Balancing act: a socialist feminist perspective of rural low-income mothers’ experiences navigating the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected rural low-income mothers due to intersecting and compounding factors such as gender, race, income, and disability, among others. In this study, we utilized socialist feminist theory to explore the impacts COVID-19 had on rural low-income mothers’ capacity to facilitate leisure and support their families’ well-being. Through semi-structured interviews with 29 rural low-income mothers, our findings indicated that these women were uniquely challenged with having to balance paid and unpaid work and entertaining children at home while dealing with pandemic-related employment insecurity. These mothers were disadvantaged due to inaccessible personal leisure resources, intensified by the closure of public parks and trails.