Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus
Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, Baurzhan Bokayev
University of Massachusetts Press, January 2025
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Amy Lutz, associate professor of sociology, has co-authored “Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025) with two Maxwell School alumni.
Lutz and co-authors Sujung (Crystal) Lee ’19 M.A. (Soc)/’24 Ph.D. (Soc) and Baurzhan Bokayev ’22 M.A. (PSc)/’24 Ph.D. (SSc) examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the roles and responsibilities of mothers.
The authors focus on remote and essential workers in Central New York, exploring the evolving demands on mothers as well as public policies that may have hindered their ability to balance work and caregiving. By considering factors such as race and class, the book delves into the broader social consequences of the pandemic, including how it blurred the lines between the roles of teacher and parent.
The book builds on research by Lutz supported with a 2020 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her project “Working and Teaching from Home in New York State Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic” focused on school closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on working parents.
Lutz is the chair of the social science Ph.D. program and a senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research. She researches children of immigrants, educational inequalities and families. She has co-authored several other volumes, including “Parenting in Privilege or Peril: How Social Inequality Enables or Derails the American Dream” (Teachers College Press, 2021) and “Children and Youths’ Migration in a Global Landscape” (Emerald Group Publishing, 2022).
From the publisher:
When stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic erased the division between home and school, many parents in the United States were suddenly expected to become their children's teachers. Despite this new arrangement, older gender norms largely remained in place, and these extra child rearing responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers. “Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus” explores how they juggled working, supervising at-home learning, and protecting their children's emotional and physical health during the outbreak.
Focusing on both remote and essential workers in central New York, Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, and Baurzhan Bokayev argue that the pandemic transformed an already intensive style of contemporary American child rearing, in which mothers are expected to be constantly available to meet their children's needs even when they are working outside the home, into extremely intensive mothering. The authors investigate the consequences of this shift, and how it is influenced by issues such as class and race. They also bring attention to how and why current public policies are not conducive to the de-intensification of motherhood. Locating their study within larger intersections of gender, family, and education, they contend that to fully appreciate the broader social consequences of COVID-19, we must understand the experiences of mothers.
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