Pandemic shows it’s past time to value working mothers
The chaos of last spring, when schools were suddenly shuttered and everything became uncertain, was unmanageable for nearly every mom I know. A working mother myself, I made it about three weeks into virtual learning and working from home before I negotiated a deal for reduced hours and reduced pay for the flexibility my family desperately needed.
Even then, I spent three hours each night finishing work after my kids’ bedtime, meaning I was wrapping up around midnight each night to catch the bare minimum of sleep I needed to do it all over again.
When it was clear that the fall would bring more of the same, I felt increasing despair welling up inside me. How were working parents supposed to manage this? In the absence of any real solution, government-led or community-driven, some nonprofits and local day cares have announced programming to help. But it isn’t near enough to meet the needs of all of America’s children.
This pandemic has made clear that our society has never fully accepted or accounted for working women. We refuse to acknowledge all that mothers do. We take care of entire households, sometimes by ourselves. We work outside the home, sometimes for more money than our spouses. Research shows that women consistently enroll in and graduate from universities at a higher rate than men, and have for the past four decades.
We make up a full 50% of the workforce, working hard and uncomfortably laughing off sexism on the way (because you can’t piss off the very people who are responsible for promoting you). In addition, we statistically still spend twice as much time doing housework as our partners.
Yet even as moms first trickled into the workforce in the 1940s until we flooded into it in the 1980s, schools’ 3 p.m. dismissal didn’t change, even when moms increasingly weren’t home until later hours. Kids who went to latchkey were pitied, until it became normal and the market stepped in with nonprofit and for-profit companies becoming an extension of the child care industry that previously focused on infants and preschoolers.
So when our school system, underfunded and under-equipped as it is, must keep its buildings closed, and kids have to be kept home yet educated all the same, who will take this on?
Women.
This is widely being recognized by statistics and national newspapers. Despite work and career ambitions, and fathers who are supportive partners, mothers will take on added work at home with the children. None of our other responsibilities will drop off our plates except possibly work, if we can spare the income.
It’s time to change the conversation that we are having around working motherhood.
Child care is not a stopgap measure for poor families or a luxury for career-minded women. Women must be allowed to be fully ourselves, mothering our children in partnership with our spouses or extended family, with support from our communities, while pursuing our own meaningful work outside of the home and financially supporting our families.
What if we approached this moment as though we really were all in this together? What if, instead of being told we aren’t cutting it at our 9-to-5, or that we ought to just to give up our 9-to-5 (as though it were a hobby like crocheting or a problem like drinking), corporate America found a way to fit the 9-to-5 job into the full-time work of motherhood?
Our families will make it through this. Women will still work (even if for less pay), we will still mother our children, and we will take on the education of our children at home, even if no one is there to help us. But what if we chose to find ways to honor both mothers and our children, who will go on to create a future we haven’t even imagined yet?
Let’s use this moment to finally reconcile with the reality of working motherhood.
Stephanie Ranade Krider is a mom of three and advocate for women and children everywhere. The former vice president of Ohio Right to Life, she also is the owner of a consulting firm and the “learning coach” at home for her school-age children.