Women & COVID-19
One thing that surprised me while I was reading the two articles and watching the short video, was how women have been negatively impacted in many of the same ways before such as with the Zika virus and the Ebola outbreak. Yet I can’t remember anyone talking about it, and I know for sure that it wasn’t something that was made to be a big deal or common knowledge. Now that it’s happened again with the COVID-19 pandemic and I’m old enough to see and hear of the effects, I completely agree with the author of these articles that women are rightfully mad. In some ways, I’m grateful that I wasn’t an adult woman during any of these epidemics because I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the direct effects that the author is talking about in the two articles. However, that doesn’t mean that my mom or women that I know didn’t experience these negative impacts themselves. In fact, I know that they’ve directed effected female professors at this university. Now that I am gaining more of an awareness about how our systemic disadvantages are exacerbated in times of crisis, it makes me want to do even more to try and fight against androcentrism and sexism at a systematic level. It also brings up a lot of emotion for me because I really don’t want these things to continue to happen when I am an adult woman or when I am trying to raise children myself.
The articles and the video also show how deeply rooted our binary ideas of feminism and masculinity are, and how most of us have an outdated concept of what a family should look like. As was mentioned in the article, as soon as we have to go back to times of crisis, that world goes right back to the way it was in the 1950s and it’s almost unconscious. For many families, I’m sure it made sense to keep the woman at home and send the men to work, but what about women who don’t want to be home? What about men who don’t want to be the only one going to work?
The positive side to things is that it helps to bring a diverse group of women together over a common issue that they share. Luckily, because we are all affected by crisis in different ways, we can all see it from different perspectives and hopefully offer some enlightenment to others. However, after reading the articles and watching the video for this week it really brought to light the fact that systemic issues of sexism need to be addressed now!!! It’s freaking 2022 for crying out loud. For example, those who are unaware of the second shift or the unpaid labor that women are responsible for don’t understand or consider the effects of children and childcare on their colleagues. Additionally, the government and our society at large doesn’t account for those not in the ideal white, hetero, middle-class situation. At a systemic level we need to change the way that our world works and the way our women are treated. However, we also need to help bring awareness to all the responsibilities that women take on that they don’t have to. We need to consider single parents both moms and dads, and homosexual couples as well because all these issues impact these groups as well but in a different way.
