Not going back: Motherhood in the Covid-19 pandemic

By Agnes Howard

Introduction

Under the cover of darkness on March 4, 2021 a lively group of women from a comfortable neighborhood outside of Boston met in a field to get outside and air their frustrations—in loud voices. Media coverage nicknamed their gathering a “Primal Scream.” Organized by therapist and mom Sarah Harmon, some women simply let loose with yells as loud and long as they could. Others screamed what NPR coverage of the event politely called “curse words.” The outcry gave vent in the only way then allowed to the pent-up pressures of Covid parenting, outdoors with social distancing. A few caveats the group requires drawing right away. It was a group of predominantly upper-middle class women, mostly white, fairly affluent. Still, the emotion and its response were widely shared beyond their zip code. Harmon’s Instagram post went viral. Groups far away, in New Jersey and Brooklyn, in New Orleans and Roanoke and Anchorage, planned similar events (Kelly, 2022; Lukpat, 2022; The School of MOM, 2022).

In the spring of 2021, the New York Times amplified these voices by establishing a call-in line for mothers, perhaps women without a local morning-meeting-scream group of their own, to vocalize their frustrations. The New York Times then released some recordings as part of a special interactive section in its newspaper. Along with recorded clips of these voices, the “Primal Scream” section presented articles with titles like “America’s moms are in crisis,” and “America’s moms are not okay.” One remarkable feature of Covid motherhood was its visibility. The pandemic surprised in many ways, not least in how much of people’s private experience strangers got to see. Pandemic measures like quarantines drove into private space much that used to occur in public—work came home, school came home, activities stayed home. At the same time, unprecedented use of video calls invited millions to beam out into public space what was happening behind closed doors. This new access into our neighbors’ living rooms showed something surprising.  Jessica Bennett (2021a; 2021b), New York Times writer and author of the special section’s lead article, noted that,

There has long been a refrain among working women in America that to get ahead, the ‘mom’ part of their lives needed to be hidden from view….But there is no hiding anymore. The struggles of working parents—and moms, in particular—have never been more in our faces (para.10-11).

What showed up in our faces surprised many. Bennett was right. Women could no longer hide from view the “mom part” of their lives. What came into view, perhaps contrary to prediction, was that pandemic parenting seemed to erase gender equality. This paper engages that phenomenon through two interlocked circumstances surrounding Covid-19 motherhood: women’s management of household conditions and public reactions to the kind of motherhood that was put on display. Pandemic parenthood drafted women into old-fashioned domestic roles, doing more cooking and cleaning and childcare. This reality was disorienting, perhaps especially for the sort of moms who showed up for Primal Scream gatherings or were accustomed to reading the New York Times. For decades, college-educated and upper-middle-class Americans had endorsed gender equality at home and praised men’s engagement in housework and childrearing. Suddenly video calls revealed something contrary, as though perhaps American couples might ascribe to progressive principles in public but regressive ones in private.

Some commentators were quick to fault this as a slip backwards in time, a reversion to the 1950s or 1960s. New York Times “Primal Scream” special-section editor Jessica Grose (2022) observed that Covid’s gendered effects became “a whirlpool, sucking mothers down as the pandemic wore on” (p. 145). She reported one friend joking that the virus was “just a plot by traditionalists to get women back into the kitchen” (p. 145-146). Writer Jennifer Senior noted that Covid resulted in “enforced disaster domesticity” such that “some attitudes toward gender roles actually went back in time.” It became a commonplace for observers of pandemic parenting to label it setback or rollback. Senior wondered why we would “revert to these stereotypes so quickly and so automatically?” (Senior, 2020).

This paper examines the common judgment that Covid was a setback for American women. Its contention is concerned not so much with the specific disadvantages that troubled working mothers during Covid but instead with the popular interpretation of these problems as a movement backward in time. Interpretations of what went wrong for women mistakenly applied setback language to problems more accurately seen as endemic to intensive parenting. Observers worrying about setback tended to focus on backward movement in three areas: working-moms’ employment, remote schooling, and childcare. In all three, I argue that backward movement was never the most accurate way to describe what happened. Stuck in older arguments pitting men against women and careers against care work, these analyses obscured more needful attention to the way pandemic exigencies differed, pushing the logic of intensive parenting to absurd extremes in ways that revealed its futility.

Employment “Setback” or Cultural Progress?

