Households, bubbles and hugging grandparents: Caring and lockdown rules during COVID-19
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Households, bubbles and hugging grandparents: Caring and lockdown rules during COVID‑19 Jackie Gulland1 Accepted: 7 November 2020 / Published online: 23 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis brought mountains of legislation and guidance to coerce or encourage people to stay at home and reduce the spread of the virus. During peak lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK) regulations defined when people could or could not leave their homes. Meanwhile guidance on social distancing advised people to stay within ‘households’. This paper explores the legislation under lockdowns in the UK from March to October 2020 and the implications for women’s gendered caring roles. The regulations and guidance assumed that households were separate units and ignored the interdependencies which exist between households and between individuals and wider society. The continuing focus in the lockdown regulations has been on households as autonomous, safe, adequate and secure. This overlooks the interdependency of human life, gendered aspects of caring and the inequalities of housing and living conditions, highlighted by feminist scholarship. Keywords Care · COVID-19 · Ethics of care · Gender · Households · Interdependency
Introduction In March 2020 the UK entered a period of lockdown, to tackle the COVID-19 crisis.1 Legislation during the peak lockdown period (March–May 2020) required most people to stay at home and ordered most workplaces and public services to close down. Formidable powers were given to governments and local authorities to control public order and restrict freedom of movement, creating major threats to civil 1 This article concerns the UK, but many of the gendered patterns of COVID-19 and associated restrictions can be seen across other countries, see for example McLaren et al. (2020), Brennan et al. (2020).
* Jackie Gulland [email protected] 1
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK
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liberties across the spectrum (for details see Greene 2020, Liberty 2020a). Lockdown brought immediate pressures on the everyday workings of society. With the closure of schools, the term ‘home schooling’ was used by policymakers and the press to describe how parents should organise their days. While parents in middle class jobs struggled to look after their children while working from home, this was less feasible for people in frontline working class jobs, and so they risked losing their income, risking their own health and struggling to provide care and education for their children (Warren and Lyonette 2020). Parents of disabled children had additional challenges brought about by the loss of existing childcare support systems, home schooling and concerns about their children’s health. Early research on the effects of lockdown on parents showed that women carried the bulk of this childcare work, at the expense of their ability to continue in paid work a
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