THE LITTLE WOMAN
Anxiety over Covid-19 is sending people scurrying back to the gender roles of the past — at a cost to women, writes Paula Andropoulos
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image. My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. The Applicant, Sylvia Plath
“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear, but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.” The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
The year is 2020, the world is askew, and you’re a woman. Perhaps you’re religious. Perhaps not. A radical feminist. A traditionalist. Poor. Richer than sin. A year shy of your PhD. Pregnant again. Two or three months ago, you took it for granted that your foremothers fought precisely so that you, a woman, might have some choice in these matters. In the battle for gender equality, they won for you this spectrum of femininity, this ideological amplitude.
At least, that’s what you gleaned from all the feminist lore you’ve been exposed to. It doesn’t matter if your brand of womanhood is styled after bell hooks or Jane Fonda. The legend of womankind’s triumph over the reign of biological essentialism is a staple. Only, as the weeks mount in a state of mandatory lockdown, for women the world over it’s beginning to seem a lot like fiction.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew — a category 5 Cape Verde blitz — wiped out a southern swathe of Dade County, Florida, along with patches of Louisiana and the Bahamas. The economic fallout was considerable. In fact, prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Andrew was the most expensive natural disaster in US history. Equally devastating were the social ramifications of the storm — in addition to an overnight obliteration of their lives and livelihoods, affected populations went on to suffer from both long-lasting homelessness and PTSD.
In a 1998 journal article on the impact of Hurricane Andrew on gender roles — just before, during, and after the storm — Joan Always and Kenneth Smith found, somewhat to their surprise, that far from nullifying social conventions, the hurricane actually concretised traditional gender dynamics.
According to the study, the men and women of Dade County adhered to their conventional roles even in preparing for the hurricane: most of the men looked for plywood and staged last-minute property renovations, while most of the women went grocery shopping and cared for children — behaviour that some interviewees described as being totally out of character for them in the ordinary course of things.
Overwhelmingly, the women featured in the study describe reverting to an archetypally female role — “nurturer” — while, by the sounds of things, their masculine counterparts aped protective patriarchs. The women tended to the children and “played host” to members of the community. The men carried heavy things and hammered and built in a bid to fortify their houses.
Reflexively, one associates disasters with anarchy: with the rapid dissolution of societies and social constructs. In my preCovid innocence, I would have assumed that conventional gender roles would be sublimated to an all-hands-on-deck, haphazard sort of survivalism, under hurricane — or pandemic — conditions. But it seems that the converse is true.
The findings of that 22-year-old article accord with what women all over the world are experiencing today as a consequence of the novel coronavirus. In the weeks since the lockdown began in SA, I’ve already seen at least three newspaper editorials on the subject, penned by a bewildered international sisterhood of career writers adrift in their new — and wholly unsolicited — roles as housewives.
That the gender hierarchy of yore is alive and thriving is evident in the fact that, while men work from home, women work at home. Without recourse to their relatives, professional childcare or cleaning services, many women are having to juggle their domestic work and their professional duties. Many men — husbands and fathers — seem to have found a way to bypass this inconvenience. They’re still outsourcing. To their wives. And aunts. And girlfriends. And mothers. And sisters.
There are so many cogent explanations for this retrograde phenomenon. (That it was a biological inevitability should not be credited as one of them.)
This might just be a strange new chapter of the same old story. Women are, after all, used to picking up the slack, gratis. We always have — we are inured to rubbing backs and stroking egos from the time we can talk. People who aren’t women take this manner of work for granted.
When women are paid for their work, it’s usually less than men, often for the same work (sometimes done better).
As such, people who aren’t women believe — and are financially validated in the belief — that their work is more important, and they conduct themselves accordingly.
On the other hand, it could be that — as Always and Smith suggest — when everything changes, we want everything to stay the same. Reverting to conventional gender roles affords human beings a modicum of control — and a semblance of familiarity — when the natural world reduces all our edifices to naught.
It could also be that our collective backsliding has less to do with women behaving like “women” than it does with men wanting to behave like MEN. After all, natural disasters — floods, droughts, plagues — jeopardise men’s ability to perform their ascribed functions. Jobs disappear; everyone’s frightened, and a man’s ability to protect his family in any meaningful way is seriously compromised. If this theory holds any water, then it may be that women are simply having to compensate for a worldwide male mental exodus to the past, where things are certain — and dinner’s on the table by six.
This might just be a strange new chapter of the same old story. Women are, after all, used to picking up the slack, gratis