Leah Libresco Sargeant, like many authors, has a blog. Like others, Sargeant posts opinions on sensitive topics. But unlike many in a digital culture driven by polarization, Sargeant does something more: she invites readers to challenge her.
“What it means is, I’ve got readers who have been with me for four or five years now who definitely don’t agree on anything and everything with me, and would be really sad if I were president,” Sargeant told Life & Times. “It gives us a space to work together on the places where we’re in agreement, whether that’s paid family leave or more support for moms after birth, and just to hear each other out.”
A resident of Hyattsville since 2022, Sargeant said she was first motivated to move to the area after seeing local children out on a snow day. Parents couldn’t tell the kids apart because of their heavy coats, but it didn’t matter, she said — everyone looked out for one another, regardless. This pursuit of connection is a large part of Sargeant’s life and the focus of her newest work.
Sargeant’s third book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, was published by Notre Dame Press in October. In it, she argues that women and men must embrace their differences and their dependence on others — rather than attempting to handle life alone — in order to lead fulfilling lives and connect to their broader community.
“Our society is founded on a poor conception of what it means to be human, as though we are, at our core, autonomous individuals,” Sargeant said. “When you start with that assumption, you constantly shortchange anyone who falls short of that definition, which is everyone.”
A practicing Catholic and mother of three, Sargeant represents the largely unexplored space between pro-life and mainstream feminism in her work and on her Substack, Other Feminisms. Following the release of The Dignity of Dependence, she gained a wider audience from reviews in national publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post, along with an appearance on The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast.
Sargeant says her openness to dialogue with a range of opinions comes from her early experiences with the internet.
“[I started] writing in college, back in the golden age of blogging, when everything was a big, rowdy conversation,” she said. “And part of the fun of having a Substack is having kind of a curated space for conversation. That’s why I end with questions [where] I often share reader responses. It’s a way of continuing to talk to a group of people when things like Twitter [now known as X] are really fragmentary.”
Sargeant’s book comes at a critical time, when prominent political voices of every ideology have deepened the divide among Americans. In her appearance on Douthat’s podcast, Sargeant was joined by conservative commentator Helen Andrews, who has found prominence with her argument that women should return to traditional homemaking roles.
But what Sargeant has proposed is something radically different — that the U.S. workplace isn’t a good fit for anyone.
“We see fertility being pushed back further and further, marriage being pushed back further and further, and that this is something where people feel happy with the trade-offs in the moment, but not in the long term,” she said. “That’s where I think we can say the workplace isn’t well-suited for this, because it kind of asks you to make these compromises, but doesn’t pay you back in the long term.”
Much of Sargeant’s thesis centers around her experiences with pregnancy and the ways in which mothers learn to lean on others, as well as how the American system is hostile to those who need care.
“I think pregnancy is the kind of very unique way people confront the sense of dependency,” she said. “It’s one of the noisiest ways to be confronted with it, and one of the ways people get confronted with it earliest. … It’s always, for me, that question of — you’re going to find this out at some point — when is the hollowness of autonomy going to be evident to you?”
Sargeant hopes that The Dignity of Dependence’s 232 pages will confront readers with uncomfortable opinions, allow them to sit with the ideas and eventually come to their own conclusions.
“There will be moments where [readers are] hopefully deeply in agreement with me, and then they turn the page and I say something where they go, ‘Oh, but I don’t agree with this,’” she said. “If I could guarantee readers got what I wanted to get out of it, it wouldn’t be a book–it would be mind control.”
Ultimately, Sargeant is advocating for Americans to lean on one another at a time when workplace culture — and American culture at large — often demeans the idea of reaching out in times of need.
“When I give book talks, I tell people that I’d like them to ask for help in the next week with something they could have solved on their own or could have paid to solve,” she said. “That’s kind of the person-to-person place you start. And then, I think, we can go a long way in terms of treating these disruptions as part of the normal pattern of human life.”
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Stella Garner is an undergraduate journalism major at the University of Maryland.