Mothers, Mothering and Covid 19: Dispatches from the Pandemic

About the Author\nDr. Fiona Joy Green is a feminist mother and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg who believes in the power of revolutionary feminist motherwork. She’s interested in the agency of children and mothers, in gender socialization and gender identity, and in the ability of matroreform and feminist motherlines to contribute to feminist theorizing and praxis. She’s the sole author of Practicing Feminist Mothering (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011) and co-editor of three books addressing feminist parenting and maternal pedagogies published by Demeter Press. Dr. Andrea O’Reilly is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University, founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of twenty books including Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond and The Routledge Companion to Motherhood, and author of three monographs including Matricentric Feminism: Theory Activism and Practice. She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). She is mother of three adult children.\nThere has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers? care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers? employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The maternal voices and visions dispatched in this collection contribute to the necessary and long-overdue conversation on, and action towards, empowered social change for workplace justice and the re-evaluation of care work as an essential part of an economic agenda.