Being a nomad in one’s home: The case of Italian women during Covid-19

From Firenze University Press Journal: Cambio

Sandra Burchi, University of Pisa, UBIQUAL Research Centre

Sahizer Samuk, University of Pisa, UBIQUAL Research Centre

Home is one of those places where inequality is inherent. To a considerable extent, it is the place where gendered inequalities manifest themselves in a clear-cut division of labor and rationalized inequality, especially for dual-career heterosexual couples (Van Hoof 2011). Patriarchal structures have dominated domestic life (Lasio et alii 2017) despite changing fam-ily patterns and shifting gender roles (Ruspini 2013).

Historically, cultural institutions like the church have supported the idea that a woman’s place is in the home (Walby 1989); furthermore, women are typically associated with home and housework from childhood (Oakley 2018). At the time of this writing, the social construction of the “women and homemaking” pairing was more strongly accentuated when the house became a workplace during COVID-19. Especially since March 2020, COVID-19 demonstrated that inequalities in gendered domestic spaces were even more evident (Manzo, Minello 2020: 2).

A strong spatial dimension (Massey 2013) must be considered with respect to COVID-19. Home became the workplace, and the work was disconnected from the real place of work (e.g., office, company); in fact, in the aftermath of COVID-19, every place was eligible to become a workplace, and people had almost no excuse not to be connected. Before COVID-19, at least being at home allowed them to disconnect from work. Some have also argued that working from home has advantages, such as flexibility (Sullivan, Lewis 2001).

Nevertheless, lockdown and smart work1 perpetuate many problems from the perspective of a gendered division of labor. Gendered work from home overlaps with time and space constraints, causing asociability, intensive multitasking, and a constant struggle to defend work from the invasion of private life or vice versa. With these conditions and having no room of one’s own (Woolf 1929), women became nomads in their “own” spaces. We examine all the strategies and manoeuvres of women in accelerated time and limited space. To do so, we first focus on the literature and the context, which is useful to survey research conducted to date; second, we describe our methodology and third, we elaborate our analysis of the interviews. Finally, we close with our findings, paying tribute to previous literature on gender, time, space, and the COVID-19 crisis.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-10778

Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/cambio/article/view/10778