Pandemic strikes earth. Women affected most?
As a result, some suggest that a year of Covid-19 may undo decades worth of progress toward gender equity in America, that even after the pandemic is brought under control, a generation of working mothers will never recover what they lost.
It makes you wonder: How meaningful was the progress we’ve made in the last three decades, if it can be undone so quickly and so ferociously?
This may not be known by some “vagina owners,” but sometimes babies enter the world through them. I know, it’s just a social construct, but the whole stork story is untrue. Yet, what happens after that is really up to you.
It was around the middle of May that I began to realize how disastrous the pandemic was going to be for mothers. I felt it myself and I saw it all around me, the mounting fear, the feeling of helplessness and isolation as we realized that the institutions we depended on were failing women and children, and that there was no backup system in place. Mothers themselves were the backup system.
There are a great many issues wrapped up here. For some, the question may be who takes responsibility for child care during a pandemic, itself a one-off occurrence that might require some extraordinary choices for anyone. Even women. Especially mothers. If your spouse shrugs and walks away, then you need to have a serious chat with your spouse. If the father was never there for you, then another series of choices is involved which may or may not have been your fault.
But this isn’t an attack on women or feminism. This is life. If you have a child, and you’re locked down, it’s going to be a problem, even if you’re a woman. If it’s impacted your career and you’re the primary breadwinner for the family, then maybe you need to tell your spouse to deal with it. How is that feminism’s fault? How is that society’s fault? Oh wait, what about society’s duty to facilitate your personal choices by providing daycare so you aren’t “burdened” by your children?
Child care centers are shuttering around the country. According to a report from the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, the child care crisis could cost women $64.5 billion in lost wages per year. One study found that even mothers who have managed to keep their jobs have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Mothers are also more likely than fathers to work part-time, and only 43 percent of part-time workers have access to paid sick leave, 8 percent to paid family leave and 22 percent to health care benefits.
Who works in child care centers? How much do they get paid? How much should they get paid? And where does the money come from to cover their “fair” salaries? Or paid sick leave? Or family leave? Or health care benefits? Or any of the list of entitlements that would enable you, feminista, to have the worklife you believe you’re entitled to without the burden of living in a world of your own making and choosing?
Feminism didn’t fail you. You can be any damn thing you want to be, provided you made the choices that allow you to do so. What failed you is maturity, responsibility and rational decision-making. Just as you can’t be in two places at the same time (physics, amirite?), you can’t make choices that can’t possibly work and then complain the neither society nor feminism bailed you out of your self-indulgence.
We might even have to reconsider our idealization of the nuclear family, which we’ve now seen cannot really function without the support of broken institutions, to make way for the notion that raising children is a communal obligation, of benefit not just to an individual woman or couple trying “to have it all,” but to society at large.
There is a reason why society developed to support the things it did and reject the things that made life unsustainable. Being raised by parents is better for children, even if it sucks for career advancement. Having a nuclear family, two parents living together at home, makes for a better family unit because if one can’t be there, you have a spare.
No one can “have it all” because the logistics don’t work. Not for men. Not for women. Not for anybody in between. But if you’re enough of an adult to have a child, then you have undertaken a responsibility for yourself. Society isn’t responsible for being your kid’s parent. Neither is feminism responsible for taking the burden off your back. Adulting is hard. Whining is easy. If it’s too much for you, then you shouldn’t have had children.
But if you have a child, then it’s too late to complain and blame. Your child comes first, even if it means you don’t get to have the fantasy life you thought you were due. And if it makes you feel any better, neither do the guys, who have to suffer reality just like women.
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