“Responsibility to deal is on me”
Working mothers are taking on more duties, trapped at home or on front lines, during the coronavirus pandemic
As soon as she began planning to work from home, Saba Lurie knew she would need to make major adjustments in how she operates her private psychotherapy practice, from counseling patients through a screen to managing her staff remotely. She also quickly realized that, because her husband earns a higher salary, the bulk of the domestic work would fall on her.
The aggravations added up quickly: Her bathroom became an emergency office.
“It’s the one place I can close the door and lock it,” she said.
Her husband, unaccustomed to balancing his workday schedule with hers, forgot to tell her about some of his conference calls, leaving Lurie scrambling to figure out how to tend to their two daughters, ages 4 and 1.
Her practice, which she spent years building, has been pushed aside.
“The responsibility to deal is on me,” Lurie said.
And many of her clients have told her the same thing.
“What I am hearing is that we as women are going to be the ones to
set boundaries or establish a plan,” Lurie said.
Lurie and her clients are part of a generation of professional women who had arranged their domestic lives, however precariously, to enable full-time careers and parenthood. They are facing this crisis in the midst of high-intensity parenting years, and a crucial moment for growing and establishing their work. Now, able to set up shop remotely, but with schools closed and child care gone, the pandemic is forcing them to confront the bruising reality of gender dynamics as the country is trapped at home.
Even before the coronavirus crisis, women spent about four hours a day on unpaid work — such as laundry, grocery shopping and cleaning — compared with about 2.5 hours for men, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That labor has expanded exponentially in recent weeks, as Americans homeschool their children and help older family members and friends more vulnerable to the virus.
In interviews with more than a dozen women who work as lawyers, writers, architects, teachers, nurses and nonprofit administrators, many said that they were grateful to have some child care help pre-quarantine, and that they could work from home. But they have been slightly stunned to learn that they are expected to organize and manage every domestic need for their family, while maintaining a career as part of a dual career couple.
It was feminism of earlier generations, after all, that declared “the personal is political.”
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, Gretchen Newsom sat in her car and burst into tears. Six weeks later, Warren backed her onetime political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Newsom is working, parenting and teaching as a single mother. And, as the political director for the San Diego chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, she is struggling around the clock to answer fearful questions from union members.
“It is kind of a slap in the face; we’re doing all of this and yet we have so little representation,” she said.
The bargain is bipartisan. Indeed, it is the kind of “lean in” feminism embraced by people such as Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter — whose 2017 book “Women Who Work” essentially told women to get enough help to do it all — that is facing perhaps one of the most jarring shifts. It’s also an economic struggle, long clear in the lives of women who earn lower wages, that feminist political leaders have criticized for years.
“It’s like our economy is this house of cards for women and it is just toppling down,” said Cecile Richards, a founder of Supermajority, a new political organization aimed at energizing female voters. “All of the structural problems that we’ve all known intellectually you can now see in pretty much every woman’s daily life.”
While those who can work from home do so, millions of women, such as nurses and home health aides, find themselves on the front lines of battling the virus, facing serious health risks. And with women making up nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage jobs — a majority in the service industry — many have lost their income entirely.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than onethird of working women, compared with just 15.7% of working men, are employed in two industries that have been significantly affected by the virus: the health care and social assistance industry, and the leisure and hospitality industry. In both fields, women are paid less than their male peers, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.
“I hope we rethink a lot of structures after this,” said Candace Valenzuela, a Democratic congressional candidate from the suburbs of Dallas. “My hope is that coming out of this crisis we rethink compensation for both women and for people who traditionally get minimum-wage work.”
Until March, Valenzuela spent hours calling donors from her campaign headquarters. Now, she is at home caring for her sons, ages 4 and 1. Her mother-in-law, who lives with the family and often helps with the children, had fallen ill, and although it is uncertain if the coronavirus is the culprit, she was quarantined in a different part of the house. With space at a premium, Valenzuela cleared her curling iron off the counter, brought in a yoga ball and turned her bathroom into a makeshift office for the foreseeable future.
Valenzuela considers herself lucky because her children are young enough that she is avoiding home school. And her husband had already taken on much of the household duties since she began her campaign last year. Still, she said: “The way we’ve been able to Macgyver a career as a woman is completely under attack by a global pandemic.”
The crisis has become a moment for some to reconsider how much progress has taken place on a societal level.
Lurie, the therapist, recalled the day she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, holding her year-old daughter. Since then, she said, “it has just been having to recalibrate, recalibrate and recalibrate. What I promised my daughters isn’t something I can deliver and that’s such a painful thing to consider.”
The new set of challenges comes as more American families are likely to be dependent on a female breadwinner. Mothers are the primary or sole earners for 40% of households with children younger than 18 today, compared with 18% in 1987. Nearly a quarter of families are headed by a single mother, the second most common family arrangement in America after living with two parents.
Amy Pompeii, 46, has managed to juggle working as a nurse at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center with being a single mother since her husband died nearly a decade ago. With her daughter, a college sophomore, now at home, Pompeii has help to care for her 10-year-old son.
“A lot of my co-workers do not have that luxury,” she said.
So far, the hospital where she works has not been inundated with patients battling the virus, but her children still worry.
“We are all under a very stressful situation, but the men I work with, for the most part, they go home and decompress, do something to clear their mind,” Pompeii said. “We don’t get to do that.”