Ryerson grad’s new book Women of the Pandemic is tribute to heroes

In the spring of 2020, as the reality of the pandemic began to set in, journalist and author Lauren McKeon’s thoughts immediately shifted to a particular segment of the population: women. 

Having already written two books on women’s issues, McKeon, a 2007 Ryerson journalism graduate, knew she wanted to capture women’s stories. 

“It became pretty clear to me early on in the pandemic that it would affect women differently. You could see that they would have the opportunity to become leaders in a way that we hadn’t seen before. I didn't want to lose those stories,” said McKeon, who is also deputy editor of Reader’s Digest.

So, McKeon set out on a quest: to create what would become a written time capsule of women’s stories. 

Her book, Women of the Pandemic, was released in April 2021. It’s a 310-page account of the countless challenges and experiences women faced - as mothers and caregivers, nurses, doctors and PSWs, business owners, teachers, cleaners, factory workers and more - often on multiple frontlines at once.

“So often throughout history, women are relegated to the footnotes - they’re the wife, the sister, the daughter. But women are so essential to everything that’s been happening with the pandemic. We need to hear and honour their stories.”

Below, learn more about Women of the Pandemic (external link)  in a Q&A with McKeon.

Q&A with Lauren McKeon, author of Women of the Pandemic 

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
It wasn’t a challenge to find interesting people, but I wanted to be proactive and intentional in ensuring I was honouring diversity and including a wide-range of experiences. That was always top of mind - how are my own biases playing into this? How are they determining who I talk to and who I don’t talk to? I had a spreadsheet so I could track, ‘Who am I missing? What experiences have I not included so far?’

How did you find the women to profile in your book?
Once I started asking questions, the floodgates sort of opened, and it was hard to stop myself from talking to more people. The challenging part was limiting who I would include.

Then, it was asking, how are mothers faring, what support are they getting or not getting? What about business owners and entrepreneurs, how are their businesses faring? In a lot of cases, they weren’t.

Then it was asking, ‘What does it look like on medical front lines, and for grocery store clerks, and the long-haul trucker carting medical supplies? What is it like to be Bonnie Henry, or Theresa Tam and what is it like to make such decisions for their provinces or the country? And what does domestic violence look like right now? ...Sometimes it all collides - you know, a woman working 20 hours a day on a vaccine also has kids at home to care for. 

Talk about the challenge of writing this book while you yourself were living through the pandemic.
When I started, I remember feeling like a lot of people, and just wanting to make banana bread, and eat inhuman amounts of banana bread.” (Laughs) And, sometimes I’d sit there and ask myself, ‘Is it Monday or is it Friday?’ So, it was sometimes difficult to find the same creative spark and drive.

But on the other hand, being able to do this gave me such a purpose. Hearing peoples’ stories and what they were going through, it gave me such a window into what was happening. I just thought, ‘Everyone needs to know these stories.” It really carried me through.

From health care to homeschooling to the “she-cession”, so many themes are addressed in your book. Talk about what inspired you to explore some of these angles.
I had just come off of writing No More Nice Girls, and I knew from writing that book that women comprise 81 per cent of healthcare workers. So, I knew that women in health care would be greatly affected by the pandemic. 

When we look at the home and family, it was also easy to see that women and mothers would also be greatly impacted by the pandemic, especially when you consider homeschooling responsibilities and knowing that this would vastly fall on women as well. 

I think anyone who knows a mother knows that women bear the brunt of so much, and we know that women are traditionally pushed out of the workforce due to childcare responsibilities and an inequitable division of labour in the home. So, I immediately started to wonder, ‘How is this going to work, and what does this mean for women's equality and advancement?’

“I discovered that 12 times as many mothers than fathers have left their jobs in the pandemic in Canada to care for their children… How will they get back to work, what will that look like? Will there be jobs for them when they come back? We are just starting to see the ripple effect now.” -Lauren McKeon

Can you illustrate how the pandemic played a direct role in the “she-cession” ?
I spoke to one woman who was completing her master’s degree. She was a single mother with a child at home, and she would say, ‘I can’t finish this assignment because I’m helping my son with Zoom school’. But nothing was done to help her. She couldn’t meet the requirements for her master’s, so she had to put that on pause.

I also spoke to a young woman of colour who recently graduated and had just started a well-paying job with benefits at a hotel. But the pandemic hit just a few weeks into the new job. So, she lost her new job, and because she’d only been there for a few weeks, she didn’t qualify for benefits or for CERB. Universities had student aid, but since she graduated before the cut-off, she didn’t qualify for that either.

Can you tell us a bit about the ‘everyday heroes’ profiled in your book?
I interviewed over 50 women for this book - and they’re all incredible. You can’t listen to these women’s stories and not be moved by them.

I spoke to a woman in North Preston, which is the oldest Black community in Nova Scotia, and she worked with other volunteers to make sure they had a COVID testing centre, that they had the health care services they needed, and that they had culturally appropriate materials. People like her showed resilience and drive and held their community together.

I also spoke to one woman who worked at a meat processing plant, and said the most gut wrenching thing - ‘No one hears our stories unless one of us dies’. She had been working since the beginning of the pandemic and hadn’t had a single day off, so she was going to work to make sure people had food to eat, but didn’t know if they had protocols in place to keep her safe. 

What was most surprising about this project?
Given that I’d just worked on books involving women’s issues, it wasn’t necessarily their stories that were surprising - it was the fact that we weren’t hearing about them. So many women said, “I haven't told this story before. I haven’t even reflected on this myself because I’m just trying to make it through.” I felt very grateful they were willing to be so vulnerable with me.

What do you see as most urgent in terms of support needed for women moving forward?
We need to use this experience as a blueprint for the future. We need to realize that maybe the old normal is really bad, and maybe we don’t want to go back to it. 

For example, in the pandemic, affordable day care was finally pushed forward - and that needs to keep going. We also saw a pay raise for PSWs, who are mostly women of colour. They barely make a living wage, and they’ve been fighting for higher pay for years...They had a $4 increase during the pandemic - but it was then taken away. So, we’ve seen things pushed forward, but clawed back again. And that’s something we need to keep pushing for.

We have a responsibility to not leave women behind again. We have so much to learn from them - especially now in the recovery period and moving forward. If we walk away from this and don’t change anything it will be incredibly disappointing. -Lauren McKeon

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