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To understand how care is provided in the context of family relationships, especially when it is the only or the most important resource, we followed the daily lives of two low-income Brazilian women who self-identify as Black, one living in Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in the country, and one in Altamira, a medium-sized city within the Amazon. We talked to them—the women and their family members—via phone calls and WhatsApp. In both locations, access to public services is scarce, yet essential. In both families, women are responsible for care-related chores such as the organization of the house as well as cleaning and feeding the family. During pre-COVID times, the everyday lives of these women suffered from interruptions to the power supply, lack of water or access only to poor quality water, lack of basic sanitation, and different forms of violence, particularly those involving the police and criminal groups. Fights, suspicions, accusations, and even violence mark the everyday lives of these families, in which care is a social requirement and a practical obligation in the absence of social assistance and state structures.
In the context of the health crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, medical assistance was reduced, schools closed, and millions of people lost their jobs and started relying solely on emergency financial aid provided by the federal government. The weakening of public services and social rights, as well as the difficulty of earning money, have made family relationships one of the only resources that people have to stay alive. The pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities in the spheres of health, education, the labor market, and social services, which produces losses that are especially dramatic for Black and low-income women who occupy low-paying and socially unstable positions. Following the propositions of science and technology scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, for us, the “ethics of care” appear not only as a normative and prescriptive framework of moral obligations, but as a relational one as well. With this in mind, and grounded in the experience of two women, Flores and Conceição, we ask, What can care inflict in the lives of women caregivers? What ruptures does care or the lack of it create in the everyday lives of families? What does it mean to consider that care is a source of conflict?
Flores’s family
Three children aged 11, 10 and 7 years old lock themselves inside the room to play with alcohol, out of their mother’s sight. Minutes later, they scream because the youngest one is on fire. Flores puts her son in the shower and calls her husband, who does not answer. Then she calls the firefighters, who arrive at her house within 20 minutes. The team decides to take the child to the referral hospital in the city, despite the chances of it being crowded as a result of treating patients with COVID-19. The child undergoes surgery for more than five hours. Flores needs to stand in the restricted area at the entrance of the operating room to receive information about her son. Her husband cannot accompany her due to pandemic-related measures to limit the number of family members entering the hospital. Flores’s mother, when hearing about her grandson’s accident, says in an audio message, “So, Sis, it must have been a very bad burn. Now she [Flores] has come up with this idea of working and the children stay alone. She says that they [the children] stay with Wellington’s [her husband’s] niece, but it is a lie. They stay alone at home, raising hell, so these things happen. Besides, when she is at home, she sleeps until noon. She is lazy.”
Other women (mothers, neighbors, friends) hold Flores and Conceição accountable, openly accusing them of being “lazy” or gossiping and criticizing them.
The child’s hospitalization lasted 21 days. During this period, COVID-19 control measures were further intensified inside the hospital, so Flores was unable to share the duty of caring for her son in the hospital with other members of her family. On the day they were discharged, Flores and her mother decided that the child would go to her mother’s house, because it would be easier for the child to recover away from the restlessness of the other seven children. Flores was late to meet her mother the next day, and so once again her mother complained, “She is waiting for someone to bring her the gauze. She should have asked Wellington for money yesterday to buy this gauze, but she is very lazy, just like her father. She’s saying that Wellington is pushing her to make him lunch. But her priority is her son.”
Conceição’s family
After years of frequent fights with her mother, Andressa, almost 18 years old, decides to leave the house where she lives with her mother, Conceição, her stepfather, and her three siblings aged 10, 5, and 4 years old. She moves to a nearby house, paying rent with the savings she earned while selling clothes. Andressa is in her final year of school, one of her justifications for living away from her mother. It is impossible to find the privacy and peace she needs to study—a process already hampered due to poor access to digital remote education platforms—in the family’s two-bedroom house, one of which Andressa shares with her three siblings.
There was another reason for the conflict with her mother: Conceição insinuated that Andressa had been “flirting with,” “hitting on,” and “offering herself to” her stepfather. This insinuation led to serious arguments and even physical assault. Despite this, Andressa did not fail to recognize her mother’s efforts to keep the house organized, and to take care of her little brothers and sister. In fact, Andressa thought the domestic chores performed by Conceição were unfair, since she considered her stepfather “a lazy person” who “did not help” and even “beat the mother,” humiliating her and the couple’s two children. Conceição mentioned her difficult and volatile relationship with her partner several times, complaining that he rarely contributed toward household expenses or the children’s needs. According to her, everything was her responsibility, and her partner grumbled when something was not to his satisfaction.
Andressa insisted that her mother kick her stepfather out of the house, which she did in the first months of the pandemic, but the decision lasted less than a month. With his return, the fights and arguments escalated, as did Conceição’s suspicions about Andressa. In one of our WhatsApp conversations, Andressa criticized, “My mother became his nurse. She takes care of the children, the house, she cooks, helps him with the surgery that he went through last week, bathes him…I brought the children here for her to rest. He treats her poorly, he is ungrateful. I see how she is going through a hard time, but I can’t help anymore. I can’t.”
