The Good Girls: Locked up, Locked Out and Locked Down.
Keywords:
Lockdown, Gendered roles, Personal experience story, Collaboration, Dislocation.Abstract
On the 24thth March 2020, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced the country would go into a Covid-19 lockdown. Two days later a new reality dawned with all businesses, organisations and educational institutions closed, except those deemed ‘essential’. Within a week media reports started to emerge, suggesting that Covid -19 would adversely impact on women and girls to a greater extent and that women make up the majority of workers in frontline essential work.
In order to make sense of this lockdown experience, the authors of this article, four academic women, reached out to each other to share their lockdown experiences in a collaborative research project. Drawing on narrative inquiry methodology, this article highlights storytelling as a method to explore, analyse and present new understandings about the phenomenon.
This article confirms how lockdown created boundaries for the authors. These are reflected in the creation of a personal experience story i.e one summative narrative in which Lisa is the representative character, the “good girl”. The story illustrates the dislocation and disconnection imposed on the authors during lockdown and depicts the internal and external struggles of being “expected” to continue in various ‘gendered’ roles as a caring mother, manager, daughter, grandmother, and academic.
References
Acker J (2006). Inequality Regimes: Gender, class and race in organizations. Gender and Society 20: 441-464.
Atkinson, R. (1995). The gift of stories: Practical and spiritual applications of autobiography, life stories, and interpersonal mythmaking. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Atkinson, R. (2002). The life story. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research context and method (pp. 121–140). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Author (2016). Interpretive stories: understanding individual transition and change. Auto/Biography Yearbook, the annual journal of the British Sociological Association (BSA) study group on Auto/Biography. Nottingham: Russell Press.
Bell, S. E. (1998). Becoming a political woman: The reconstruction and interpretation of experiences through stories. In A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds.), Gender and discourse: The power of talk (pp. 97–123). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Bold, C. (2012). Using narrative in research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21.
Chase, S. (2005). Narrative inquiry: Multiple lenses, approaches, voices. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 651 - 680). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Crossley, M. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology: Self, trauma and the construction of meaning. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.
Ellis, C, & Berger, L. (2003) “Their Story/My Story/Our Story.” In James Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium (eds.), Inside Interviewing: New Lenses, New Concerns, 467–93. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Fontana, A. & Frey, J.H. (2005). The interview: From neutral stance to political involvement. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 695–728). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (1998). Narrative practice and the coherence of personal stories. The Sociological Quarterly, 39(1), 163–187.
Hesse-Biber, S. N., & Leavy, P. (2007). Feminist research practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2005). Interpretive practice and social action. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 483–506). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2011). The constructionist analytics of interpretive practice. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 341–357). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Jamieson, T. (2020). “Go Hard, Go Early”: Preliminary Lessons from New Zealand’s Response to Covid-19. American Review of Public Administration, Vol.50(6-7)” (pp.598-605).
Johnston, K & Knox, C. (2020, April 25). Covid 19 coronavirus: How women became the lockdown’s most essential workers. Retrieved from, accessed 24 September 2020
Johnson, J. M. (2002). In-depth interviewing. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research context and method (pp. 103–119). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Josselson, R. (1996). On Writing Other People’s Lives: Self-Analytic Reflections of a Narrative Researcher. In R. Josselson (Ed.), The Narrative study of lives, Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives. Vol. 4. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Leavy, P. (2007). The practice of Feminist Oral History and Focus Group Interviews. In S. N. Hesse-Biber, & P. Leavy (Eds.). Feminist research practice: A primer. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Loretto, W., & Vickerstaff, S. (2013). The domestic and gendered context for retirement. Human Relations, 66(1), 65–68. doi:10.1177/0018726712455832
Loretto, W., & Vickerstaff, S. (2015). Gender, age and flexible work in later life. Work, Employment & Society. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0950017014545267
McAdams, D. P., & Bowman, P. J. (2001). In D. P. McAdams, R. Josselson, & A. Lieblich (Eds.), Turns in the road: Narrative studies of lives in transition (pp. 3–34). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
McCormack, C. (2004). Storying stories: A narrative approach to in-depth interview conversations. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 7(3), 219–236. doi:10.1080/13645570210166382
Minichiello, V., Aroni, R., & Hays, T. (2008). In-depth interviewing: Principles, techniques, analysis (3rd ed.). Sydney, Australia: Pearson Longman Australia.
Ministry for Women (2020). Covid -19 and Women. Retrieved from https://women.govt.nz/news/covid-19-and-women, accessed 25 September 2020.
Olesen, V. (2005). Early millenial feminist qualitative research: Challenges and contours. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Panui Wahine, (2020, Spring). Women and Covid-19 impacts. Retrieved from https://ministryofwomensaffairs.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/d/369FE0A705FE2BDC2540EF23F30FEDED/A81F58812EEC3CA2C67FD2F38AC4859C, accessed 16 October 2020.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5–23.
Reinharz, S., & Chase, S. E. (2002). Interviewing women. In J. F. Gubrium & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research context and method (pp. 221–238). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Savin-Baden, M., & Van Niekerk, L. (2007). Narrative inquiry: Theory and practice. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 31(3), 459–472.
Simpson, R., & Lewis, P. (2007). Voice, visibility and the gendering of organizations. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Templeton, S. (2020, March 30). The benefits of working from home during the Covi-19 level 4 lockdown. Retrieved from https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2020/03/the-benefits-of-working-from-home-during-the-covid-19-level-4-lockdown.html, accessed 26th September 2020.
UNWomen (2020, June 26) COVID-19: emerging gender data and why it matters. New York (NY): UN Women. Retrieved from https://data.unwomen.org/resources/covid-19- emerging-gender-data-and-why-it-matters, accessed 25 September 2020.
World Health Organization (2020) COVID-19 and violence against women: what the health sector/system can do. Geneva: World Health Organization. Retrieved from https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/331699, accessed 25 September 2020.
Downloads
Additional Files
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
