Whitney Williams-Coble, 34, starts her day taking her 10-year-old daughter on a walk in the winter sunshine before remote school begins. She’s careful about making time for self-care, defining segments of pandemic time with what she can control. “It’s been a very daunting time where I was, you know—you’re trying to make sure your house doesn’t fall apart.”
Williams-Coble, a University of Chicago–trained educator, taught English to fifth- and sixth-grade students. But it wasn’t clear to her that there was a solid plan in place to keep teachers safe at her school. “I didn’t want to die. I love teaching, but I did not expect to be in a situation where being a teacher could possibly take my life,” says Williams-Coble. She also learned that teachers would be required to be in the classroom even if school was remote—an impossibility for Williams-Coble, who is a single mother and doesn’t have family close by or the discretionary income to pay for a sitter. “Not only did I make the choice, but I had to make the choice,” she explains. She resigned, which meant she didn’t qualify for unemployment.
In June 2020 she found herself stretching $20 to make it over two weeks. She applied for food stamps, waited 45 days to hear back, and was denied. She had to wait to be able to access her retirement funds, and since she’s been dipping into them, they’re now nearly depleted. She’s doing some freelance writing, marking time with her cooped-up daughter who constantly wants to play dollies. To break it up she’s given their days themes: Theater Tuesdays; Wellness Wednesdays; weekends for self-care, braiding their hair, and journaling. She’s trying to teach her daughter how to persevere.
In some ways, despite the impossible professional choice and resulting economic crush, Williams-Coble—with her mind set on creating what peace she can—is doing better than a lot of other mothers.
For three brief months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic’s reaching the U.S., American women held more jobs than men—it was the first time since a blip in the 2010 recovery, and it was in part because women were more likely to hold part-time or multiple jobs. But once schools began closing and businesses shut down, many mothers found themselves having to choose between work and leaving their kids (with no safe childcare option), or if they could work remotely, doing so while also juggling their kids’ learning at home. Quality childcare—the basic infrastructure needed for parents to have careers—has long been expensive and hard to find. In 2020 the piecemeal system we did have busted.
Even within Congress, where members have access to more resources than the vast majority of Americans, the absurd hellscape that pandemic parenthood had become was apparent. In May 2020, Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) found herself in a fight demanding the ability to vote by proxy. “Because of childcare issues, I was not able to easily travel to Washington, D.C., every week to vote,” she says. Toward the beginning of the pandemic, she tried bringing her child onto the House floor so she could vote. “They wouldn’t let me. I was very angry because, I said, ‘I don’t have childcare and you won’t let me bring my child into my workplace. I literally have no options.’” Meng believes if there were more moms of young children in Congress, “our policies and our legislation would be a lot more family friendly.”
As it is, the imbalance of the burden moms share right now leaves many struggling alone, without the support systems they need, says Meng. “If we don’t have a better childcare infrastructure, there is no doubt in my mind that women’s careers and career paths will be cut short and eventually eliminated.”
Now is the time to mention that of course there are dads who have left their jobs to be with their children or who run point on remote learning at home. But those fathers are in the definite minority. During the pandemic, 80% of the time it’s moms who have been managing the majority of remote school, which means it’s moms who are tasked with keeping children engaged with virtual learning while negotiating constant interruptions during work calls. Those juggling parental and professional responsibilities while remaining in the workforce are overloaded. And when that doesn’t cut it, in dual-earner, heterosexual couples, it’s women who tend to reduce their paid work hours.
In September 2020, even as some schools reopened, 860,000 women dropped out of the workforce. In December 2020 women accounted for 100% of U.S. job losses, disproportionately affecting women of color who also often have less access to paid sick and family leave.
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“Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women,” summarized Jessica Calarco—a sociologist who has been studying pandemic-related disruptions in women’s lives—in an interview with the journalist Anne Helen Petersen. And moms are fraying.
“You know, we had the opportunity of almost having universal childcare and Nixon vetoed it,” says Liuba Grechen Shirley, CEO of Vote Mama PAC, which endorses, funds and mentors moms running for office, and Vote Mama, a nonprofit that supports and advocates for family-friendly legislation. “Back in World War II we had the Landham Act, with childcare centers set up so women could go into the workforce, and the second the war was over, they closed down the childcare centers,” she says. “We lost that.”
