I Initially wrote this for a college course in Feminism. This is a slightly less technical and more condensed version of it, with less pressure to sound formal. While this covers some aspects of the problems, it does not cover all. So many issues have been left out here. But at times we may feel like theory floats in the skies, like a rainbow – interesting to watch but with no real use. I put this up because I feel that theory can be relevant and tangible. Now more than ever.
Over the past decade, feminist movements have come a long way in gaining women rights and visibility in the public sphere. But with months word-wide recessions and lock-downs, what is the public sphere, really? Beyond the vegetable trucks and the grocery stores, most of us know only what is on the news – if we still follow it. However, even the best journalism cannot know it all. Recently, I had been reading about the effects of the Spanish flu of the First World War. What came as a surprise was not the number of deaths – it was the number of people that simply went ‘missing’. In hindsight, scientists estimate that women and children who were largely dependent on the male breadwinner could simply not find work in the crippled economy. Some children were seen begging on the streets, but some just disappeared. People did not know what had come of several families; families with little children who had no way to live. The ones that survived grew into the generation of the Second World War, and struggles of that era remain forever blurred. While the world has entered the one of the most connected ages, many remain off the grid. Many may be erased from records, for political reasons that we can and may never know. In times like these, theory is essential for the layperson to make an estimation of the suffering at the least. Else, solutions may elude our grasp forever.
The widely unprecedented pandemic is being handled at the fore by over-worked nurses and essential service providers. While it may seem like Governments are appreciative of the work of nurses, their struggles tell a different story. Fund allocation and pay for the nurses is minimal, and they receive inadequate training. The pandemic has demanded that countries maintain a high level of cleanliness and hygiene in private and public places. Medical screeners achieve this at airports; and cleaners, janitors, and maids are responsible for this in other spaces. They are underpaid for performing essential tasks, and hard hit by the pandemic due to their meagre and unreliable incomes.
Globally, women constitute between 65% to 86% of the nursing workforce. With increased industrialization, care work has been delegated to women in both public and private spheres. Essentialist assumptions about the woman as a nurturing being form the implicit basis of societal organisations. Primary-care is seen to be the job of women, and caring for people is seen as a ‘natural’ part of their femininity. Within this demarcation of care work, there is a hierarchy. Those who are responsible for the care of the state or economy wield much more power than those engaged in more domestic matters like caring for their family. This hierarchy translates monetarily too: The Diplomat or the Economist is more ‘valuable’ to patriarchal society and paid much more than caregivers. On the other hand, nurses who work overtime, suffer from poor resource allocation. Despite the essential work that they perform, society perceives nurses as ‘lacking competence’, engaging in work that is ‘low-skilled’. There seems to be an inherent belief that the work of nurses is a result of their altruism. Thus, nursing is a ‘woman’s job’, low in the ladder of ‘real’ value. Even within the rung of care-work, women are paid much less than their male counterparts – salaries of male janitors are often much higher than lady cleaners and maids. Like other professions, there seems to be an unbreakable glass ceiling hanging over women’s heads here too. While most nurses worldwide are women, they are hardly hired in decision-making roles. Donald Trump recently announced his Coronavirus task force – constituted by 12 men, 11 of whom were Caucasian. Women and minorities work at the frontline but are passed over as candidates for drafting national responses.
Even as the deadly pandemic plagues the world, society has not accorded care work the importance it deserves. In Trump’s reign, the US faces a 3 million budget cut in financing global health programmes. He has dissolved the epidemics response team, leaving the entire world more vulnerable to diseases. Side-lining women’s health needs proved to be a death knell during the Ebola outbreak – more women died due to obstetric complications than Ebola itself. It seems that countries have learnt nothing from the epidemic, and trends may be similar even today. The definition of ‘Essential’ health services has largely ignored the needs of women. Access to acute and emergency services like caesareans or abortion care is limited and has been pushed to the backseat during COVID-19. Health and sanitation must be made accessible to all, and this must be a higher priority than profits of private players. Moreover, the effects of harsh policies may be drastically different for different women. Caste, class and other determinants of societal position and access will play a pivotal role in determining experiences.
Even while women band together under a common umbrella to fight for rights, their experiences are varied. A forum of 3000 Manipuris living in Kolkota has shared that 300 nurses have quit their jobs from private hospitals to go home. They allegedly faced harassment from their landlords and were denied salaries as they risked their lives at work. Young girls were targeted and called names like “Corona, Corona”, and denied entry into their apartments after a day of essential services. Lack of salaries after the closure of some private hospitals has made it difficult for them to pay rent or buy food (Karmakar 2020). The state and needs of gender non-conforming individuals have not received much attention from Governments. Studies say that LGBTQ+ communities are often hard-hit due to their higher proclivity to engage in smoking and vaping. They are also prone to HIV and AIDS, making them highly vulnerable. Discrimination in accessing health care makes their vulnerabilities fatal.
