Bio: Agnes Howard is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Humanities, Valparaiso University honors college
Abstract:
Studying the rhetoric of the 2021 New York Times’ special section on motherhood during Covid-19, this paper argues that moms’ sense of crisis then did not emerge from setback in jobs or response to children’s needs in remote schooling. Setback language evaluating mothers’ struggles mischaracterizes them in terms familiar from older conflicts over work, gender, and family life.Covid-19 disruptions for women’s work reveals broad cultural support for moms’ employment. The novelty of remote learning makes inappropriate any charges of return to earlier educational patterns. More intensive motherhood of children during the pandemic is more accurately traced to expanded expectations of childhood among children, rather than return to mid-twentieth-century norms.
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