This book presents interdisciplinary empirical studies about the COVID-19 pandemic’s complex influence on the professional, personal, and family lives of mothers in academia or “MotherScholars”. It calls attention to how the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education's responses to it highlight the historical, societal, and cultural inequities between diverse groups of MotherScholars. The volume represents diverse ethnicities (e.g., Black, Pinay, Asian American), an assortment of disciplines (e.g., sociology, education, psychology, Asian American studies, etc.), and a variety of methodologies (e.g., collaborative autoethnography, photovoice, kuwentos, etc.) to share diverse narratives linked through an identity and pursuit of MotherScholarhood. It addresses the wide range of pressures and influences affecting mothers in academia and tackles the additional burdens and prejudices MotherScholars with marginalized cultural and religious identities face. Taken as a whole, the book presents important and complementary findings through different MotherScholar perspectives, which underscore the complexity of their experience and how it was impacted by a global pandemic. MotherScholaring During the COVID-19 Pandemic will be a key resource for researchers and practitioners of education studies, educational research, educational leadership and policy, educational administration, gender studies, and women’s studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers' care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers' employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography, and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

This volume focuses on the diverse ways in which mothers working within academia seek to find others with similar experiences to build virtual communities. Although the faculty and student populations of universities have diversified, mothers in academia are disproportionately overrepresented in precarious faculty and staff positions and continue to experience myriad institutional and interpersonal barriers, such as gender wage gaps that are exacerbated by stop-the-clock tenure policies, inadequate parental leave policies, expensive or scarce local childcare options, and social biases. The book gives space to the many ways women create and challenge their own versions of motherhood through a digital “village,” examining how academic mothers use virtual communities to seek and enact different kinds of support.

Stabilizing and Empowering Women in Higher Education: Realigning, Recentering, and Rebuilding is a book that addresses the challenges faced by women leaders in higher education during the current pandemic. The book is written by experts in the field and draws on emerging evidence-based practices and personal narratives to provide insights into strategies for emotional balance, self-care, and wellbeing for women leaders. It explores the challenges faced by women leaders in higher education and offers solutions for their wellbeing, including reframing and reinventing oneself during the pandemic. This volume is an essential read for women in leadership, faculty, administrators, professional staff, graduate students, and researchers. It provides valuable information and perspectives on creating access for marginalized groups, using roles as women leaders to create change, and nurturing and empowering women in leadership. Overall, it is a persuasive and powerful book that will help readers to realign, recenter, and rebuild in their personal and professional lives.

Women Educators’ Experiences During COVID-19: On the Front Lines examines the gendered experiences, challenges, and rapid changes faced by women in higher education during COVID-19. The book’s chapters cover lived experiences ranging from graduate students navigating the pandemic to those grappling with balancing motherhood and the academy. Through these diverse perspectives, this edited collection explores the impact of the diversity and nuances of the feminine identity on navigating higher education during an international health crisis. Ultimately, contributors provide recommendations for best practices and suggestions for change for administrators, faculty, and policymakers to dismantle the academy as a male-dominated institution. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and higher education will find this book of particular interest.

Women and COVID-19: A Clinical and Applied Sociological Focus on Family, Work and Community focuses on women’s lived experiences amid the pandemic, emphasising migrant labourers, ethnic minorities, the poor and disenfranchised, the incarcerated, and victims of gender-based violence, to explore the impact of the pandemic on women. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated pervasive gender inequalities in homes, schools, and workplaces in the developed world and the Global South. Female workers, particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds, were often the first to lose their jobs amidst unprecedented layoffs and economic uncertainty. National lockdowns and widespread restrictions blurred the boundaries between work and home life and increased the burden of domestic work on women within patriarchal societies. This so-called ‘new normal’ in everyday life also exposed women to increased levels of gender-based violence and the likelihood of contracting COVID-19 due to overcrowding. This edited volume includes contributions from leading applied and clinical sociologists working and living in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and gives a global overview of the impact of the pandemic on women. Each chapter adopts an applied and clinical sociological approach in analysing gendered vulnerabilities. The volume innovatively uses personal accounts, including narratives, interviews, autoethnographies, and focus group discussions, to explore women’s lived experiences during the pandemic. This edited collection will greatly interest students, academics, and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in gender and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.