This article was co-authored by Dr. Mary A. Hermann and Dr. Cheryl Neale-McFall.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed working motherhood in the United States. As the crisis exacerbated already existing challenges, over 1.4 million mothers were forced out of the workforce. Mothers who remained are leading a major cultural revolution as they re-envision working motherhood by revising intensive motherhood and work norms.
The new vision of working motherhood is reminiscent of the origins of the gender revolution in the 1960s. When a significant number of women entered the workforce, they supported one another and relied on family and friends for childcare. Parenthood standards at the time allowed for children to play outside unsupervised and even to return from school to an empty house. Furthermore, women envisioned achieving parity with men at work as well as men providing an equitable share of childcare and household labor. In actuality, mothers in the workforce encountered not just a glass ceiling, but also heightened discrimination based on their motherhood status – the even more constraining “maternal wall.” And many men have yet to take on an equitable share of childcare and household labor, often referred to as women’s “second shift.” These barriers have resulted in what Arlie Hochschild referred to as the “stalled gender revolution.”
By the 1980s, as women were trying to break through the glass ceiling at work and working the second shift at home, the term “superwoman” became a common description of working mothers. Daniel Levinson described this superwoman narrative as the “heroic woman” who could do it all and “realize ‘the incredible joy of having it all’ – career, marriage, family, leisure, everything.” Levinson also reiterated the illusive nature of this cultural ideal, quoting a working mother who concluded “I think Superwoman is dead; she died of exhaustion.”
Though the superwoman ideal was problematic decades ago, instead of working motherhood expectations becoming more reasonable, they have increased exponentially. Standards of motherhood have changed from raising self-sufficient, latch-key children to viewing children as requiring continuous care and great self-sacrifice, an “increasingly extreme parenting model.” Expectations for homemaking have also increased in recent decades, currently reflecting media-informed creative, homemade, and perfect ideals, what Douglas and Michaels described as “the Martha Stewartization of America.” Higher expectations at home coincided with a significant increase in work hours in many professions as the traditional 40-hour workweek became a 60-70 hour workweek. And by the early 2000s, women were expected to manage historical and contemporary roles without ever asking for help, while making balancing these roles appear to be effortless.
Though men have increased their participation in childcare and housework in recent years, women still provide significantly more of this work as well as the time-consuming role of being manager of the second shift. And, men’s contributions differ from women’s contributions. Men’s efforts are often framed as “helping” and “babysitting” as men engage in the discretionary housework and the more enjoyable activities with their children. Men are also held to different second shift standards. Fathers are glorified for performing activities that are basic expectations for mothers, described by Anne-Marie Slaughter as the “halo dad syndrome.” Women are even blamed for their husbands’ lack of engagement in the second shift as they are often told that men would participate more if women lowered their second shift standards. This characterization ignores the fact that women are judged more harshly on parenting and the appearance of their homes than men.
These systemic inequities were further exposed during the pandemic. In many instances the expectations for women at work increased because of downsized staffs and the effort involved in pivoting to virtual formats. Simultaneously, the infrastructure that supported working mothers collapsed as childcare, supervision of children provided by school systems, housekeeping services, the ability to outsource meal preparation, and other systems that supported working mothers disappeared. The significant increase in childcare responsibilities, including overseeing children’s remote learning, was particularly detrimental, especially for mothers of young children who required constant supervision. And, as in the past, the continuous and unmanageable pandemic responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers.
As a result, women realized that second shift standards, untenable before the crisis, were certainly not achievable under pandemic circumstances. Managing multiple roles during a world-wide crisis necessitated that women prioritize what was really important both at work and at home. Instead of mothers perpetuating the illusion of balancing roles with ease, they began to acknowledge that they were struggling and to rely on family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for support. Mothers once again were figuring out strategies for managing multiple roles as a community.
As challenging as pandemic motherhood was, working mothers also relished the experience of being more involved in their children’s lives; and they are refusing to go back to pre-pandemic working norms. They are seizing this opportunity to advocate for more flexible work options as both employers and mothers have realized that telecommuting can be effective and workers can be successful without working extreme hours. And while women have traditionally been expected to keep motherhood mostly hidden in the workplace, pandemic-necessitated working from home made it impossible to keep children invisible. Expectations that video-calls mirror conference room environments were particularly unrealistic for women with young children. As the invisibility of motherhood in the workplace could not be sustained, new norms that reflect better work-life integration emerged.
As we move into the post-pandemic world, working women are expecting trauma-informed leaders to recognize that the effects of experiencing a worldwide pandemic are not going to dissipate quickly. The workforce will further benefit from leaders who attend to the well-being of their employees and focus more on worker productivity than face time at the office. And this crisis has demonstrated the continuing need for norms and policies that support working mothers, including paid parental leave and affordable childcare. Modifying intensive work expectations and providing a family-friendly work infrastructure can increase mothers’ retention in the workplace, supporting a more robust workforce and better aligning workers in the United States with workers in other developed countries. Leaders also need to ensure that family-friendly policies are offered to all genders, disrupting the idea that care-giving is only the responsibility of women. And leaders must make certain that mothers in the workforce do not experience discrimination. Only then will working mothers finally be able to break through the glass ceiling and dismantle the maternal wall.
At home, women engaged in this new wave of the gender revolution are beginning to re-negotiate participation in the second shift, looking to their partners to be co-participants and co-managers of this work. They are revising intensive motherhood norms. And they are relying on their community of family and friends for support.
While the COVID-19 pandemic magnified the challenges that working mothers experience, the crisis also served as a catalyst for the development of healthier norms for working mothers. The impending end of the superwoman era – coupled with the continued building of a pandemic-informed, family-friendly work infrastructure – provides another opportunity for the successful resolution of the gender revolution envisioned over 50 years ago.