%20I,%202020.jpg)
Life in Lockdown is a series looking back at an extraordinary, challenging year—commemorating what we've lost, what we've gained, and finding the moments of hope.
I’m writing this story from behind a locked bedroom door in my New York City apartment. On the other side of the door, my two small children, in the care of their after-school babysitter, chase and torment each other, squeals piercing the air, rendering my sound machine useless. It’s been almost a year of this—trying to string a sentence together amid shrieks; feeling isolated, anxious, despondent. For the first six months, my husband and I traded off, fighting for time at this tiny desk while parenting a kindergartner who had 45 minutes of virtual school in the morning and a 3-year-old home indefinitely from day care. And I am one of the lucky ones.
The statistics reflecting this struggle are staggering and, by now, oft repeated: 2.5 million women have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic, according to the Labor Department, and the declines have hit Black, Latina, and Asian women hardest. But left is a loaded word: Some were laid off in an economic crash and burn that could end up being worse than the Great Depression. Others felt forced to leave work by a tumbling house of cards: With schools and childcare centers abruptly closed and lockdown rendering home health aides a COVID risk, women have assumed the responsibilities of caring for their children and aging parents, adding the unpaid labor of homeschool teacher, nurse, aide, and administrative assistant until their past jobs and careers became untenable.
“There’s this invisible crisis brewing as we look at the COVID moms who are trying to do it all,” says Catherine Orr, Ph.D., a critical-identity-studies professor at Beloit College. “There’s groups of women whose lives have fallen off a cliff.” Or, as sociologist Jessica Calarco told journalist Anne Helen Petersen in a quote that’s taken up residence in my brain: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
It is a “national emergency,” as Vice President Kamala Harris recently described it, both for the economy and women’s mental health. In conversations with women who have lost or left their jobs during the past year, there is a palpable mix of grief and rage. It became clear to me how little women and mothers are talking about the trauma they’re living through. More than one woman broke down in tears (and I along with them). They all did something that struck me as distinctly womanly: issued disclaimers about not wanting to complain, no matter how dire their situation, and pointed to others who had it much worse.
But after nearly a year of lockdown and picking up society’s slack, the three women I spoke with—a small snapshot of the larger crisis—are also demanding long-overdue action in addressing the flawed, flimsy system that led us here. The pandemic has exposed the urgency of the fight for a $15 minimum wage (a rate that still barely covers many babysitters), affordable childcare, and paid leave, among many other policies.
.jpg)
“Moms throughout America are screaming out for help,” Representative Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) tells me, “but they sometimes feel like they are screaming into an echo chamber.” In February, Meng, the mom of middle schoolers, introduced the Marshall Plan for Moms, a sweeping resolution calling for direct payments to mothers forced from the paid job market and the passage of paid leave, affordable childcare, and pay-equity policies. “We want more public acknowledgment, whether it’s by corporate or government leaders, that they understand the challenges and the hurt that moms across the country have been going through.”
The House’s recently passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan includes child tax credits and increased funding for safely reopening schools. But for women smarting from the pandemic, “it may be difficult to get back to where you were,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently acknowledged, leaving women forced from work by the pandemic in a kind of stuck place. Vogue spoke with three women who lost or left their jobs during the pandemic about what they’ve been through and where to go from here.
Shanita Matthews, a 41-year-old mother of one in Suwanee, Georgia, was forced to close her wedding-decor business shortly after the pandemic struck.
Right before COVID hit, brides were just ghosting. They didn’t want to invest money if this was going to be a thing. I closed my business bank account because I couldn’t keep up the minimum balance. Then, March the 13th, we received an email: School buildings are closed, and our children will be doing digital schooling. The schedule they sent us was Monday through Friday, 8:15 a.m. through 3:15 p.m. It doesn’t really leave you any time to work a regular job. My daughter was six at the time. She didn’t have the know-how to get around on a computer. I had to close my business all the way.
