Motherhood taken for granted

The increased salience of the maternal role among middle class Hungarian mothers during the first COVID-lockdown

Abstract

During the past two years an increasing number of studies have analyzed the impact of the COVIDpandemic and the lockdown on women’s circumstances and has found women bearing larger financial, labor market or personal costs compared to men. Women were more likely to be employed in sectors more powerfully affected by the pandemic or to lose employment due to the lockdown. Meanwhile, they also shouldered the bulk of the caring duties resulting from the closure of educational, social and childcare institutions. For mothers it was especially challenging to compensate for all institutions that ceased to provide educational and childcare services, even though the worsening care crisis during the past few decades has taught them how to replace missing or poor quality services. According to previous COVID-related studies, mothers’ and particularly middle class mothers’ efforts were directed primarily towards caring for and assisting their children in their school tasks.

In our paper we aim to describe the complexity of mothers’ care work during the first lockdown and to explore their own interpretations regarding the changes and responsibilities they had to cope with during the pandemic. Our qualitative research was carried out in May 2020 and involved 52 semi-structured interviews with predominantly middle class working women living in heterosexual partnerships. The families were raising at least one child between 2 and 14 years and both mothers and their partners were working full time remotely, from their homes. The interviews were conducted via phone or online in Hungary and among ethnic Hungarian women living in Romania.

One of the central findings of the research is that while all our interviewees have maintained their employment, the majority of the mothers we studied prioritized their maternal roles and tasks over other duties. In their narratives their previous, pre-pandemic efforts to achieve work-life balance was replaced by prioritizing motherhood. In our paper we strive to explain this strategy and argue that society itself has determined and encouraged mothers in at least four ways to concentrate on their children at the expense of paid work or personal leisure. In parallel, however, we also claim that the emphasis put on motherhood in our interviewees’ narratives is at the same time a form of resistance against the promise and ideology of work-life balance for working mothers.