Women Writing Lockdown's virtual house exhibition explores the impact of lockdown on British women through their own words – in books, poetry, blogs and on Mumsnet. We are very grateful to Mumsnet for working with us on the project and would like to invite Mumsnetters to explore the rooms of our virtual house.
Living in lockdown was a particularly gendered experience. As schools and childcare facilities closed, women took on the bulk of the burden of home schooling and childcare. They were more likely to take furlough payments or leave employment entirely in comparison to men with children.
Regardless of age, ethnicity or geographical location, British women were more likely to lose paid work than men and more likely to increase their domestic work. The Women’s Budget Group tells us that parents were twice as likely to be furloughed as childless workers – and that women did 78% more childcare than men in households with children under five.
Our exhibition uses women’s words written during the first lockdown to tell the story of women’s experiences as their homes became schools, places of work, isolation wards, and – for some – spaces of fear and danger. Our virtual house showcases writing from published authors such as crime writer Elly Griffiths and poet Nayma Chamchoun, bloggers like Jen Walshaw (muminthemadhouse.com) and Natalie Lue (baggagereclaim.co.uk), women journalists’ news reports, and the words of social media users, who turned to spaces like Mumsnet to share their worries, frustrations and anger.
While some women embraced the chance to spend more time with their families, others felt trapped in some kind of 1950s nightmare where food was rationed, and a new domesticity encouraged the competitive making of banana bread.
Worries about money, the impact of homeschooling on their children, and their own health and those of vulnerable family members led to sleep loss and an increase in alcohol consumption. There were alarming reports of rises in domestic violence, as women found themselves trapped in homes with their abusers who were able to use lockdown laws to extend their coercive control. One of the rooms of our house includes interviews with Shonagh Dillon of Aurora New Dawn and Vivienne Hayes of the Women’s Resource Centre, who discuss how lockdown impacted their work with women trying to escape their abusers.
A century ago, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, in which she argued that women need a room and money of their own in order to write and to counter women’s social silence. Her work helped to establish the significance of spaces, both public and private, as necessary factors in the writing process.
Woolf’s essay provided for the first time a means of evaluating and rendering visible how women’s writing ‘disappears’. The aim of our project is to prevent the re-emergence of this knowledge gap around the pandemic by capturing a variety of sources of life writing by women to document this unique period in recent history.
Our project contributes to the documentation of women’s experiences during lockdown. Feminist scholars are very aware of the possibility that women’s experiences and the representation of them, although visible and acknowledged at the time, can quickly be forgotten. We seek to ensure that the effect of the pandemic on women and women’s writing is not hidden from the historical record. It is extremely important to reflect women’s realities back to them and also to continue to raise awareness of the impact of lockdown on women’s lives and careers.
Twitter: @WomenLockdown
Website: https://womenwritinglockdown.co.uk/