Women’s employment conditions, not unreasonably, were among the first categories registered as setback. Despite a language of “setback” in women’s economic situation due to Covid, in practice the pandemic proved not to be that for many women. In principle, cultural aspects of women’s work situation could even be read as evidence of progress. Before Covid hit, women made up almost half of the American labor force, and in 2019 over three-quarters of American women aged 25-54 were working. Women losing or leaving jobs early in the pandemic made economic commentators worry about a “shecession,” a term coined by C. Nicole Mason, President and Chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (Holpuch, 2020). Unlike other recessions where men’s jobs are disproportionately affected, during Covid women lost jobs at higher rates, in part because of the way its responses shut down service-sector jobs held disproportionately by women. Social commentators found it alarming and retrograde that women were pushed back home. Some women found themselves in this situation both because they lost jobs and also because schools and childcare centers closed, leaving parents with few options but to take on this care themselves. Jessica Grose (2022) reported that 45% of mothers of school age children were not working in April, 2020, and unemployment figures counted 1.4 million more out of work than before in January, 2020 (p. 145). The cost to women during the pandemic seemed to be large and growing, since analysts predicted that women would not only lose out in the moment but would have harder time recouping those financial losses, with long-term negative consequences for work promotions and savings. Some worry was well founded, especially about effects on Black women and poorer women, who suffered more than did middle-class white women, reflecting in part difference in job types and health issues. Non-white single moms reflected the most difficult conditions. For some, problems were grave and their effects not quickly reversed. But for American women in general, long-term financial loss was less severe than was predicted. Covid was not a push backward into stay-at-home motherhood ideals. 

Capturing the felt anxieties of putative economic setback, Brandie Kendrick, a writer on the website Scary Mommy, described 2020 as a year “where you are either a kick-ass employee or a kick-ass mom, but not both. This will be the death of the working mother” (Kendrick, 2020). The error of this prediction invites reflection on “the working mother” as a stock character created in part through decades of polemics over moms’ jobs. Factors advancing or limiting women’s economic status stand apart from interpretation of them. Images of the “career woman” have been extrapolated from men’s work trajectories or from previous decades’ assumptions about women’s work. But the contrast of Covid-19 worries about women’s work with older career-woman rhetoric demonstrates how mistaken were recent “setback” assessments. In the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called mommy wars heard voices pitting the working mother against the stay-at-home mom. Caricatures in those battles cast the former as cool-hearted in consigning children to daycare so she could actualize herself in a high-dollar job, while critical views of the latter saw self-indulgent moms wasting their potential on spoiled children. Remembrance of these arguments underscores how different the Covid-era debate was about women’s work (Perelman, 2020).

Rather than the death of the working mother, Covid demonstrated that the cultural contest has been settled decisively in her favor. During Covid women were not pushed back into antique cultural roles casting them as housewives instead of earners. Indeed, near universal concern about moms’ job losses showed conclusive support for the fact of their employment. Respectable commentators did not worry during Covid about mothers having jobs but worried about the opposite, that mothers temporarily did not have them, and puzzled over solutions aimed to get them back into work, not to keep them at home. 

Educational “Setback” or Unprecedented Event?

The realm of remote schooling during Covid also attracted judgments of setback for moms. The failures of education during Covid, from frantic early efforts and misfires to protracted school closures and awkward distancing methods, were conspicuous in many ways. On kids’ behalf, a common concern was learning loss. While the pandemic indeed may have imposed setback onto children in terms of learning outcomes, for moms, setback is not a suitable evaluation. Remote schooling did not push women backward but confronted them with an altogether new situation. 

After nearly universal school closures in the spring of 2020, many families faced the academic year 2020-21 and even portions of 2022 outside of usual in-person schooling. E-learning during Covid was a novel experiment, a new response to a new problem with newly available technology. Schools, teachers, parents, and students were taken by surprise. The unprecedented character of the experience was part of what made it so difficult, and long-term consequences for children still merit further understanding (Goldhaber et al., 2022; Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2023).

Women were justified in their broadly shared beliefs that they were doing more remote-school supervision than male parents were. A study released in May, 2020 confirmed what many assumed anecdotally, that usually moms and not dads clocked most time in this supervision. This phenomenon hardly deserves an estimation as setback. Responses to Covid school conditions were not predetermined by the past or deferential to the way things were done in the mid-twentieth century. Historical experience could have prepared Americans to expect that either dad or mom might have taken greater share in remote learning. In past periods, fathers engaged actively in instruction for children, especially sons, in training for craft work. Fathers invited children’s participation in agricultural labor, or helped train children by seeking apprenticeships or tutors for them. On the other hand, mothers in the twentieth-century United States have been the ones more likely to show up at teacher conferences and school events. But given the unprecedented nature of the way schools actually executed remote learning, it makes little sense to read the response of either parent as a move backward in time. The precedent of historical experience did not rig the situation in advance so that that supervision necessarily would fall to moms. The adaptive and varied responses women devised to the problem of helping kids with education while having other responsibilities is even more regrettable a misreading than setback in employment terms (Miller, 2020). 