Before I had my daughter, I worked my ass off to get a nursing degree. My parents were both addicts, so my siblings and I were raised by our sixth-grade-educated grandparents, who had a farm. Growing up not having money, you really depended on community. That was my foundation to nursing. I got scholarships and grants and worked two jobs. I graduated with no debt. I saw so much struggle, so much hopelessness. I did not want that for me.
When it was time for kindergarten, it got tricky—my husband and I don’t have family here. She was out of school at 2:45, and they don’t have after-school programs at her school. I told my husband, “I’ll take a step back,” since his job is more rigid. I did my research and saw that billions were made every year in the wedding industry. I’d been helping friends who were on a budget and thought, I could do this as a business, and I would be there to put my daughter on the bus. I don’t think you could ever prepare for a pandemic, especially when you’re an American and you’ve never really gone through anything like this. Plus, we have a system set up to feel like we’re so much better than everybody else.
Now, school is open, but if the children are exposed to anyone in class, they have to quarantine for two weeks. When the custodial staff is out sick and there’s no way to keep the school clean, the schools close. They close a lot, at the drop of a hat. I’m a registered nurse, so to not be able to get a job because I cannot commit to a 12- to 14-day schedule because I’m a slave to the school system is, I’m just gonna say it bluntly, disgusting. It’s disgusting how our state and federal government has left us to sink or swim on our own.
I don’t want to believe there’s nothing out there, but there has been nothing for almost a year now. I cannot go work at McDonald’s for $10 an hour because my babysitter’s $10 an hour. We have one old computer and my daughter and I have to share it, so I couldn’t even do a work from home. I’m with my child from the time she wakes up until four o’clock in the afternoon. If I work an all-night job, when do I get to sleep? How am I going to continue to take care of us if I’m dead? My husband’s working 70, 80 hours a week just so we have enough money to pay our mortgage. We don’t live on the bus line. Both of our cars were repossessed. We’re not lazy. We’re not looking for a handout. We need damn help.
The CARES Act says that an individual affected by a school closure qualifies for unemployment assistance. The first time they denied me—they said I was unemployed before the pandemic. As a business owner, I am self-employed. I filed for an appeal in September. By this time, we’re juggling money trying to put $20 on the light bill. I was excited when I got off the phone for my appeal. I said, “Maybe we can buy something other than cereal and sandwich meat.” A week and a half later, I get a denial letter saying because I applied in July, my daughter was out of school, so I wasn’t affected by COVID.
We’ve been forced from the labor market. My rainy-day fund is gone. We are on zero. I’m trying not to get so emotional about this, but my husband’s lost about 30 pounds because he’s been working himself to death. We just don’t have the money so that he can have breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work. It was a joke between us when I said, “I don’t know anything else I can do other than be an escort.” If that’s something that I have to do as a mom to provide, that is something I may have to consider. I’m not too good to do what I have to do to make sure my family eats and has a place to live.
No one is listening because they look at me and I’m a Black woman. I’m at the point where I feel like I’m broken. I feel like I’m losing it and I’m losing myself along the way. I had my doctor write me a prescription for a Celexa that I can’t even afford anymore, even with insurance. I was so happy that I found cake mix and icing on clearance so that I could make my daughter a fucking birthday cake. What has this world come to? I’m praying so much, but praying isn’t paying the bills.
I’m not shocked, but I’m just devastated that we’re sold this dream that if you work hard, you go through college, you get a good job, that life will be different. I try to keep my spirits up because I have a seven-year-old who looks to me. I don’t want her to see us trying to play the game how society says it’s to be played and failing. I don’t want my child to see that and feel like she shouldn’t aspire to more.
Loraya Harrington-Trujillo, 33, chose to leave her job as director of member success at a tech start-up to care for her two children and aging parents in South Orange, N.J.
I’m a multigeneration child of farmers, and my husband’s family emigrated from Cuba. It is in our DNA to survive and rise above. We actually felt really fortunate in the first six to eight months of the pandemic because we work in tech and we were able to pretty smoothly transition to working remotely. My husband and I have a three-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. My parents also live with me, and my dad has Parkinson’s.