The phenomenon of domestic or care-oriented labour falling on women is mirrored in private spaces too – women bear the brunt of domestic work while their male counterparts use the time to focus on their career. Feminist movements across the world have achieved significant strides in bringing more women into the working force. However worldwide lockdowns prove to be a substantial setback to the socio-economic emancipation of women. Women have taken on care responsibilities at home, and working women juggle this with their paid work. They are taking on disproportionate childcare responsibilities in heterosexual relationships, and women (employed and unemployed) spend an hour and a half more with home-schooling children than the average man in the same situation in the UK. ‘Working Families’ runs legal advice services for carers and parents. They have reported that 80% of the queries that have come in recently have all been from women. The number of academic papers authored entirely by women has dropped drastically, while that of men has increased. CEO Emma Workley of Philosophy Foundation has reported that most of their work comes from men, as women have to engage with home education and other domestic work. Several biologically deterministic justifications like ‘they are naturally better at it’ seem to govern the way that families function.
During this pandemic, both employed and homemakers have taken on domestic work to run their families. This has meant sometimes that they have to trade in their careers to do so. This phenomenon poses a challenge to the rational choice theory which assumes individuals to be utility maximising – the very bedrock of neo-liberal economics. Constitutions around the world want to uphold the spirit of liberty and equality. However, some are more equal than others, and some more at liberty. Feminist theory suggests that the individual’s positioning often makes their chosen action the only line of action or one of limited choice – dictated by their positionality. That is, in a man’s world, full freedom can often be a fairytale. This is not to say that men all over the world repress women around. What the theory points to is that what we may conceive as a choice is not entirely so. It is not entirely so, because individuals can only choose to live so differently from society. While society is gendered, and while institutional mechanisms fail to tend to different needs, autonomy will be meaningless. It is expressed most lucidly in the experiences of Anna Bosworth who is self-employed and does part-time work after the birth of her first child. Her husband has a full-time job and is the primary bread-winner of the house. He continues to work fully, and Anna has given up her career during the pandemic to meet financial and domestic needs of the house. Although they are a happy couple in a happy marriage, Bosworth says:
“I am a feminist and believe in choice. But because of the pandemic, my choices have been taken away. I feel like a 1950s housewife”.
The pandemic has revealed the gendered construct of society like never before. States have been enacting work from home policies along with constant hand-wash reminders. In a sense, the feminist cry of ‘the personal is the political’ has acquired a literal dimension today. Thus, a feminist response to Covid-19 is paramount.
~ Madhumitha Raghuraman
References
Donnell, O Megan and Rick, Samantha. 2020. “A Gender Lens on COVID-19: Investing in Nurses and other Frontline Health Workers to Improve Health Systems”. Centre for Global Development. March 25, 2020. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/gender-lens-covid-19-investing-nurses-and-other-frontline-health-workers-improve-health-systems
Ferguson, Donna. 2020. “I feel like a 1950s housewife: How the lockdown has exposed the gender divide”. The Guardian. May 3, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/i-feel-like-a-1950s-housewife-how-lockdown-has-exposed-the-gender-divide
Hughes, Christina. 2002. Key Concepts in Feminist theory and Research. New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd.
Karmakar, Sumir. 2020. “COVID-19 Impact: Racial slur, harassment force Manipuri nurses to leave Kolkata” Deccan Herald. May 20, 2020. https://www.deccanherald.com/national/east-and-northeast/in-attempt-to-politically-disturb-me-bjp-is-harming-west-bengal-mamata-banerjee-842501.html
Lewish, Helen. 2020. “The Coronavirus is a disaster for Feminism”. The Atlantic. March 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid19/608302/
Mezzadri, Alexandra. 2020. “A crisis like no other: social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the Covid-19 pandemic”. Developing Economics. April 20, 2020. https://developingeconomics.org/2020/04/20/a-crisis-like-no-other-social-reproduction-and-the-regeneration-of-capitalist-life-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Neely, H Abigail, and Lopez, J, Patricia. 2020. “Care in the time of covid-19”. Antipode Online. April 4, 2020. https://antipodeonline.org/2020/04/04/care-in-the-time-of-covid-19/
Ribeiro, Celina. 2020. “Pink collar recession: How the COVID-19 crisis could setback a generation of women”. The Guardian. May 23, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/24/pink-collar-recession-how-the-covid-19-crisis-is-eroding-womens-economic-power
Smith, Julia. 2020. “Gender and the Coronavirus Outbreak”. Think Global Health. February 4, 2020. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/gender-and-coronavirus-outbreak
“Why the US Economic turndown could hurt Women More”. Wharton. April 21, 2020. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/economic-downturn-hurt-women/
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