Parenting “Setback” or Category Errors of Intensive Parenting? 

The most persistent “setback” language came in evaluating domestic roles. Here, I argue that the burdens typical of middle-class moms’ situation do not mostly reflect a reversal of gender equality. Instead, the visible domestic labors of moms during Covid offered troubling revelation of motherwork’s multiplication as expectations about childhood have been transformed and informed intensive parenting.

For those not immediately affected by death or illness from the disease, women’s ballooning household labor during Covid was among the most discouraging features of pandemic reality. Time-use surveys indicate that both men and women increased housework and childcare during Covid, though since some men were doing less before, the drama of their new efforts may be offset by lesser previous contributions. Differences between men and women in household labor load are often read primarily in terms of gendered disparity; a de facto sexism betraying more high-minded hopes of equality. But changes in parenting fashions through the last several decades, attested by hands-on fatherhood exhibited by celebrities and public figures, presumably wrought change in this reality for middle and upper-middle-class families. Social elites clearly assume men should be and in fact were much more involved in hands-on parenting than in the past, so the new disparity came as a surprise (Carlson et al., 2022).¹ 

If American dads actually were doing more than in the past, why was household family life so much harder during Covid?  The struggle was not, as was commonly assumed, a result of women being pushed backwards to an older standard. Instead, women’s work overload came from their adherence—perhaps disproportionate adherence in contrast with men–to twenty-first-century manners around parenting, an occupation expanded in degree and kind in contrast to some earlier childrearing standards and amplified by children’s own dislocation during the pandemic. Here it is most clear that standards of an earlier time were not being reinstated or women being driven back into them. Mid-twentieth-century parenting, sometimes caricatured as hands-off or free-range, was not the style that left moms overwhelmed during Covid. Jennifer Senior comes closest to naming the problem accurately, suggesting that during Covid women were “both 1960s parents and 2020s parents all at once, a nightmare mash-up in the space-time continuum, brought to you by a wormhole from hell.”  Senior (2020) named the 1960s in order to reference stay-at-home mom ideals and while the 2020s signifies norms involving two working parents. 

Beyond comparison of decade-typical parenting styles, it bears noting that the current decade’s parenting style invites children to assume much more engagement on adults’ part. The situation of working women during the pandemic might be compared to employees who keep their jobs while a company downsizes. When some employees are let go, the ones who stay on get stuck picking up additional tasks otherwise the whole system would go under. This workaround may seem sustainable after a first round of layoffs but not after a second or third or fourth. An employee formerly busy with one job might be able to absorb a few extra tasks but ought not be expected to carry the tasks once otherwise covered by large numbers of people. Similarly, the expansion of moms’ duties resulting from social and economic shifts might have been sustainable with addition of a few more tasks but not with the accumulation brought by the pandemic. In decades before Covid, American mothers had added paid employment at higher rates to traditional household work and at-home parenting. In consequence, parents turned to daycares, schools, and activities to serve children while moms accomplished other jobs. When other providers of children’s services shut down during Covid, the tasks of taking care of children according to current needs and habituation were more numerous than in the past, and mothers, having managed though delegation much of children’s spheres before the pandemic, were overwhelmed by taking on more immediate care. 

One problem for middle-class women before, but especially during Covid, was not merely one of paid work placed in conflict with home duties, but the changed character of both work and home duties. Many jobs have become “greedy,” in Claudia Goldin’s apt expression, especially always-on, high-stakes jobs. But parenting has gotten “greedy” too. Expectations of what childrearing entails requires much more hands-on activity than in older models. Middle-class motherhood exploded in all kinds of ways to embrace what scholars call children’s intensive or concerted cultivation. The tasks of motherhood have changed substantially because expectations for a happy well-appointed childhood have changed (Gavette, 2021; Goldin, 2023; Senior, 2020).

