Beacon Views, Sarah Anne Strickley: Self-Storage Unit: Women's Work in the Age of the Pandemic

Last week, after considerable delay, I began packing away my professional wardrobe. Black blazers, black dresses, blocky black heels — all tucked into boxes for storage until classes begin again in the fall. This usually happens around the final week of spring semester classes, but this year I was afraid to pack away my professional wardrobe lest it remain in storage for many months or even years. Forever?

To be clear, I know that I’m very fortunate. Jobless claims have now exceeded 40 million and we’ve lost more than 100,000 souls to the virus. I’m healthy and, for the time being, I still have a job, but I don’t know what’s ahead. It’s possible the pandemic will render my work wholly digital; it’s possible enrollment numbers will tank and I’ll be terminated; and it’s also possible the virus will make my career seem expendable in the context of a family in crisis.

It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of myself in a window, walking the dog in a woolly shift in 90-degree heat, that I finally made myself pull out the boxes. Meanwhile, my mother, who has made difficult negotiations in order to maintain a career while also mothering four children, was considering retirement. We texted about it. She’s an X-Ray tech and disappointed in the protections her company has afforded its workers. Why continue working for a company that doesn’t value you enough to ensure your safety?

Why indeed?

All over the country and around the world, women are making similar calculations: what is my work worth? Already, they’re disappearing from the workforce in record numbers: because they happen to work in industries that are especially hard hit, because they’re the first to go in any industry, because they earn less than their spouses and someone needs to watch the kids.

None of us know what’s ahead, but we already know all too well who will bear the brunt of the labor left uncovered by canceled summer camps, shuttered daycares, sitters and nannies deemed exposure risks. We know that millions of women will leave the workforce when schools open (online or otherwise) in the fall and we know this because our country has never been able to arrive at a good solution to the problem of childcare — much less childcare in a pandemic.

It will be women who lose their careers, lose aspects of themselves, lose capital and footing. If they’re mothers, they’ll be expected to say that they’re simply glad their children are safe and well-cared for, which will be true, but it won’t be the whole story. When the crisis ends, will those mothers find their ways back to their work selves or will that aspect of their identities occupy dusty boxes in storage units for the rest of their lives?

I wish I could throw my mother a splashy retirement party. I’d make a dumb and meandering speech and somewhere in the midst of my bloviating I’d try to make her see that I see her, that she has been seen — quietly claiming her ground and never letting go of her work self despite considerable pressure. My hope for my daughters is that they never have to be made to feel as though they must choose between being a "real" mother and a working mother, but at this moment I can’t say that my hopes are exactly high.

Still, there’s a kind of lightness that happens when you tuck away the heavy clothes of work. There’s a kind of worth one is prone to explore in the absence of productivity metrics. Today, for example, I watched my daughters play with bubbles in the yard, I prepared a meal I knew in advance that they’d resist, I walked the dog in appropriate attire. And I wrote this.