A Year Out The Window
Babysitter Withdrawal Syndrome (Retiro Way #1988)
The title is a reference to all those parents who, upon the enactment of stay-at-home orders at the pandemic’s start, suddenly had their children at home with them all day long every single day, a situation that oftentimes led to tremendous levels of stress for parents for a variety of reasons — which surely led many to sorely miss schools and daycare — and which disproportionately forced far more women than men to leave their jobs so that they could stay at home with their children. That trend — along with the fact that the industries most severely affected by lockdowns generally employed more women than men, plus the fact that more men than women were being called back to their jobs when those industries were allowed to partially reopen — set the number of women in the workforce back an entire generation to 1988 levels, ergo the figure in the subtitle. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit noted, about the many articles in the media remarking on how pandemic duties had disproportionately landed “on the shoulders of women,” that it was as if “that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by their [unremarked-upon] spouses.”