Moms during the pandemic were relieved from some daily servicing of children’s activities because all those practices and tournaments and meets and lessons abruptly stopped. Suddenly, moms did not have to drive everywhere, pack snacks, and lay out supplies for kids’ many activities. That might have seemed like a relief. However, cancellation of these activities did not uniformly yield gain in available time or tranquility because, absent these usually scheduled programs that have come to fill out the child’s side of the intensive-childrearing arrangement, mothers felt pressed to substitute something to fill those large gaps. Mothers felt pressed and kids pressed them: Kids’ habituation to those activities made them accustomed to receiving more direction, organization, and entertainment from the adults in their lives—here, parents, much of the time, moms.

Overburden for mothers as a function of childrearing practices becomes clearer through consideration of a category distinction used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between “primary parenting” and “secondary parenting.” The Bureau has used these labels since 2003 to distinguish hands-on involvement with children under thirteen from what parents are doing while at home with children under thirteen but engaged in other activities and not hands-on involved with kids. The distinction was devised to avoid double-counting parents’ time at home with kids, distinguishing the kind of active engagement from the time when parents are simply at home doing things while children are also home doing other things. For many middle-class American women until near later in the twentieth century, secondary parenting used to be what motherhood basically just was, moms being present with children but also doing other things. When work and family became physically separate for most American adults, two-parent households with both engaged in work for pay outside the home, accounting seemed more accurate with primary childcare set apart from the more passive spending of time together. In popular parlance, quality time marked the intentional or primary way of engaging children when at home, while shorter spans engaged secondary parenting since families felt pressed to make time together mean more when there was less of it.(Allard et al., 2007).²  

The pandemic’s blurring of primary and secondary parenting may explain motherhood stresses of the period more fruitfully than do setback theories. During Covid parents may have been keenly self-aware about working from home, but the boundaries they set on their time likely was less evident a legitimate distinction to children. Perhaps even in ideal circumstances, a primary-parenting and secondary-parenting distinction might make sense to parents but not to the children who seek a preferred response from their parents. Furthermore, as busy pre-Covid activity schedules evidenced, middle-class children may have become acculturated to assuming that the interaction they sought from adults was more often of the primary kind, even if this “parenting” was not always provided by their own parents. Then, during Covid, when families were together at home more than usual, children presented as needing primary parenting during hours structurally more suited to secondary parenting. Moms who reported feeling overextended or in crisis may have found themselves in secondary-parenting circumstances trying to meet kids’ demands for primary attention, including demands that ordinarily would have been directed to teachers, coaches, babysitters, or playmates. 

The women profiled in the lead article of the “Primal Scream” section clarify these distinctions. Their experience underscores the claim that the real driver of predawn screaming was not setback but pre-existing frustration from intensive parenting’s tangled primary and secondary demands. Jessica Bennett’s (2021b) feature article traces the daily life of three working moms during the pandemic. All three found themselves stretched thin trying to meet demands of jobs, plus parenting, plus remote schooling. The first woman in Bennett’s study, Dekeda Brown, a Maryland mother of two daughters, appears in pictures in what would become the iconic illustration of the new phenomenon, working-from-home. She has several laptops open on her dining table. Meanwhile she struggles to help her daughter, who struggles with learning difficulties, manage her own remote schoolwork. Brown clearly exhibits high-level organization skills. She has a supportive spouse. Still, Brown was stretched thin by inability to do her paid work during “secondary” parenting spans because her daughters’ needs required her primary parenting. 

The second woman Bennett (2021b) studies in the article, Mercedes Quintana, is a California mother of a preschooler with even more challenging work conditions. With a young child at home, Quintana is unable even to set up her work at a proper table, instead pictured doing her laptop-enabled job from inside a closet while her daughter plays at her side. The computer sits on the footrest from a rocker-glider, that chair with symbolic freight as new moms’ favored seat for breastfeeding. The implausibility of any real divide between primary from secondary parenting is made conspicuous. That non-existent boundary is even more conspicuous in a picture revealing activities in two adjacent rooms in the Quintana home. In one room, a bathroom on the left, Mercedes has stepped away from her work to help her child on the toilet while, on the right, her husband continues work in his home office–quiet, orderly, uninterrupted–immediately next door. This picture may seem perfectly scripted to underline disparities between men and women. Her husband is positioned in a way that makes clear separations between his job duties and his spousal and parental ones. On the other hand, Mercedes clearly is not able to set the conditions for her work. She is exposed, an embodiment of interruption. The gender roles here look old-fashioned, even nearly illustrative of setback. Brown and Quintana have what appear to be supportive spouses but still find themselves shouldering more responsibility for their children.

