"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."

November 12, 2020 10:41 AM

Sociologist Jessica Calarco about her recent research on mothers grappling with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during the pandemic. [***Content Warning*** description of sexual assault and coerced pregnancy ] The corona virus has illuminated the structural inequities that women face. Women are carrying the weight and dealing with the fall-out. Real help is needed...now. (found via Kottke)
posted by zerobyproxy (17 comments total)

My annecdote for this is today a student told me his mom quit her job to stay home and watch the kids at virtual school... She's go back to work when they go back to school.
posted by subdee at 10:52 AM on November 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

HOO BOY

I have sent this one to my mom and to a fellow parent at our preschool and will be thinking of it all day. I feel like her studies are both very representative of a particularly mid-west pattern (I am Indiana-adjacent) and resonant for every woman with kids I know in this country.

Also, I remember reading Anne Helen Petersen on The Toast. I miss that place.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 11:36 AM on November 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

The study is a pretty small sample of white, hetero, partnered women with enough money to pay bills.
posted by Ideefixe at 12:06 PM on November 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

Someone who works for me still has unused vacation time, and will be taking several half days just to be available when their second-grader is doing remote school to provide tech support and in-person help. (The other days he's attending school in person...for now...)

They're lucky to have time and a flexible manager; their kid is lucky to have someone tech-savvy and willing, with time and flexibility; the spouse is lucky to have them already WFH (in order to keep their own job!), with time and flexibility, with tech skills and enthusiasm. I can't even imagine the agony of choosing your kid or your job, because you don't have that long chain of advantages.

On Twitter, someone said basically, "Since there's a vaccine coming Real Soon Now, it should be easy for Republicans to support cash payments to let people stay home. That would limit the number of additional cases, without being an open-ended public benefit." I think my bitter lalughter woke up my kids.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:26 PM on November 12, 2020 [9 favorites]

Ideefixe, the interviewee is definitely explicit about these limitations, but I think there's a broader picture being presented here-- motherhood spaces we would be inclined to think of as privileged due to those factors have higher commonality with other motherhood spaces on account of the same forces of white, moneyed patriarchic supremacy. Motherhood itself is an oppressed category because the limitations are imposed from similar directions. Article seems to present it as: A white women in a forced birth relationship may not experience the identical intersectional oppressions as a Black woman, but the oppression As Mothers comes from the same place.
posted by Grim Fridge at 12:29 PM on November 12, 2020 [16 favorites]

The study is a pretty small sample of white, hetero, partnered women with enough money to pay bills.

Looking at the actual papers: no, it's a large sample for qualitative research - 65 in-depth interviews is a big study (just think: maybe 60-90 minutes of recordings to be recorded, transcribed and analyzed - and that's before you add the non-verbal data they may have collected).

The sample is majority white (which may reflect the population of the area), and the majority of interviewees had male partners (which, of course, doesn't mean that they are hetero), but they did have a few interviewees with female/non-binary partners (mildly surprising if you aren't actively recruiting for people in same-sex/non-opposite-gender relationships, and you are recruiting in a less urban area). Probably a little over-represented on the advanced degrees (29/65) - that's a common problem in research, as people with higher education are more likely to volunteer to participate. From the FPP itself: one of the few participants the author discusses lost her job at the beginning of the pandemic - and was deeply concerned about the fact that her husband didn't make enough to pay their bills.

I haven't looked into their recruitment methods specifically, but this looks like a pretty good sample considering that qualitative research isn't meant to be representative of the national population. Most qualitative studies are investigating social phenomenon at a high level of detail, looking at the experiences of individuals, and are not intended to be generalizable to a larger population. This is a study of majority partnered, majority white partnered women with tertiary education and the impact of COVID on their parenting and work. That's a valid population to study, particularly as the implicit comparison group is not other women, but these women's partners.
posted by jb at 12:31 PM on November 12, 2020 [43 favorites]

In my annecdote the student was not white but Puerto Rican. FWIW.
posted by subdee at 12:37 PM on November 12, 2020

This article is me. I have nothing to add but my tears.
posted by medusa at 1:09 PM on November 12, 2020 [22 favorites]

I get why some people make “cherish these moments” comments to mothers stuck at home with their kids. They’re well meaning. But parenting during a pandemic is not parenting under normal circumstances.

If you were a stay at home mom any other time, and let’s say you homeschooled your kids - sure you’d be together all day. But you’d also be able to take them to the park, let them play with their friends, go to birthday parties, visit with family, take them shopping, etc.

Pandemic parenting is bizarre, it doesn’t map to any other kind of parenting because you’re both completely isolated and housebound which are really abnormal conditions for most people.

So instead of saying “cherish these times” with your kids, which just makes moms feel guilty that they’re struggling, instead maybe say “this is really hard, I wish I could help”.
posted by supercrayon at 2:08 PM on November 12, 2020 [35 favorites]

Honestly it works out to be divorced right now with a teen. She gets to switch location every few weeks, we both get a break. I can't imagine what I'd do if she were still small
posted by emjaybee at 2:54 PM on November 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

"Pandemic parenting is bizarre, it doesn’t map to any other kind of parenting because you’re both completely isolated and housebound which are really abnormal conditions for most people."

