being. Part memoir and part treatise, What It Takes to Heal champions embodiment practices as a way forward to knowing ourselves and each other and asks us to consider: what might be possible if we put healing at the center of how we live our lives?

Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger and Higher Education by Stephanie Land

In her compelling, often angry, and always deeply felt follow-up to her blockbuster, Maid, Stephanie Land bares her life and soul to show how difficult it is in the United States to live in poverty, especially for those with children. She takes on popular notions of “resilience” and the “deserving poor,” takes readers through the Kafkaesque maze of struggling to qualify for and keep public benefits that are supposed to help stabilize families, and eviscerates the argument that people in poverty have just made “bad choices.”

“To change our society’s worship of the concept of ‘resilience’ would require a whole other way of thinking,” she writes. “But that’s unlikely to happen, not when there are whole systems in place to keep low-wage workers so desperate for paychecks that they’ll do all the jobs no one else wants to. Not when it would require trusting poor people with money for food without making them prove they worked their asses off for it.”

The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning by Samhita Mukhopadhyay

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a nationwide debate and culture shift regarding work, how it should get done, and how much it should matter in a worker's life. In the Myth of Making It, former Teen Vogue editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay argues that what she calls our “workplace reckoning” particularly resonated with women, especially women of color and women with caregiving responsibilities.

Just prior to the pandemic, women were inundated with messages from culture, politics, and workplaces that promised empowerment through dedication to a career. Mukhopadhyay recounts the evolution of concepts like leaning into being a “girl boss” and includes stories from her own career and others about how these ideas seeped into their consciousness before COVID caused a major reevaluation of these ideas. The book advises women who want to create change in the world and their workplaces to channel their ambition not toward workplace acclaim but toward transforming their workplaces and living the lives that connect them with others and make them feel whole. When BLL Research fellow Haley Swenson interviewed Mukhopadhyay about the book in July for Early Learning Nation, the author offered this poignant insight into how to do so: Pushing back, she said, “is also something that we need to do collectively. You can ‘quiet quit’ as an individual, but if the person next to you at work is going to pick up the slack, you’re not creating a collective environment where we’re all saying together, ‘This is what we’re willing to put up with, and this is what we’re not willing to put up with.’”

The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor by Hamilton Nolan

Driven to understand the grotesque income inequality in the United States, journalist Hamilton Nolan began to see only two solutions: For the government to tax the wealthy and reform the unfettered capitalism that drives so much of it. Or for workers to band together and demand better. “The only mechanism for doing this is organized labor,” Nolan argues. And he maintains that the labor movement's failure or success “is absolutely central to the success or failure of the American experiment.” The book is a fascinating journey through ongoing efforts to reinvigorate union power, including a drive to unionize family home child care providers in California to further the promise of shared prosperity—something the entire nation can learn from.

Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life by Brigid Schulte

With deep reporting and accessible, compassionate storytelling, Brigid Schulte makes a strong case that the greatest barrier to equity and a better quality of life for people in the United States today is a culture of work that drives many toward exhaustion, burnout, and financial and emotional devastation. Over Work is the result of Schulte’s research and reporting on U.S. work culture while leading the Better Life Lab over the past several years. Schulte’s reporting has taken her across the globe, from U.S. cities to Scotland, Iceland, and Japan, to understand the origins of Americans’ fixation on work and the real-life, ongoing efforts many are taking to transform work to make it serve rather than conflict with personal and family thriving.

Over Work connects the dots between unforgiving ideal worker norms, scant U.S. policy to support workers and families, and growing inequalities at the intersections of race, gender, class, and ability. But in keeping with BLL’s mission to craft solutions to society’s biggest challenges, Schulte concludes the book with an appendix called “How to Change: Tools and Strategies to Make Work Better” and calls for all those this system no longer works for to start building the alternative work cultures we want—here and now. (Editor’s Note: This review was written by Swenson.)

Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section and the Disturbing State of Maternal Medical Care by Rachel Somerstein

Through a mixture of reporting and memoir, Rachel Somerstein digs into the science and history behind the C-section—the most common surgery performed in the United States. Somerstein’s story begins with her own personal nightmare, an unplanned C-section performed without anesthesia. Afterward, the doctors told her that it had to happen this way.

Rightly infuriated by the way her labor and delivery were handled in the hospital, she began to dig into the origins of the surgery, which traces back to enslavement. She also looks into why it’s so common today. In the past 50 years, rates of C-sections have grown considerably, with one in three babies now born that way. Somerstein is careful not to unnecessarily demonize the surgery, and she wants us to remember that it can absolutely be life-saving. At the same time, she uses the story of the C-section as a way to investigate the denial of agency women experience during and after childbirth, the economic and racial implications of that lack, and expands our notions of what true reproductive justice, and care for all pregnant people, can and should look like.

If You Care, the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others by Elissa Strauss

In this brilliantly argued and timely book, Elissa Strauss takes on centuries of theology, philosophy, science, economics, and the pervasive cultural attitudes that have for too long diminished care as a woman’s burden, offered shallow praise, or erased care entirely from our history. Instead, she calls for a total reimagining of care, one that demands we see that it is in our relationships with one another, the way we give and receive care, that we are all able to be most fully human. Rather than keeping care tucked in the margins, it is time to acknowledge, celebrate, and support how central care is to life itself. Check out the joint Careforce/Better Life Lab virtual event with Strauss and New America fellow Sian-Pierre Regis, moderated by BLL’s Goldstein, with remarks from New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter.

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman

In her smart, funny, and timely book, Ruth Whippman explores what it means to be a “good man.” As she wrestles with how to set her own three young boys on the path to becoming good men, Whippman takes readers on a deeply reported and eye-opening journey through the perilous landscape of modern masculinity. She skillfully upends limiting stereotypes along the way and shows how embracing caring, intimacy, and relationships make for richer lives for all genders and a more fully human world possible.

Other Work-Family Justice, Care, and Gender Equity Books Published in 2024 to Put On Your Reading Wish List

Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy by Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit

Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality by Josie Cox

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism by Jenn M. Jackson

Faux Feminism, Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader

Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss by Kim Hong Nguyen