Covid-19 is egregiously impacting women, particularly women of color, and the current administrations, national and local, need to take action to address this. In December, 2020, women accounted for 150,000 job losses while men fortunately gained 16,000 jobs. Moreover, women bear the brunt of home or zoom schooling, parenting, and caring for aging and disabled relatives.
My contact with immigrants reveals heartbreaking stories every week: the woman who quit her job to take care of elderly parents and then lost her mother to covid, the single mother who lost her job, so her 17-year-old son quit high school to earn money for the household, and the woman whose husband lost his job due to sickness and severe depression, and who now assists her two school-age children with zoom-schooling and has accepted food stamps for the first time in her life.
All of these families worry about getting evicted in the near future as they have absolutely no way to catch up on their unpaid rent.
How can the Biden administration help? The Marshall Plan for Moms is a grand-scale plan for helping families with children recover from the economic and employment devastation of the past year. It is modeled on the Marshall Plan which invested in Europe’s recovery after WWII. Not one of the arguments against it discounts the urgent need for such a large scale strategy. It would benefit every part of our society by increasing parity among the classes. This is not socialism; this is humanism. It’s a plan for improving the conditions of our country by focusing on human values and equality. Check it out and see what you think.
Marcia Arthur
Seattle
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