I've been calling it Little House on the Prairie parenting, because I don't know that I would have signed up for a mode of parenting where I'm stuck in my own house with my spouse and children all day every day and get to socialize with no one else ever and have no external support available.

And I mean, honestly, it's going pretty well for us, all things considered. That I work 4 pm until midnight has put us in a vastly better situation than two-working-parent families where both parents are working 9 to 5. I manage distance learning and parenting from 8 to 4 while my husband works, and we swap at 4 and I work and he parents. (Which was an intentional decision we made several years ago to simplify caring for our child with disabilities, but has made pandemic parenting a lot simpler.) We both have some flexibility -- our preschooler often plays Legos on the floor of my husband's office in the morning, so she doesn't bother her brothers when they're in class, and only rarely has she been so loud or whiney or distracting that I have to go extract her. And we were able to afford to buy some pandemic-friendly furniture -- my sons were in little-kid bunk beds that we'd been putting off replacing because we intend to move, but we went ahead and replaced those with lofts-over-desks so they could each have a dedicated workspace; I got a secretary-style desk because I've been working in ad-hoc spaces (because we intend to move!) and with everyone home all the time I needed a dedicated space. Which is in the middle of the living room, but it helps. And our kids have displayed a startling level of resilience and adaptability, and they understand that everybody's trying their best and struggling to cope with their normal supports removed. They make their own lunches and do household chores with less fighting and have been cutting us some parenting slack.

But it's utterly exhausting and there are no breaks, and I'm just so TIRED all the time. And I miss other adults. And I miss ever being by myself; I had no idea how much I valued solitude, but I've been by myself maybe half a dozen times since March, when my husband takes all three kids on a hike, and usually all I can do with my solitude is sleep because I'm so exhausted.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:14 PM on November 12, 2020 [37 favorites]

I will never stop being bitter about my work’s all-staff meeting in May when the male CIO asked staff how we felt about working remotely, and a bunch of men said, “Great! I love not commuting from the exurbs to downtown. I’ve never been more productive.” Then in October they had an IT leadership panel in which all the bosses talked about how they are really doing well working from home, though one female boss who worked upstairs while the nanny watched the kids downstairs said, “Sometimes it’s hard sharing internet bandwidth with my distance-learning kindergartener.”

My colleagues with young kids at home are terrified to talk about how awful everything is because we’re terrified about being called out for not performing at the same level as those men. Leadership sent out an email about the impending budget disaster and said we could go part-time in 2021 and keep our benefits and go back to full-time when the pandemic is over. I thought seriously about it and decided against it because it seems like we’d be more visible as targets when layoffs do come, plus I’d probably have to do the same amount of work in fewer hours in order to keep up with my team. And what if my spouse got laid off and I needed to go back full-time - would they let me? It’s all fucked.

My husband and I have finally worked out an equitable split of the household/childcare duties, and my kid's elementary school/teacher is fantastic, so I am thankful to finally have a rhythm at home that does not send my brain into constant fight or flight mode (I’m a flee-er, which especially sucks during a pandemic and there’s nowhere to go). But my only working parent friends who are doing OK are those who have chosen to keep their young kids in daycare.
posted by Maarika at 6:27 PM on November 12, 2020 [16 favorites]

In a small way, i regret I can't share the article uncontextualized to my local friends because so much of this echoed our experience because our social welfare is thin and overlooks the typical middle class/dual-parent profile so it practically doesn't address the needs of many parents and women and I don't want them to take the piece as an opportunity to feel better about themselves.
posted by cendawanita at 6:57 PM on November 12, 2020

She addresses representativeness of qualitative research directly in the interview:

Other studies — “qualitative” studies like this one — use in-depth interviews (and sometimes small-scale surveys) to understand how people perceive their experiences, what those experiences mean to them, and what motivates people to respond to their experiences in particular ways. … There are certainly limitations involved in focusing on mothers in one Southern Indiana community. The community we studied, for example, is primarily white. We do have Black, Latina, and Asian women in our study, but we can’t say with certainty whether their experiences are representative of the experiences of Black, Latina, or Asian women in the U.S. as a whole. At the same time, getting to know these women allows us to make sense of their experiences and their decisions in the context of their own lives — and in the context of the lives of other women facing similar challenges in their lives.

posted by migurski at 7:00 PM on November 12, 2020 [5 favorites]

You can't include bald people in your sample if you're trying to study demographic patterns in choice of artificial hair color.

For similar reasons, you can't include folks who never had regular paid work, or folks who flatly can't afford to quit, or single people if you're trying to study the gendered patterns in couples where one person reduces their paid work hours.

There are segments of the population who do not qualify to be in any given study. This is completely fine. It's ok to study how privileged people live and work.
posted by MiraK at 7:17 PM on November 12, 2020 [8 favorites]

Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter has featured writing about (mostly) millennial work habits under late-stage capitalism for a while now, and the stuff she's been putting out since the pandemic has been phenomenal.
posted by mostly vowels at 8:50 PM on November 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

A gem from the article:


In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.

Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.
posted by yohko at 11:34 AM on November 13, 2020 [16 favorites]