We might view the conditions of Mercedes and Dekeda as unjustly gendered household arrangements. But the fault cannot be said to lie flatly with something like men’s unwillingness to divide chores and childcare. Instead blameworthy is the way both childcare and work have changed, with women often absorbing the changed terms to meet expanded expectations. These experiences, pictured in Bennett’s (2021b) article, show that distinctions between primary and secondary parenting hold for men in ways they do not for women. Consider Mercedes’s further description of how she starts her days. Mercedes reports that she cooks three separate breakfasts, one for each member of the household, because she defines herself “as a good mom by providing them.” The standards of what would be nice for her child, especially in compensation for the stresses of Covid, pushes her to this additional effort, though she resents being “expected to entertain Mila and make breakfast for everyone.” Of course, Mercedes does not have to make three breakfasts. While very young children may require some level of parental engagement, the unique conditions of the pandemic made some older children also expect entertainment. The desires of children, young or not so young—desired with substantial cultural approval–came arrayed against the needs of women in their capacities as workers. Mila may put her finger on the problem most clearly, in Bennett’s (2021b) report that the child, reluctant to cede the attention given when her mother shifts from primary-parenting to secondary-parenting levels, tends to react with an outburst. Whenever Mercedes opens her laptop, Mila shouts, “MAMA NO WORK!!”

It would be a mistake to read the experiences of Mercedes and Dekeda as undermined mostly by antique gender roles rather than by current social expectations of intensive—especially emotionally intensive—parenting. The source of this undermining is underscored by the third of Bennett’s (2021b) subjects, Liz Halfhill. Because Liz is a single mom, gendered disproportion in childrearing cannot be availed to explain her aggravated stressors. Since she is not sharing home duties with a spouse, disproportion in sharing duties is not at fault. Holding a job and trying to complete a degree program in order to get better work, Liz’s time is stretched about as far as it can go. Multiple images of Liz aim to pair for readers’ response the exhaustion of Liz’s life and the tenderness and energy she expends in her motherhood. Photos show that the way Liz cares for her child—playfully sparring with her son while fixing their breakfast, comforting him through anxieties produced by e-learning, sharing the ranch dressing at their dinner table—is not typical motherhood from the middle of the last century. This is not a setback to June Cleaver parenting. Instead, it follows social expectations of intensive parenting. The images further illustrate that many demands in intensive parenting are not results simplistically of faulty work-life balance or sexism but proceed from children themselves, culturally habituated to resist limiting their primary demands on parents’ time.

Conclusion

All three women in Bennett’s (2021b) study not only illustrate the combined pressures that created a felt crisis, but also indicate why this crisis was never helpfully interpreted as a setback. “Setback” language mischaracterized women’s economic achievements, the normalizing of women in the workforce distinct from outdated mommy-wars rhetoric. Setback language also underappreciated the novelty of remote schooling. Finally, setback language misled by evaluating motherhood in terms of gender-role disparities that do not adequately account for the character of twenty-first century parenting norms. Arguments over how much work men and women divide illuminate less than does attention to the kind of work that now comprises parenting, the way children are engaged through other institutions (whose pandemic closure multiplied parents’ compensatory exertions), and the way those expectations ill fit categories designed for adults’ experience in family life. 

Analysts were right to recognize that Covid-19 circumstances posed particular problems for working mothers but the tendency to interpret these problems as setback muddled judgment. These extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic were misfitted into molds determined by chronological progress or regress. The narrow character of these frameworks, the male-female dynamic assessed for sexism or forward-backward schedule of progress, gets in the way of understanding a many-sourced problem. The problematic household realities of Covid did not chiefly pit one parent against the other. Family responses to those realities did not chiefly alarm by nostalgic gazes backward but by displaying the unsustainability of contemporary parenting arrangements. Covid did not create the parenting crisis but made it visible—from one parent to the other, from teachers to parents, and across screens from the privacy of one household to another. 

American Time Use Survey (ATUS) researchers requested information from survey participants for secondary parenting as on their “more passive form of childcare,” asking about time when a child under 13 was “in your care.” This distinction “is more passive–and a more encompassing–notion of childcare than the activity-based concept used in the past.”

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Footnotes:

1.  Carlson et al. asked the question this way: did the pandemic exacerbate existing disproportion of maternal labor, or give opportunity for men to live up to their stated intention of greater domestic activity and childrearing? Time-use surveys indicate that both men and women increased housework and childcare. ↩︎
2. American Time Use Survey (ATUS) researchers requested information from survey participants for secondary parenting as on their “more passive form of childcare,” asking about time when a child under 13 was “in your care.” This distinction “is more passive–and a more encompassing–notion of childcare than the activity-based concept used in the past.” ↩︎