Article 29: “All You Can Say is That You Plan on Being Finished Soon”: Doctoral Student Mothers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Doctoral students are in a position of liminality, even without a global pandemic. We are pre-professionals in fields where professional employment post-degree is far from guaranteed, and we are often both students and employees of the same institution. Our stability, status, resources, privileges, and benefits can vary wildly from year to year, or even semester to semester. Often, for women, the years of graduate training overlap with pregnancy and parenting young children, and mothers in academia face special challenges (Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden 2013; Casteñeda and Isgro 2013; Langin 2021). It has long been the case that academics have felt the need to bracket or hide their roles as mothers, but the pandemic has rendered such strategies impossible and illuminated a situation that was already built on inequity, undervalued labor, unpaid labor, and outdated approaches to “having it all.”