Leah Libresco Sargeant. The Dignity of Dependence. University of Notre Dame Press, 2025. $28.00. 200 pp.
One of the most haunting scenes in Greek tragedy reflects on the two defining experiences of men’s and women’s lives in much of human history: war and motherhood. The protagonist of Euripides’ Medea is a foreigner and a sorceress, who sacrifices her barbarian family of birth to move to the Greek world with her common-law husband, the hero Jason. Except Jason turns out to be a faithless opportunist. Offered the chance to marry a Greek princess, he gives Medea her proverbial walking papers, although he graciously offers to retain custody of their two children. Medea’s gut-wrenching monologue in response concludes with this: “Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”
Medea’s comparison is apt, as many have recognized in the 2,400 years since this comment was first uttered to an all-male audience on the Athenian stage. Just as the most life-threatening activity in which men traditionally engage is war, so is childbirth the most life-threatening experience for women even today, Leah Libresco Sargeant reflects in her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. But while war has historically offered men a way to exercise their strength to protect their state, childbirth for women is a time of profound vulnerability. It requires a dependence on others that will continue and even intensify after the baby’s arrival.
It is this dependence and its ramifications for articulating a well-ordered anthropology that forms the focus of Sargeant’s book. Why does this matter? Because “no just society can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.” No matter how much people may deny this reality in words, deeds, and policies, “vulnerability cannot be solved; it can only be shared.”
The present essay is part of a roundtable of essays by women (all mothers, to boot), on a book written by a woman (herself a mother), defending the dignity of dependence as a “feminist manifesto.” It might be easy for some readers to dismiss this conversation and this book as a women's issue that is not relevant for the other half of the human race. And yet, part of the argument of this book is that the dignity of dependence concerns us all, because we all start our lives carried by our mothers, birthed by them, nourished by their bodies. Furthermore, even the strongest of male bodies wear out and grow weak by life’s end. But I'm not going to dwell on these particular points, which other contributors to this roundtable have so beautifully addressed already. Rather, I am a military historian by training. So I'm going to take this conversation outside the realm of traditional women's lives—not that it ever was fully in that realm alone.
The story of war across world history is a story of absence—the absence of recognition of the dignity of the weak, those who depend on others for their protection. To be dependent—to require protection from others because one cannot effectively offer such protection to oneself—has historically entailed a recognition of inferiority. The author of one Byzantine siege warfare manual says this quiet part out loud, as he describes the individuals who cannot fight in the military but must be protected during a siege as “the useless ones.” It’s a terrible drag on military resources, he notes, that some military personnel must be assigned to these useless people during war, lest they interrupt the military activity that actually matters. Can’t have hysterical civilians running around the city streets unsupervised while enemy projectiles rain in.
Indeed, we could say this is the default mentality across world history in times of war until fairly recently. Society in wartime organically splits into two categories of people, which have historically been heavily (if not absolutely) gendered. First, of course, there are the defenders, the ones who possess the strength and the financial resources to bear arms. They are most often men. And second (in more ways than one) are the dependents, the ones who cannot fight in the military. Their numbers include women, children, the elderly, and the disabled—categories that can, to be sure, overlap in various ways. They are the people whose dignity will be denied them altogether in case of their state’s defeat in war. Slaughter, rape, and sale into slavery are the trifecta of outcomes awaiting them, should their defenders fail.
It is striking that the ancient Greco-Roman world did not possess clear terms for this category of people in wartime, even as precise language existed for describing military personnel. This absence of language is, in and of itself, telling. Such absences are an admission that some people are not necessary to talk about, except when their very existence presents a problem, a disruption to the oxymoron of orderly warfare. At that point, calling them “useless” or “worthless” is appropriate, because from the perspective of the doers in time of crisis, useless is what everyone else is. It is likewise no less telling that today we do have specific internationally and legally recognized terms for such individuals. They are “civilians” or “non-combatants,” the latter term effectively defining them by what they are not.