Meanwhile, in order to populate the workforce as much as possible, countries in Europe “created all sorts of policies that facilitated women’s work,” Calarco says, such as affordable childcare and extended maternity leave. “We opted not to pursue those kinds of policies, and we actively avoided those policies in order to push women out of the workforce, and we’re now left with a legacy of that today.”
It doesn’t have to be like this, Grechen Shirley insists. Our armed forces spend more than a billion dollars a year on childcare, subsidizing parents’ access to trained childcare staff who are paid a living wage. That could be a model. Instead it’s an exception. Fewer than 10% of childcare centers are accredited, and more than half of Americans live in neighborhoods classified as childcare deserts. And the childcare workers we do have—most of them women of color—aren’t making enough to provide for their own children and families.
“By the time you realize how screwed up our childcare and paid family leave systems are in this country, you’re a new mom and you’re too busy trying to survive this and build your career, so you don’t have time to go out and fight for systemic change,” says Grechen Shirley.
Grechen Shirley ran for Congress herself in 2018 and lost. But the race wasn’t a total wash. Her campaign won approval of an important Federal Election Commission petition, allowing her to become the first woman ever to receive federal approval to spend campaign funds on childcare. That shift in rules back then made it possible for Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) to use her campaign funds for childcare as she worked full-time and ran for office, and as her son shifted to virtual kindergarten last fall.
“I don’t know how a five-year-old does virtual kindergarten without someone there with them,” Williams says. She counts herself fortunate, grateful for those who came before her to ensure campaign funds could be used for childcare. She was able to hire “Ms. Betty,” who’d worked at her son’s previous daycare and had been out of work since that center closed in March. But most mothers are not running for Congress and don’t have campaign funds to spend on childcare, and instead have to make wrenching decisions between being present at their job or attending to their child.
In the first two weeks of Williams’s term, she faced an insurrection at the Capitol where she feared for her life and then voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. But she’s also been thinking about the childcare business. “The pandemic has been devastating for women in the workforce, because we know that the majority of [workers] in the care industry are women, specifically women of color, and they make all other work possible,” says Williams.
Williams is a proponent of universal family care to support people from birth up to when she describes them as “seasoned citizens,” wanting to age with dignity. She sees President Joe Biden’s willingness to invest an additional $40 billion in childcare through the American Rescue Plan as a first step, “because we have not had the financial support at the highest levels of government,” she says. But Williams insists caregivers need pay equity and benefits and inclusion in federal labor protections to ensure a living wage and that Americans need a child tax credit given on a monthly basis, so people have guaranteed income.
She notes that the current Congress includes more women than any other in U.S. history but, as she puts it, “We have to make sure that we’re not just here in numbers only.” She sees herself and her colleagues as obligated to “move an agenda forward that really uplifts women in this country.” Williams indicates a force that could become powerful within Congress—a kind of childcare caucus consisting of mothers (and fathers) who understand the strain on parents and the inequities that childcare providers face. To lift up women, she says, “A childcare caucus would be a huge step in the right direction.”
It would have a few obvious supporters. In both the House and the Senate, some have been calling for these kinds of reforms for years. Last May, representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) were among those who cosponsored the $50 billion Child Care Is Essential Act with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Since 2017, Scott and Murray have been pressing for the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap out-of-pocket costs for middle income Americans and make it no-cost for those with lower incomes.
“Women, especially Black and brown women, have been hardest hit by pandemic-related job losses and by the loss of childcare options. The consequences are historic, and the collapse of childcare would hold back a generation of working parents, especially women,” Warren tells me via email. With the $10 billion for childcare included in the pandemic-relief Cares Act, plus the $40 billion in the new stimulus plan that has passed the House, Warren is counting a win for the $50 billion childcare bailout she’s advocated for. “I’m glad that President Biden has included strong support for childcare in his COVID-19 relief plan. As we move forward out of this pandemic, we need to fight for a better childcare system than we had before.”
