Covid Diaries: Women's Experiences of the Pandemic

While under lockdown, women’s work expanded exponentially, especially care work at home, including emotional care work. What the pandemic exposed is the unpaid care work that most women perform. Midway through the stages of lockdown, researchers started to do surveWhile under lockdown, women’s work expanded exponentially, especially care work at home, including emotional care work. What the pandemic exposed is the unpaid care work that most women perform. Midway through the stages of lockdown, researchers started to do surveys to find out what is happening to women, expressing the results of the research. Yet, this research does not get to the heart of the matter: women's lived experience of an historical epoch - of a virus spreading at breakneck speed across geographical boundaries, condemning the whole world to final infections, state sanctioned lockdowns and death.

This collection by a diverse group of women academics and writers, consists of essays written with raw emotion, others in poetic prose, some in poetry. The golden thread that runs through the collection is a coming to terms of a new way of life for women during Covid-19. In this book published by Imbali Academic Press, Ashanti contributed a chapter called I Followed the Fire.