The Dignity of Dependence - with Leah Libresco Sargeant

In The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025), Leah Libresco Sargeant —our guest for today — envisions a world where caring for loved ones is not seen as an interruption of a real, normal, satisfying life, but constitutive of one. In fact, one measure love might be our “interruptibility.” The myth that we are independent is an “anthropological falsehood” promoting the lie that we can survive or thrive without others who choose to care for us. Women’s bodies point continually to this lie, and its tragic that pregnancy, birth, nursing, and parenting overall are treated as interruptions from work and life. Yet, as she reiterates in this episode, “men can’t get away with pretending to be autonomous, either. They just get caught later.”

We talk to Leah about her book and how it relates to single people, whose lives are often structured so that they simply don’t receive as many interruptions from other people, and often struggle to ask for help. Hope you enjoy the conversation!

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