O fechamento das creches públicas e o cuidado de crianças na pandemia de Covid-19: uma análise da relação entre o extraordinário e o ordinário a partir das narrativas de mulheres de classes populares no Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This research falls within the field of care and gender studies, highlighting markers of social class and race. Its main objective is to analyze the meaning of the prolonged closure of public daycares during the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of working-class women, reflecting on the relationship between the extraordinary (the pandemic) and the ordinary (everyday life) in the care of young children in these families. The subjects of the research are working-class women, mostly black, whose children were aged zero to six years between March 2020 and October 2021, a period during which public daycares in Rio de Janeiro remained closed to in-person activities due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. This is a qualitative study, and data were collected through semi-structured interviews, as well as content gleaned from informal conversations and a discussion circle held at a municipal daycare in a community in the northern zone of the city, of which the interlocutors are or have been users. The pandemic and the closure of the daycares were extraordinary events in the lives of these women, with repercussions on their relationship with paid work and the effort to maintain their families' lives, involving material issues such as food and rent payments and also survival in the face of the risk of contagion by the Coronavirus. The repercussions were generally more about highlighting precarities and other ordinary characteristics in the lives of working-class women than about substantially altering their way of life. It is also possible to suggest, from the reports, that the mothering practice of the interlocutors has particularities in relation to that of the middle classes, with less connotation of motherhood as a burden and suffering. Race is a factor that permeates the entire research, and a reflection is especially made on the issue of mixed race and the different ways that women identify and are racially identified, showing that racialization is a relational process. In many of the reports, women mentioned concern for the development of children, which suggests a strong emphasis on the educational role of daycares by the researched women. This topic and a few others, mainly the relationship of women from different social strata with the practice of mothering, are important issues to be further developed in future works. The research indicated that the extraordinariness of the pandemic and the closure of the daycares laid bare daily inequalities and precarities. They also offered mechanisms that, although they were capable of cushioning the extraordinary difficulties, did not change the precariousness present in the ordinary lives of working-class women.