Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19: Dispatches from the Pandemic





Price: $49.95

Page Count: 550

Publication Date: March 2021

ISBN: 978-1-77258-343-4

There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers’ care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers’ employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The maternal voices and visions dispatched in this collection contribute to the necessary and long-overdue conversation on, and action towards, empowered social change for workplace justice and the re-evaluation of care work as an essential part of an economic agenda.

These dispatches provide raw, diverse, critical evidence that much of the economy did not ‘stop’ under Covid-19. Production and service work shifted from the paid to unpaid sector creating intensive days of triple shifts for mothers. It shifted to the working unit – the home – what economists declare is unproductive. This invaluable and timely collection is compulsory reading for policy makers and researchers to support and empower mothers, the pandemic's most overworked, reliable, and invisible workers.

- Marilyn Waring, public policy scholar, former politician, and a principal founder of feminist economics

Click here to read a review from The Vanier Institute of the Family

Click here to read a review from Herizons magazine

Introduction
Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green
15
Section I
Mothers and Wage Labour
33
1.
Thank You Heroes
Dara Herman Zierlein
35
2.
Women’s Witness
Cali Prince
37
3.
“Certainly Not an Equal-Opportunity Pandemic”: COVID-19
and Its Impact on Mothers’ Carework, Health, and Employment
Andrea O’Reilly
41
4.
Same Storm, Different Boats: Some Thoughts on Gender,
Race, and Class in the Time of COVID-19
May Friedman and Emily Satterthwaite
53
8

5.
“Who Cares?” Women’s and Mothers’ Employment in Caring
Industries during the First Wave of COVID-19
Gillian Anderson and Sylvie Lafrenière
65
6.
Workplace and Social Justice: A New Feminist Movement
for Labour and Love
Jennifer L. Borda
83
7.
Pink Tax: How COVID-19 Inadvertently Became a Field
Experiment to Test Gender (In)justice in South Asia
Saba Karim Khan
101
8.
When COVID-19 Hit, Our Worlds Turned Upside Down:
A Feminist Antiracist Ethnographic Reflection on Postsecondary
Accommodations and the Work of Disability and Carework
Elizabeth Brulé
117
9.
Mothers in the Legal Profession Doubling Up on the Double Shift
during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Never Waste a Crisis
Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich
131
10.
Disappearing Act: Dance Artist Mothers in the Gig Economy
of the Performing Arts in Canada
Susie Burpee
141

11.
Motherhood and Academia in Mexican Universities:
Juggling Our Way through COVID-19
Lidia Ivonne Blásquez Martínez and Lucia Montes Ortíz
153
12.
An Ode to Academic Mothers: Finding Gratitude and Grace
in the Midst of COVID-19
Sara Hayden and Lynn O’Brien Hallstein
169
Section II
Mothers and Carework
181
13.
20/20 Vision
Maya Bhave
183
14.
Breathe. Exhale. Repeat: A Reflection on Love,
Caretaking, and COVID-19
Haile Eshe Cole
187
15.
Caesura
Jennifer Long
195
16.
Knock Down Series
Barbara Philipp
205

17.
The Balancing Act Is Magnified: U.S. Mothers’ Struggles
amidst a Pandemic
Molly Wiant Cummins and Grace Ellen Brannon
211
18.
Mothering Beyond Monogamy: Navigating Nontraditional
Relationships of Care in the Society of Individuals during
COVID-19
Stevie Lang Howson
221
19.
A Single-Parent Multigenerational Family Testimony:
Living under COVID-19 and Other Orders in Silicon Valley
Perlita R. Dicochea
235
20.
Walking the Talk: (Counter) Narratives for Pandemic
Parenting Young Black Children
Brooke Harris Garad
249
21.
Planet COVID-19: Single Mothering and Disability
Euphemia Bonnitcha
261
22.
“Your ‘Only’ Is My Everything”: Mothering Children
with Disabilities through COVID-19
Kinga Pozniak and Olaf Kraus de Camargo
277

