Young Women During the Pandemic in Mendoza Argentina: The impact of unpaid child care on their lives

VICTORIA SECA; EMILIANA SEGATORE

Feminist Futures

Emerald

Lugar: Leicester, UK; Año: 2024;

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 has created social, economic, and health crises. With domestic confinement, there was an increase in gender inequalities that brought greater public awareness to the importance of care and the inequitable distribution of this work (Rodríguez Enríquez, Alonso & Marzonetto, 2020). In this chapter we seek to understand the experiences of young women who performed unpaid child care in this new social context, through interviews with young women in the province of Mendoza (Argentina).The research takes a qualitative approach. We take a critical look at unpaid care from the perspective of feminist economics and seek to contribute to the sociology of care and youths based on a situated study. We conducted non-sexist interviews (Díaz Martínez & Dema Moreno, 2013) with young women in the province of Mendoza, Argentina, who had child care responsibilities in their homes during the 2020 lockdown. Virtual interviews were conducted in April and May 2021. A purposive sample was used and data analysis was explanatory and interpretative (Tesch, 1990). Detailed interpretations of the interviews were made and the data were organized, thematically coded, and integrated, with the goal of reaching an integrated explanation (Perez, Perez & Seca, 2020) that can dialogue with existing theoretical developments and the aim of this book.The chapter is structured in three parts, in addition to the introduction. First, we describe the theoretical concepts that guide our analysis, which is situated within the study of youth and the sociology of care. Second, through the voices of young women from Mendoza, we analyze their experiences during preventative and mandatory social isolation. The goal was to understand the impact that child care had on their careers and education, as well as the effects on their daily experiences, emotions, and life projects. Third, we present our final reflections. Understanding the subjective experiences of the young women who carried out child-care tasks during social isolation in the province of Mendoza allows us to consider the singularities of a structural problem such as those of gender inequalities and the social, economic, and health crises that were exacerbated by the pandemic. These young women carried out direct and indirect unpaid child care (Faur, 2014) in their homes and had to devote more time to this than before the pandemic.This had an impact on their mental health, relationships, progress in educational programs, and economic freedom (Young Women’s Trust, 2020). It highlighted the importance of having personal space, which is necessary for overall well-being. That "room of their own" that they had before the pandemic, which they maintained alongside child care tasks, was closed off. This created tension between the obligation to care for children and women’s desire for time to themselves. However, experiences were different. It could be seen that differences in social, economic, and symbolic capital affected how well women were able to manage the tension between ideal and feasible situations in attempts to reduce the consequences that gender inequalities provoke in the life trajectories of young women.Care is one of the issues where gender inequalities are most clearly observed, so we hope that this article will help bring understanding to the subjective experiences behind the statistics used to track the pandemic in Argentina and other countries. The particular experiences of young women in Mendoza may help us avoid homogenizing generalities and create comprehensive public policies from a feminist perspective. In this article, our intention is not to take a snapshot of the situation or to present a static image cut out of a puzzle. Instead, we aim to explore the articulations of experiences, personal processes, and structural conditions. This leads us to theoretical reflections that ask new questions about young people that, in turn, enable us to build bridges between developments in feminist theory and to rethink and transform the political and social organization of child care toward building feminist futures.