The big shift happened when my son started kindergarten in the fall. The public-school system has been incredibly unstable. I’m not exaggerating when I say they’re sending updates at 8:30 p.m. that school that starts at 8:10 a.m. is no longer happening. So, unless you have an au pair, which we don’t, I was having to call out of meetings: “I’m sorry, I no longer have childcare. We have to move that presentation.” Even the [school] emails, I had to ask for my husband to be added to them because they’re just sending them to me, and it was like, I also work full-time and actually I have more direct reports.
My goal for 2020 was just: Can we keep our head above water? But then my mom became ill too, and she’s the main caregiver for my dad. I was running downstairs—helping my mom because she couldn’t get out of bed and also making breakfast and medicine for my dad—and then going upstairs to check that my kids were not murdering each other on the couch. In the meantime, while I’m on the stairs, I’m refreshing Slack.
I’m very privileged. I had a job where my company was very flexible. It’s a start-up that’s focused on supporting women to meet their personal and professional goals. I can’t say enough great things about them. At the same time, they are a company. They can only be flexible to a certain point. I have built my career on being someone who people can count on. I’m given the projects that are impossible with ridiculous deadlines, and I deliver. Ultimately, that’s why I made the decision to leave: I can’t perform anywhere near what I need to do. I’m in this home pushing, pushing, pushing, and it’s not, like, Can we endure it? It’s: At what cost for my family?
My career will be long. I have 30 more years, at least, of work ahead of me, but I really hope that this pandemic—and the time when my kids and my parents both need support—isn’t long. Because of the risk of bringing strangers into my home to help and the impossibility of taking my parents out of the home for continued care, I’m uniquely the only person who can do it. God forbid I got COVID.
I’m finishing a really specific project that I’m pushing out in a week, and after that I’m unemployed. Before my last job, I was at an organization called Girls Who Code, and my job was to create opportunities for women in tech. So, for me, I had to interrogate my own anger that I’m succumbing to a statistic when I have been doing nothing but creating opportunities so these things don’t happen. I mean, it’s devastating. I was shocked by the number of people who called me when they found out I was leaving to say, “Don’t do it.” And I was like, “You know what? I knew who I am. I’m betting on myself. I know I’m going to have to rebuild when I can, and I’m willing to do that work.”
I don’t have faith that these companies are going to massively change. If anything, the pandemic has shown that they won’t, that so many companies—not the one I was at, but so many—in the beginning, were like, “Oh, we understand.” And then when they realize this isn’t changing, it was like, “Put your camera on mute, make it work, work until the night to make up the hours.”
Do I still every day think, Oh, my gosh, the things I’ve given up? My career has been such a big piece of my personality. I feel really privileged that I have a dual-income home, but in no way do I feel like I went from all this pressure to it’s easy. There’s still no plan from the school district. I don’t want to open another email that says, “Due to unprecedented times…” It’s been a year. I’m at the place where I’m just angry. Who do we have to mobilize? What do we have to do to actually make a plan so people can live and our kids can be successful?
It’s hard on a lot of levels, most of which is the mental, emotional piece of it, this feeling of isolation. My kids aren’t falling way behind, thankfully, but just their emotional health…. It was excruciating. They’re having meltdowns. My son has a really hard time concentrating, and I’m asking him to sit for five hours in front of a screen. It’s a success if we can get through the full day without him turning off Zoom and walking away. He’d been in school a total of two days this year. We went one day, and then the teachers went on strike because they didn’t have proper air filtration systems. They had the windows completely open in January and instructed our kids to bring coats. Every Friday I get an email with anywhere from 2 to 16 pages that I was printing and cutting out. It’s 8 to 11 emails a week from teachers and the school, like, “I need you to do this form.”
What should be happening? I don’t want to hear the statistics anymore. It’s not enough to say, “This is terrible, it’s gonna set us back generations.” What is the policy that you’re implementing? What is the committee that you’re putting together? It’s been a year, and we can’t just keep saying, “Another six months, another three months.” I’m not willing to accept that.
