Women’s Work in the Pandemic Economy

"In this complex and thoughtful ethnography author Myfan Jordan has created a fascinating and engaging text. She is one of the first authors to use the concept of the post-capitalist ‘gift economy’ to frame an ethnography of everyday life. Her book considers two case studies of women’s care work during the pandemic. She documents the toxic culture of paid care work in the neo-liberal economy through telling personal stories. She goes on to contrast this experience with the affirmative culture of women’s unpaid voluntary networking — to provide care during the same period. This is a unique take on these issues and should be of interest to anyone looking at post-capitalist imaginaries. It is also a complex and thoughtful ethnography."—Terrence Leahy, University of Newcastle, Humanities and Social Sciences, Australia This book explores two unique studies of women’s economic behaviour during Australia’s COVID-19 crisis. The first describes the care ‘frontline’ in the feminised labor sectors of healthcare and education, identifying extreme workload pressures, deteriorating conditions, and a shockingly high incidence of workplace bullying: including women targeting other women workers. The author argues workplace cultures are almost inevitable in Australia’s advanced neoliberal economy, where a patri-colonial legacy continues to devalue and under-resource women’s work. In contrast, a second study of voluntary care provisioning taking place in ‘hyperlocal digital sharing networks’ over the same period identifies very different economic behaviours. Here, women – and occasionally men – instead engage in ‘care-full’ labors of gifting, collective provisioning, and hive mind problem-solving, that align with the gift economy models seen in degrowth theory. This book will interest scholars in gender studies, sociology, and economics, particularly those interested in care work, the gift economy, and women’s labor. Myfan Jordan is a scholar activist and the Founding Director of Grassroots Research Studio.