Coronavirus Is Killing the Working Mother
In Deb Perelman’s recent New York Times op-ed, “In the COVID-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” she details the impossibility of parenting small children during the COVID-19 epidemic, writing, “We are not burned out because life is hard this year. We are burned out because we are being rolled over by the wheels of an economy that has bafflingly declared working parents inessential.”
Perelman’s piece went viral, causing “you can’t have both” to trend on Twitter and receiving a prized retweet from the totem of working parenthood, Hillary Clinton. But as a working parent and as a journalist, I couldn’t help but feel that while it articulated much of what I had been seething about throughout the crisis, it also buried the lede. Yes, fathers and mothers are having a difficult time right now; yes, our culture instructing parents to perform at full capacity in their jobs while simultaneously playing Nanny McPhee to their children is a ridiculously extravagant ask.
But it isn’t really that everyone in the COVID-19 economy can’t have a kid and a job at the same time. It’s that mothers, specifically, cannot. It is mothers, not fathers, who have historically shouldered the vast majority of the childcare burden, and continue to do so during the pandemic, according to one one New York Times survey; it is women, not men, for whom the Secretary General of the United Nations warned, “across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated.” And as Perelman’s piece notes, it is mothers, not fathers, who have historically bowed out of the workforce when their domestic responsibilities increase, thus making it more difficult for them to ever return. It is women, not men, who will take pay cuts and buyouts, who will go from full-time to part-time to no-time, who have spent years accumulating degrees and tasteful outfits and dog-eared paperbacks of Girl Boss, ascending this pile of corporate feminist ephemera to get a boost up the ladder, only to fall rung by greased-up rung. It is women who will learn firsthand what their jaded first-wave feminist forebears have warned them for years: that not only is “having it all” a sham, but that even attempting to have a little bit of both will invariably result in quietly flaming out.
In many respects, this is an unprecedented historical moment, says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Although mothers have been expected to juggle domestic labor with work for much of history, they were reliant on their communities — for instance, grandparents or neighbors — to assume some of the childcare when they were too busy. “There was this integrated community of work, education, instruction, and exchange that was very hard work, but it wasn’t this isolated work,” she says. While weepy, coronavirus-themed Facebook commercials may try to convince us that social media and virtual interaction can supplant the loss of this network, “they don’t have the actual physical coordination and the interdependence that parents really need,” she says. In other words, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in an era where parents, particularly women, are expected to achieve a perfect balance between work and childcare, and for basically the first time in human history, they’re expected to do it on their own.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/working-motherhood-covid-19-coronavirus-1023609/
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