Dependent in the First Place

Leah Libresco Sargeant. The Dignity of Dependence. University of Notre Dame Press, 2025. $28.00. 200 pp.

Early in The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, Leah Libresco Sargeant invites readers to see pregnancy as “the foundational human experience.” Childbearing for Sargeant is fact, metaphor, model. What is so special about pregnancy and birth, besides the fact that it’s the process that brings every person into existence? Sargeant explains why the way each of us got here—through the wonder-working body of a woman—matters for who we are and how we should live. Explaining that significance is surprisingly hard to do. The reason for this difficulty is related to the book’s opening line: “The world is the wrong shape for women.” 

In fact, the world’s language is the wrong shape to name what happens in the bearing of new life. Language about birth defaults reductively to the biological, sentimental, clinical, or political. Our poor language partly accounts for why it can be so hard to say apt words about birth, and also why those apt words can be so hard to hear, because even in those few minutes when we aren’t holding our hands over ears yelling LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU SAY I CAME OUT OF THE BODY OF MY MOM, we approach the experience from the wrong point of view.

Pointing readers to the womb, Sargeant encourages more creative reflection on pregnancy and infancy—not the woman’s morning sickness or the fetus with the fingerprints, not mom’s goddess power in labor or a cute baby’s toothless smile. Sargeant wants our attention first not on either participant but on their engagement with each other. Pregnant woman and developing baby proceed together because of what the mother does: “Every person’s human life begins in utter dependency. Every human person begins their life intimately dependent on the mother who carried them…. they will never be able directly to observe how their own dependency reshaped her life.”  

A woman’s response to fetal need is active, not merely instinctual or automatic. When a woman gestates a fetus, she exercises her agency to provide care. Consider maternal-fetal circulation, a process where “the smallest capillaries of mother and child lie tangent to each other, and nutrients and oxygen diffuse across the gap. The most intimate connection still involves a small separation.” The gap requires  that “caregivers also must commit to a more active choice to sustain the one who depends on them.” During gestation, the woman will repeatedly reach across the gap to provide what the baby needs. The pregnant woman’s reach across that gap demonstrates right call and response to need. After birth the gap gets bigger, and it lets other people see more clearly how a woman provides for the baby’s needs. Then other people can reach across the gap to provide for the needs of both mother and child.  

An infant cries and wants not just anybody but the voice and the scent and the resonant shelter of the one from whose body he came. The giver gives. The recipient receives, then forgets. Dependence is our original and occasional condition. But humans, at least contemporary Americans, may prefer to think of dependence as a preparatory step we take before we turn into what we really are—autonomous self-makers. Sargeant skewers this folly. She argues that humans are frustrated to live in a society that presupposes independence and thereby makes need seem shameful and exceptional. Bodily circumstances make unjust the social expectations for women to shrink themselves to fit into a world shaped for a “model man.” Yet all humans do need help: “We depend on the echoes of other people’s need to know how we began.” That is, we are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent. Forgetfulness of what we really are figures among the reasons communities and policymakers sometimes make it even harder to help others in dependency.

A woman who bears, births, or cares for a child might find the process like an immersive intro course that equips her thereafter to meet the needs of others. Simultaneously, it teaches her how to request and receive what she needs herself. Sargeant doesn’t deny that serving others can be physically demanding. But the physical expansion of a woman late in pregnancy illustrates another important kind of growth. With the maternal body as exemplar, Sargeant shows how other occasions of dependence can bring transformation too. Being called to serve the need of another pulls me to grow in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Confronted with a need that a beloved or a suffering person puts in my path, I recognize my own inadequacy to give what is required. To do what needs doing, I become larger. I also may have to depend on someone else to serve the one who depends on me, and then we become larger together. 

The reader may follow Sargeant this far and grudgingly admit that dependence is a fact of life. But wait. There’s more. She wants us to remember that dependence is more than an unpleasant fact. Dependence underwrites our dignity. It tells the truth about what we are. It builds relationships, promotes growth, strengthens character. Dependence enlarges humans rather than reducing them. In the generative whirl Sargeant shows spinning outward from dependence, help given to one who helps to meet another’s need, humans can fill out astonishing capacities. Imagining women who live as Sargeant advises (and as I think she actually lives) made me feel like some oafish character in a Flannery O’Connor or C.S. Lewis story, a bystander gawping at the surprise glory rising up out of the ordinary looking woman on the street. Sargeant is among the best writers I know in her ability to name matter-of-factly the marvelous parts and the difficult parts of embodied human life—and then hold them together. 

Dependence in human life is not just true but beautiful. Treating dependence as flaw or anomaly squanders a gigantic bonus, buries the lede, hides our light under a bushel. The experience women have of inhabiting a body practiced in dependence is boon, not impairment. And so, itemizing injustices to women and impediments to caregiving, Sargeant confronts with befuddlement the wrong turns that lead Americans to manners and rules directly opposite those that best suit our humanity. 

It’s a risky move to make arguments about human dignity rooted in messy reproductive realities. Sargeant slips past every potential tripwire. She issues no summons to go back to traditional roles measuring female success by big bellies and bare feet. She issues no screed for rigid division of domestic labor, insisting that particular connections between the bodies of woman and child configure that division. 

An argument framing dependence in the call-and-response rhythm of motherhood might risk distancing from those goods humans who do not become mothers. Sargeant clears those obstacles too by addressing men’s avenues to healthy dependence, especially in fatherhood. Still, the implications of her argument for women who are not bearing, birthing, or lactating deserve more time. I trust Sargeant more than I do myself to develop these implications. Developing them would serve an audience that I count among her most sympathetic—those women who anticipate relationships that could bring them to motherhood in the future. These readers might gladly appraise Sargeant’s appreciation for the capacities of the female body in a world designed for men.

Appreciating those capacities need not wait for marriage and a baby carriage. The capacities of the female body, moving in cycles and seasons, already instruct. The sexed body demonstrates relationality rather than interchangeability. Adult humans and their offspring are not just new copies of a single, static model. With parts that shift shape and invite special care, the female body has dexterities enabling distinctive excellences. The very variability of the female body opens awareness that humans do not always occupy a single size, shape, or function. Gladness and gratitude for one’s embodiment can come in advance of potential future fertility. Given the long cultural advantages young women enjoy over matronly ones, and Christian traditions’ occasional elevation of virginity over maternity, it would be odd if sympathetic readers had to wait until motherhood to get cognitive immediacy of Sargeant’s link between femaleness and the dignity of dependence. 

I would anticipate with interest the further analysis Sargeant may offer young women remote from childbearing. Still, worrying too much that an anthropology rooted in pregnancy may alienate those who can’t or won’t be pregnant misses an unmissable point. Like confusion over a story when the reader’s imagination inserts her as the wrong character, such worries approach this human condition from the wrong direction. In this story you are not the mother, you are the baby.

The reason to relate dependence to motherhood is not just to tout motherhood. The reason is that we all implicitly understand dependence as accurate anthropology, because our lives already depend on it. Humans’ origin in dependence—the fetus who depends on the mother who depends on others to help her in this condition—is both a given and an opportunity. Sargeant advises that “pregnancy can offer a pattern for the choice to share vulnerability with others and to meet the vulnerability of others with generosity.” 

Humans arrive in the world through this relationship of need and response. Reliance on others from the beginning assures us that we will return to that condition again. That’s an enormous compound gift, and so is Sargeant’s elegant reminder of it.