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Even Republicans have begun to see this as a winning and urgent issue, albeit with a different approach. Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is proposing a direct-deposit child tax credit of $4,200 per year per child up to age 6 and $3,000 per year for each child ages 6 to 17, given as monthly payments—but paid for by eliminating Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and other existing tax credits for children and working families. In February, DeLauro sponsored a similar monthly credit in the House (something she’s introduced about a dozen times), after two decades fighting for it and without a threat to cut TANF. Now, with the Democrats’ majority in the House, tie-breaking vote in the Senate, some bipartisan support, and a time of national financial desperation, the odds are better than ever that it could pass.
In the House, Meng just introduced a Marshall Plan for Moms, saying, “Moms—especially moms of color—have been pushed to the brink of economic, social, and emotional collapse due to this pandemic.” The Marshall Plan for Moms would include robust paid leave; investments in education; childcare and early learning; expanding unemployment benefits; a federal minimum wage increase to $15 per hour; and mental health support for moms. Meng will also be reintroducing the At Home Learning Act, a bill she sponsored to extend until June paid sick and family leave for families with vulnerable household members who choose virtual learning when given an in-person option or if their school is operating on a hybrid model.
The work ahead is a matter of emergency relief through the current crisis, but also figuring out how to build something new and stable in its place. “I think right now the focus is really on what is necessarily in front of us, because there’s so much lacking,” says Meng. “We need to help moms make up for what’s already been lost, whether it’s jobs or caregiving.” But after the pandemic, she says, “We have to reimagine our society and the United States where we are truly compensating moms and caregivers for the work they are doing.”
Throughout Calarco’s qualitative studies on the state of mothers’ well-being during the pandemic, she found in heterosexual couples where both parents are working from home, when schedules conflicted, moms were more inclined to sacrifice a meeting or work time. “Even when dads are doing a lot, it’s those moments of conflict when we see mothers sacrificing their own careers, oftentimes because they make less than their husbands and feel like their job then matters less to the household budget as a whole,” says Calarco.
My own reality seemed to want to underscore all of this: During the various interviews for this story, my daughter wandered in just to say hi to whomever I had on the screen—one of her more mortifyingly unprofessional pandemic ticks—and practiced piano as I wrapped up my phone interview with Meng. As Grechen Shirley answered my questions, she simultaneously needed to nurse her infant son, who was refusing a nap.
We’re among the fortunate ones. We’re somehow still working.
“We know from research that an investment in high-quality, universal, affordable childcare is one of the best ways to get women back into the workforce and help them stay in the workforce,” says Calarco. More broadly, she says, until inequities such as the gender pay gap are addressed, women will keep finding themselves forced into difficult choices. During the pandemic, she’s interviewed women in-depth and found so many feeling guilt and frustrated with themselves. But guilt, she notes, turns one’s energy inward. “If we want to effect social change, we need that energy directed outward. We need rage instead of guilt, and it’s only through that kind of rage, I think, that we have a shot at demanding the kinds of policy changes that are necessary moving forward.”
When I asked former-teacher Williams-Coble, given her professional experience as an educator and what she has lived through as a parent during the pandemic, what sort of policies she thinks could help parents, she echoed a lot of what Meng, Warren, and Williams have proposed. Parents should have affordable, safe childcare options if they choose to work, and shouldn’t have “to ditch more than 40% of their income towards childcare.” She thinks funding should be available for parents who have opted to stay home and care for their children during the pandemic too, regardless of income level. She knows too well how many middle-class families have found themselves a few skipped paychecks away from the threat of homelessness. “I think we’re low-key trying to choke on this bootstrap mentality,” as if in the midst of all this, we also must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps without systems to help. “We’re strangling ourselves,” says Williams-Coble.
When I asked her if she would ever consider running for office herself—school board? Congress?—she laughed and talked about how much advocacy for education matters to her.
But then she paused and said, “I haven’t considered it, but since you asked, I’m going to.” She wondered aloud where one would start—alderman? She’s not sure but adds, “I won’t limit myself…. There’s still a lot of healing and learning, but I’m not afraid anymore to tell my story and come forth and speak from my experiences, because I’m not the only one who’s gone through this…. We’re not by ourselves.”
Sarah Stankorb is an award-winning writer in Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Marie Claire, Glamour, O Magazine, and The Atlantic, among others.
