In this episode:

We speak to Dr Helen McCarthy, a Historian of Modern Britain at the Faculty of History and Author of Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood.  

In recent months, many working parents have had to juggle looking after kids at home with their usual jobs.We talk about how the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on working mothers. 

We take the historical perspective and the long view to try and make sense of these gender divisions. 

We talk about our reliance on childcare, the broader economic impact of the last few months on women, and how to ensure it is truly valued in the coronavirus recovery. 

Guests:

Dr Helen McCarthy (@HistorianHelen), Historian of Modern Britain at Faculty of History (@CamHistory) and Fellow of St John’s College (@stjohnscam) Author of Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood @BloomsburyBooks 

More Info:

https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-helen-mccarthy

Transcript:

Unknown Speaker 0:00   

Hello and welcome to the other university, a podcast about the people who make Cambridge University unique. I'm your host, Nick Saffell. In this episode, we speak to Dr. Helen McCarthy, a historian of modern Britain at the Faculty of History, and author of double lives, a history of working motherhood. In recent months, many working parents had to juggle looking after kids at home with their usual jobs. We talked about how the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on working mothers. We take the historical perspective and the long view to try and make sense of these gender divisions. We talked about our reliance on childcare, the broader economic impact of the last few months on women, and how to ensure it is truly valued in the Coronavirus recovery. Just tell me a little bit about your experience of lockdown so far?

Helen McCarthy 0:52   

Well, my experience of lockdowns probably fairly similar to that of many other working parents, I've had my two primary school aged children at home for most of it, they managed to get back to school for a few weeks towards the end of the summer term. But it's been pretty intense and pretty full on. I've been trying to do my teaching and my university work. My husband, who's a lawyer, has been working at home doing some virtual court hearings, which has been a new experience for him. And it's been, you know, we've been sort of tag teaming it, trying to sort of muddle through as best we can. But it's been it's been a pretty stressful period.

Unknown Speaker 1:34   

So do you think it's changed your working practices as a family? With this sort of future mindset? Do you think it's going to change how you'll go about work?

Helen McCarthy 1:43   

Well, I've talked a lot about this with with my husband, who has only been into his chambers in central London once since the beginning of lockdown. And it certainly seems that for the legal profession, there may very well be a longer term shift towards doing a lot, a lot more online, including potentially quite a lot of court hearings, virtually. So that could be a permanent shift. And I think for universities, for my for my line of work. I mean, online teaching, obviously, is the immediate future for us, because University of Cambridge is, has announced that it will be providing all lectures online, at least for Michaelmas term, and then a great deal of my undergraduate teaching. And master's level teaching will also be online with hopefully a little bit of face to face teaching in there as well. But I don't know I mean, the future is really open, I think it will obviously come down to how soon we get a vaccine, whether we can work out some social distance, teaching methods that work really well. And how the pandemic pans out, I think over the next six months, I mean, I do think that the longer we are in this groove of doing everything online, the more likely it is that it will embed itself and become permanent.

Unknown Speaker 3:02   

Can you tell me a little bit about your your background and also about your new book?

Helen McCarthy 3:08   

Sure. So well, I teach modern British history here at the university and I have been in posted September 2018. And before that, I spent almost a decade teaching modern British history at Queen Mary University of London, which is in my land in East London. But I am a Cambridge product. So I did my undergraduate degree in Cambridge, then did my PhD in London, and worked for a little while for a think tank Think Tank demos in the early 2000s, which was a really interesting contrasting experience from from academia doing research in a very different kind of environment. But I'm originally from ethics from Colchester, where I grew up, spent most of my childhood and teenage years. And well, I think that's probably most that I can say about myself of any interest. And my book. Yes, so my book I've written a book called double lives the history of working motherhood, and it was published earlier this year in April, actually, really just a few weeks after the lockdown had started. So I initially felt quite sorry for myself launching a book under lockdown, but then realized that actually the themes of the book which are all about how mothers juggled care and paid work in the past, were incredibly pertinent, particularly given the theme of homeworking because home based waged work was actually a theme that came through very powerfully in my research, I suppose it might be something we'll be talking about a bit more in a minute. But the book is really meant to be a pretty broad big social and cultural history of mothers who worked for pay in Britain since the mid 19th century. I wanted to write a book that really just try to sort of tell the story of how women did it, how women have different social classes, women in different parts of the United Kingdom, women of different ethnicities. women doing very different kinds of jobs and in very different kinds of family circumstances. So women who had husbands women who didn't, and really just tried to kind of bring the story, paint a big picture on a big Canvas, as I say, over 150 years,

Unknown Speaker 5:17   

looking back in history with that sort of lens, what has sort of COVID taught us about the importance of childcare and labor in general,

Helen McCarthy 5:24   

I think COVID has, has exposed something well, which people like me already knew, yet, perhaps other people didn't. Which is that if you if you have a mass withdrawal of state subsidized childcare, by closing nurseries, by close by childminders no longer being able to work, by closing schools, by getting rid of after school clubs, breakfast clubs, and very importantly, by cutting off access to informal sources of childcare, so for a large chunk of the lockdown, families couldn't draw on grandparents or relatives or neighbors or friends to help out with childcare. If you withdraw all of that, then we can see what happens. And what happens is that the sexual divisions which already exist in our society, are magnified. And all of the research that's been undertaken since the lockdown shows very clearly, that it's women, it's mothers, who are shouldering the burden of childcare, of homeschooling, of housework as well in the home. And these are things that they were doing in greater quantities than men before lockdown, but it has been exacerbated and intensifies, under under the conditions of COVID.

Unknown Speaker 6:44   

So is it been equally felt across not just for industries and sort of classes as well? So you've talked about working mothers, but is it more greatly affected? The types of industries and just different types of classes?

Helen McCarthy 7:00   

Do you mean in history or currently?

Unknown Speaker 7:02   

Or both? Really?

Helen McCarthy 7:05   

Sure. So I was very interested in trying to trace different the different childcare solutions that women from different classes or in different industries adopted in the past. And there are some really important differences. So women of the middle and upper classes who on the whole didn't work for wages, but there were always exceptions. They were pioneer women, doctors, they were writers, artists, and so on. And they tended to have nannies, and governesses and servants who worked who worked in their own homes, so they were sort of pretty well suited for childcare. And also the upper middle classes, really right through to the later 20th century also made use of boarding schools. It was fairly standard to send your certainly your sons off to boarding school at quite an early age. And that was you know, perfect childcare solution. For those for those classes. For women working in the Lancashire textiles industries, which was an area which had a very strong tradition of married women's work right from the early years of the Industrial Revolution. They tend to use child minders. And these were often grandmothers, they might be relatives, they might be neighbors, women who live very close by maybe just the next street along. And they would pay those women to look after their children after that, and including often very young babies when they were going to the fact