Portrayals of women from classical times often show them sitting at the loom. You may argue that, since weaving is traditionally considered a domestic activity, the women in these portraits or representations were considered as early craftivists. Yet, at the same time, weaving cloth and making clothes or tapestries are actually real jobs, so these women were first and foremost workers and their portraits make us wonder if these women were also trying to tell their stories.
Weaving was indeed a way for silenced women to make their voices heard: even Penelope in Homer's epic poem The Odyssey by weaving and unpicking a shroud was silently protesting to delay marriage to one of her suitor and remain faithful to her absent husband Ulysses.
This dichotomy between women confined to a domestic environment, but actually working on a time-consuming task, makes us think about the condition of modern women.
The Coronavirus pandemic has indeed destroyed the delicate balance between roles and sexes. Last December the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published a report stating that, in the US, there were nearly 2.1 million fewer women in the labor force in December 2021 than there were in February of the same year, before the pandemic started. In the same month 140,000 net jobs were lost in America: that would already be a shocking number, but it's even more shocking to hear that this dramatic number refers to women's jobs. It is clear that women are being pushed out of the workforce by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Coronavirus redesigned the way we work, but it seems that men were able to focus more on their jobs than women even when they were assigned roles in smartworking. Many women with kids couldn't focus only on their jobs, but had to juggle working with home schooling as well. You may argue that most kids all over the world are following distance learning classes these days, so you don't really have to teach them, but they still need some help when it comes to downloading tasks, setting apps on their devices, getting in touch with teachers or scanning and posting homework.
Combining working at home and childcare is stressful: overworked and multi-tasking, many women find themselves with their energies dwindling as they wake up early or go to bed late to work, while in-between working they may be focusing on childcare.
Besides, domestic abuse cases have also been on the rise: this trend started in China where Coronavirus first appeared, but rapidly spread all over the world in a silent and invisible way. Italy recorded a decrease in homicide in the last few months, but an increase in feminicides, many of them occurred during lockdown.
In some countries, such as Myanmar, where fast fashion companies produce their collections, factory closures due to order cancellations pushed women to turn to prostitution to feed their children.
Therefore, while the health crisis has had negative effects on all of us, it is also bringing with it long-lasting effects on jobs, giving rise to inequality, and generating mental health issues, depression, physical and mental fatigue. So in many ways women are becoming a collateral casualty of the pandemic.
Most countries ignored the issue because there are not many women in power and it seems that women have been mainly absent from the discourse: throughout this year of pandemic we have often seen meetings of government representatives and emergency task forces about Coronavirus with men sitting around tables and discussing solutions, while women remained a rare sight.
Now inequality or misogyny have always existed, Coronavirus only ended highlighting them. So, while today may be International Women's Day, it is hard to celebrate maybe with a cake decorated with some special quotes, symbols and flowers in sweet pastel colours. For today we are going to leave you with a picture taken by Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia in the early '80s in the psychiatric hospital in Palermo. In this portrait a young woman with an intense stare offers a flower to the camera in a delicate gesture of kindness.
At the end of the '70s, around the time the Basaglia Law or Law 180 (the Italian Mental Health Act of 1978) was being passed and the psychiatric system in Italy was reformed, closing down of all psychiatric hospitals, Battaglia would spend a few hours a day at the Real Casa dei Matti (Royal House of the Mad) in via Pindemonte, Palermo. She would take pictures of the patients and learn about their stories. While working in the institution she discovered that often women were locked up in mental institutions by their own families who wanted them out of sight because they had been raped and were pregnant or by their husbands who wanted to get rid of them.
Battaglia developed this photographic series as she was attracted by the psychiatric dichotomies and conceptions of madness and normality and by that thin line separating "normal" people from people with mental disorders. We have all been threading this thin line during the last year, so we should take more time to reflect about the pandemic and its effects on the mental and emotional health of all of us and of women in particular, while starting to look ahead and study the strategies to readjust the gender imbalance in a post-pandemic world.
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