Margot Seeto, 38, lost her job as a catering-company manager in San Francisco. She’s been taking care of her mom, who has dementia, and grappling with whether she should have a child of her own.
I remember the shelter-in-place order went into effect March 17. The previous week we started hearing whispers that the virus was moving toward San Francisco. One by one, our gigs were getting canceled, and then all of a sudden, you just have no work. My boyfriend’s a professional musician, so we both lost our jobs instantly over the same weekend.
Processing it all, I was like, Should I go try to get a job at Trader Joe’s or Safeway straight away? And then I was like, I can’t be around people because I still go back to my parents’ house every week. My mom has dementia, and I help take care of her. My boyfriend and I are very lucky. We have savings; we didn’t have debt. Our parents are really supportive. His mom gave us a HelloFresh subscription. It was panic, but also we’re luckier than a lot of people in our position.
It’s a weird thing because I’d been trying to leave the service industry for a long time. I used to be a journalist, but [service] was always there, an instant job I could get if we were in transition. That very thin safety net I thought I would always have was gone. For me, at least it gave me a chance to get back to try to be a writer again. Some of the freelance gigs I’ve been getting are still paying okay. I applied to write a book. I’m in this weird space now where I’m still unemployed, but am I a freelance writer? What am I now?
All the venues my boyfriend’s been playing, they’re gone or shut down. His job will be probably the very last to return. Being together all the time, you start taking stuff out on each other. I think I’m doing most of the cleaning and the labor at home. My boyfriend would dispute that. We would consider ourselves to be a modern couple, but it’s surprising to see how old gender roles seem to be more pronounced. I’m in my car right now talking to you just for privacy. I go to the beach park to eat sometimes, and when I look to each side of me, everyone’s doing the same thing.
I’m the only female child in my family. I have three brothers. My mom’s primary caretaker is my father, but when it comes to the kids, I’m the only one who can give her a shower. I do feel guilty for moving out two years ago. When I made more of a set schedule [for caretaking] during the pandemic, my boyfriend, who’s not Asian, was like, “Why do you have to do all this stuff? Why can’t you hire a nurse?” From his perspective, it’s so much, as opposed to other friends who are from Asia, where this is just what you do. There’s no question about it.
It’s been pretty heavy as an Asian American woman. There are people targeting Asian seniors, Asian people. A friend of ours, her mom was robbed. I was losing sleep over it. Through the whole pandemic, I will be like, Is someone going to yell a slur at me? Is someone gonna throw something at me? A lot of us have had this blanket of constant awareness or hypervigilance. My dad runs errands all the time. I wanted to be like, “Dad, be careful.” I didn’t—he’s a big dude. He’s pretty tough, and he would be like, “I’m not afraid of anything,” but I was really worried about him.
I’m trying to separate myself from the service industry, but emotionally I still really care. I’ve been donating small amounts of money more frequently than I ever have before, to the Chinatown Community Development Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action, or GoFundMe campaigns to save Chinatown restaurants. A lot of these places won’t be there anymore to return to.
One of the huge things is thinking about having kids. I’m 38, so there’s not a lot of time left. Everything’s on pause and frozen in time, but I can’t freeze my body. It’s been a thing, kind of trying, kind of not trying, and then my boyfriend being like, “I don’t want to bring a kid into this world.” But I’m like, “But we need to bring better people into this world to fight all the shitty stuff.” A complicated thing too, aside from just logically, it’s like, Okay, why are we trying to have a kid? We don’t have jobs. We’ve been through a lot of different, I guess, emotional phases. He’s a couple of years younger than I am. The virus is really bringing out differences we have in our politics. If we do have a kid, how are we going to raise him or her? We’re at a crossroads, but I would like to try to have a kid. Even though everything is going to shit, I would like to be optimistic.
The following organizations are advocating for better policies for women in the workforce:
Unemployed Action at The Center for Popular Democracy