Section IV of the Geneva Conventions, formulated in 1949, in the wake of the stunning horrors perpetrated against civilians in WWII, attempts to protect civilians from harm. These laws recognize the dignity of dependence of the vulnerable in wartime. Taken together, they proclaim that civilians in a supermarket shopping for food, or women in maternity hospitals, or children in schools or on playgrounds or undergoing cancer treatment in a hospital all possess an intrinsic dignity and right to life, even if their state is under attack by another.
These laws remind us that the dignity of dependence, already under threat from the default settings of our world, which Sargeant so poignantly describes, is even further eroded in wartime, especially in the modern era of strategic bombing. Why else would international laws need to spell out places where one state should not attack another? Shouldn’t it be common sense that a hospital or a pizzeria or a playground or a residential apartment building are not military targets?
To take the principles Sargeant presents and apply them to war means, ultimately, to confront the continued existence of genocide in our seemingly civilized modern world. The problem is that any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, could be the object of a brutal missile attack or a nuclear bomb or a terrorist group invading a peaceful kibbutz on a holiday morning. It is not only that our own society does not recognize the dignity of the weak. It’s that the weak are considered worthless even today in war zones the world over, deemed good for nothing other than violence and outright destruction. The very attacks on the weak that the Geneva Conventions outlaw are repeatedly violated with no visible consequences for those committing these war crimes—just ask Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian mother and poet, who sent her son away from Ukraine and became a war crimes investigator in 2022, until she was killed during a bombing of a pizzeria in summer 2023. In wartime, such simple acts as meeting friends for dinner can be deadly.
The recent history of war crimes brings us back to something Sargeant hints throughout her book and that is worth emphasizing more overtly: The recognition of the weak as a category of people who should be treasured, rather than annihilated, is revolutionary and exceptional in world history. Put simply, it is unique to Christianity, although Christians too have struggled to live out this call to mercy in full. Indeed, it is no coincidence that a faithful Christian would write this book—Sargeant is a conservative Catholic, and the assumptions of her faith emerge in such tender and beautiful reflections as this reminder of the ties that bind us all: “Our lives render us stochastically vulnerable to each other. We don’t know for sure when or where the next need is going to emerge, but as with the atomic model, we know something about the shape of the cloud of probability. What we worry more about is whether, when that need comes, we will be able to offer a stable bond in response.”
As a conservative evangelical I agree, but I would note that we cannot take the value and the beauty of this vulnerability for granted. Sargeant’s book makes no sense outside the Judaeo-Christian worldview today, just as it would have made zero sense to, say, the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. The earliest Roman law code, the Twelve Tables, includes a striking command to the paterfamilias to kill a visibly deformed newborn immediately. While in all other areas, the father of the family had authority and choices to make for his family, the law in this instance is clear in denying him any choice: to not kill his own disabled newborn would have been legal disobedience, likely to carry severe consequences for any parent tempted to choose mercy. In other words, children like David, whom Rachel Roth Aldhizer describes in her essay, would not have been allowed to live in the Roman Republic.
Thus I would go a step further than Sargeant does, when she assumes that the argument she makes can be convincing solely on its own merits. Without the Judaeo-Christian value system, there is no framework to have any concern about meeting the needs of others, because there is no reason to think that other people have value. Multiple societies and religions around the world in both the past and present have seen nothing wrong with ranking people based on categories of usefulness or convenience or caste or strength or wealth or social power or any other criteria suitable for the moment. Such is the natural default in all human societies and religions apart from Christianity and Judaism.
It is much easier and cheaper and more efficient to declare people as sometimes disposable than unconditionally precious. Without the doctrine of the imago Dei, there is no clear justification for treasuring the weak, the broken, the dependent. By taking on the vulnerability of a human infant and living a life in a human body that was vulnerable to violence, Christ demonstrated the dignity of dependence to us in his own life. And so, Christ continues to call us to himself, proclaiming the beauty and revolutionary power in weakness—that of our children and our own.
