New Book Examines How COVID-19 Crisis Entrenched Inequality For Women Around The World
A newly released compendium, Feminism and COVID-19: How Women Fare in the Face of a Global Crisis, is revealing how women across the world were simultaneously critical for the success of the global COVID-19 response, and disproportionately impacted by the pandemic’s secondary effects, such as lost income, and increased unpaid care work and violence.
Book co-editors, Dr. Julia Smith of Simon Fraser University and Dr. Clare Wenham from the London School of Economics, gathered together a unique multidisciplinary and transnational team of authors and experts who examined nine case studies of the COVID-19 response and its global and local impacts on women from Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria and the United Kingdom.
“To facilitate pandemic preparedness, we now must learn from the past,” says Smith. “These case studies include a multitude of lessons on how to insure those at the center of pandemic response – i.e., women – are also protected from its worst effects.”
Feminism and COVID-19 has received much praise. Dr. Jennifer Piscopo, a professor at the University of London, commented that “[t]his remarkable volume about COVID-19 policies in diverse countries and territories shows that, rather that creating ruptures leading to transformational change, health emergencies actually reinscribe patriarchy and intersectional inequalities.”
Feminism and COVID-19 is published by The MIT Press.
