Anne

Anne is the mother of a school-age child and a toddler, and during COVID she took on the roles of schoolteacher and household manager for her family of four who were now in the house every day, all the time. Stay-at-home parenting is a rigorous undertaking in the best of circumstances, and with no in-person school or childcare help, it became an all-consuming grind.

Anne is not alone in this struggle. 10 million U.S. mothers living with school-age kids were not working outside of the home in January 2021— 1.4 million more than before the start of the pandemic. In fact, 1 in 4 women were thinking about leaving the workforce or scaling back their careers because of their new burden of COVID-era domestic responsibilities. Low-income mothers were hit particularly hard by these shifts and were 3 times as likely to leave their jobs for COVID-related reasons. Low-wage and part-time jobs rarely offer paid family leave, giving those mothers no way to continue in the workforce once the pandemic closed schools and daycares.

In Anne’s sculpture, all work hours are unpaid. Larger silver spheres represent a full hour of unpaid labor and smaller spheres represent a half hour of unpaid labor.