23.
Digitally Mediated Motherhood during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Kate Orton-Johnson
291
24.
Mothering and Family Language Policy During a Pandemic:
An Analysis of Korean Immigrant Mothers’ Narratives
Hakyoon Lee
303
25.
“I Am Always Caring at Home”: Spanish Mothers
and the Challenges of COVID-19 Lockdowns in Childrearing
Ana Lucía Hernández Cordero, Paula González Granados,
and Mar Dieste Campo
319
26.
And Then We Went Outside: A Black Mothering Lens on
Quarantine, Health Disparities, and State Violence
Zaje A. T. Harrell
329
Section III
Maternal Health and Wellbeing
341
27.
Taming the Virus, Midsummer Shaman, and Invisible Invaders
Catherine Moeller
343
28.
Misericordia (1460–1462)
Digital Drawing, Variable Dimensions
Helen Sargeant
347

29.
The First Successful COVID-19 Birth in the World:
Feminist Reflections on the Medical Model of Birth in
a Pandemic
Holly Zwalf
349
30.
“Knowing That I Had Choice Empowered Me”: Preparing for
and Experiencing Birth During a Pandemic
Alys Einion-Waller and Maeve Regan
361
31.
Professional Perceptions of How Women Have Dealt with
Pregnancy and Motherhood during the Chaos of the Brazilian
COVID-19 Pandemic
Margareth Santos Zanchetta, Marcelo Medeiros, Walterlânia Silva
Santos, Luciana Alves de Oliveira, Leonora Rezende Pacheco, Paula dos
Santos Pereira, Sheila Mara Pedrosa, Dalva Aparecida Marques da Costa,
and Daiana Evangelista Rodrigues
377
32.
Smothered and Era Fever
Victoria Bailey
393
33.
Trans-cending COVID-19
Catherine Moeller
395
34.
Outside
Elsje Fourie
409

35.
Mothering during a Pandemic and the Internalization of
Blame and Responsibility
Aleksandra Staneva
411
36.
Context Collapse
EL Putnam
423
37.
Smudging My Home and Family: An Anishinaabeg Mother’s
Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Renée E. Mazinegiizhigoo-kwe Bédard
431
38.
Futures for Ghosts: Using Traditional Feminized Skill, While
Adapting to the Unprecedented, for a Future Unknown
Hillary Di Menna
449
39.
For the Lockdown Babies
Gráinne Evans
457
40.
Are We Not the Heroes? Racialized Single Mothers during
the COVID-19 Lockdown
Punam Mehta
459
41.
The Invisible Frontline Workers: Narratives of Indian Mothers’
Experiences through the Pandemic
Ketoki Mazumdar and Pooja Gupta
467

42.
Everyday Stories on Extraordinary Times: History,
Relationality and Indigenous Women’s Experiences during
the COVID-19 Pandemic
Jaime Cidro, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Wendy McNab, Roberta Stout,
and Lorena Sekwan Fontaine
479
43.
What Are the Ties That Bind?: Mothering and Friendship across
Difference and Distance
Natasha Steer and Jen Vasic
497
44.
“A Wise and Well-Informed Person”—Australian Mothers during
the Pandemics of 1918–1919 and 2020
Belinda Robson
509
45.
No Room for Family: COVID-19 Fatigue
Fiona Joy Green and Tracey Farrington
523
Notes on Contributors
527

Dr. Andrea O’Reilly is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of twenty books including Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond and The Routledge Companion to Motherhood and author of three monographs including Matricentric Feminism: Theory Activism and Practice. She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). She is mother of three adult children.

Dr. Fiona Joy Green is a feminist mother and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg who believes in the power of revolutionary feminist motherwork. She’s interested in the agency of children and mothers, in gender socialization and gender identity, and in the ability of matroreform and feminist motherlines to contribute to feminist theorizing and praxis. She’s the sole author of Practicing Feminist Mothering (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011) and co-editor of three books addressing feminist parenting and maternal pedagogies published by Demeter Press.