Mothering in a Pandemic: Navigating Care Work, Intensive Motherhood, and COVID-19

Abstract

Even before COVID-19, women around the world performed more unpaid domestic labor, specifically unpaid care labor, than men. COVID-19 has only exacerbated the gender gap in this domestic labor. For Western women, especially mothers in the United States of America, the normative discourse of intensive motherhood and the gendered pressure inherent in the unrealistic standards set by the discourse have only increased the amount of unpaid domestic and care labor required of mothers. Using qualitative, in-depth interviews with 18 mothers during May-June 2020, this study examines privileged mothers' perceptions of what they did well in parenting both before and during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. The mothers' pragmatic adaptations during the pandemic posed challenges to the norms of intensive motherhood, as did emergent ideas about integrative mothering articulated before the pandemic's onset. We find that while COVID-19 has increased expectations on mothers, it has also provided a turning point wherein expectations can be changed, as the participants suggested. Implications for intensive motherhood scholars, mothers, and communication researchers are discussed, along with future research. Keywords Intensive motherhood • COVID-19 • Gendered pressures • Qualitative methodologyThe Organisation for Economic Co-ooperation and Development (OECD) explains unpaid care and domestic work as "non-market, unpaid work carried out in households (by women primarily, but also to varying degrees by girls, men and boys) which includes both direct care (of persons) and indirect care (such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water and fuel, etc.)" [47, para. 2]. As the OECD noted, most

Women in a Time of Crisis: Inequality of Roles in the Family During the Pandemic In Indonesia

“…However, it remains necessary to investigate the pandemic's long-term implications for the personal, family, and social lives of women. This study has shown how COVID-19 has not only returned women to their homes (Cummins & Brannon, 2022), but also "forced" them to be wholly responsible for domestic duties that had previously been shared or abandoned. This, in turn, has justified the unequal division of labor within the household, wherein men are tasked with public duties while women handle all domestic labor.…”

“It made me feel like a shit parent”: an intersectional analysis of pandemic mothering

“…While some have revealed the positive aspects of the pandemic for middle- and upper-class mothers Somogyi et al ( 2022 ), most feminist research on pandemic mothering has highlighted how gender inequities were exacerbated during this period, negatively impacting women's health and wellbeing. Various scholars have taken up and extended the concept of intensive motherhood to understand how pre-existing demands on mothers' time and energy were further amplified, or ‘intensified', during the pandemic as many mothers carried the majority of childcare during lockdowns, often while also managing their jobs and other community and family care work (Cummins and Brannon, 2022 ; Limonic, 2023 ). Prior to the pandemic, many mothers felt the burden of “unrealistic and overwhelming conditions of motherhood”, but during COVID-19 many mothers experienced increased feelings of failure amidst “good” mother myths in the context of the “paradoxical freedoms” under pandemic time (Friedman et al, 2021 , p. 47).…”

Stuck between the ideal worker and the bread winner: experiences of motherhood and work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India

“…Initiatives such as health management, setting up digital communication systems at home and mental health breaks were popular during the lockdown in work-from-home (WFH) situations (Bick et al ., 2021; Boiral, 2021; Goyal and Dangwal, 2022). However, the extant literature argues that for working mothers, the WFH dynamics were more stressful and challenging during the pandemic as they had to manage more than their other colleagues who were either single or were fathers with minimum household responsibilities (Cummins and Brannon, 2022).…”

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