It’s strange the way these two pandemic years have done something to time. People talk about how 2019 feels as if it was five years ago. I catch myself being unable to estimate how long ago something happened. Was it three or four years ago we met in that bar? 

But maybe there’s something else going on. In some ways, we’ve gone back to an earlier era. I’m thinking of the 1950s and early 1960s, when North Americans didn’t eat out as much as we did in the years immediately before the pandemic. Dinner was at home, restaurant meals a treat. Most families didn’t travel as much or go as far. Instead, they visited local sites for walks and family picnics. Had hobbies, did crafts. Or at least they cultivated crafts and hobbies both as an affordable means of personal expression and a way to keep the kids busy. 

Sounds a little 2021, doesn’t it?

There’s also this: almost two full years into the pandemic, women are back at home in record numbers. Usually men are the ones who lose their jobs during a global emergency or recession, laid off from factories. But the pandemic has been called the first female recession. The Shecession. Since women tend to work in service industries, when the doors close, jobs go away. And they’re not going back.

RBC employment figures show that during the first two months of the pandemic, 1.5 million Canadian women lost their jobs, either laid off, put on furlough, or forced to quit because their families lacked childcare. A more recent survey shows that in 2021, female employment is at a 33-year low. Meanwhile, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, four times more women than men lost their jobs in September, 2020—almost 900,000 of them. And that’s just in one month.

A text from a friend: Is this making you crazy yet? Below, one of those ads of a Fifties Housewife with a maniacal look on her face. 

My new novel, Time Squared, centres on the changing roles of women over the ages. We like to think that women’s lives have been improving over time—and over our lifetimes they certainly have. But take a look historically, and what stands out are the waves of advancement and retreat. 

Time Squared is historical fiction, but with a bit of a twist. A young woman named Eleanor meets a soldier named Robin in 1811. He heads off to fight Napoleon, and their romance progresses through separations (remember letters?) and periodic reunions. 

But the story keeps jumping in time. Robin fights in the Napoleonic Wars, then the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam and Iraq. As far as Robin is concerned, he’s always lived in whatever era he wakes up in. He was born twenty-five years earlier and his memories fit with that. 

Yet Eleanor has a growing number of strange dreams and visions—glimpses of living in different eras—and gradually comes to understand that they’re travelling through time. Someone is playing with them, and Eleanor has to figure out who’s doing it and why. Who’s is the chessmaster that’s treating them like pawns? Most importantly, she has to get herself and Robin off the merry-go-round so they can lead authentic lives.

That’s the basic story I wrote—and wars proved sadly useful in shaping it. As Eleanor’s aunt remarks, there will always be another war. But this basic structure allows me to look at the way the role of women has changed over the centuries. There’s one obvious recent example: Rosie the Riveter being hailed for her work during the Second World War, then being sent home afterward to become one of those Fifties housewives with a maniacal look on her face. 

Going back further, you can trace the relative sexual freedom of women during the raucous 19^th century English Regency period through the corseting-up of the Victorian era, and after that, another opening-up, this one led by the suffragette movements that loosened barriers (and stays).

Action and reaction. Systole and diastole. And what interests me is what this does to individual women and their relationships. What it does to the personality of my character, Eleanor.

So here we are in 2021 as yet another period of relative freedom for women constricts. Not perfect freedom, of course. Before the pandemic, Canadian women overall earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. For racialized women, it was worse. They earned 76 cents per white male dollar. That’s one reason so many women have “voluntarily” left their jobs when their families lacked childcare. If they had to survive on one salary, the man’s was higher. 

So what does it do to a woman’s sense of self when she feels less valued for her hard-won work skills than for her supposedly innate female childcare abilities, especially when she might not actually have innate childcare abilities? She’s never been valued equally at work, and now she feels overwhelmed at home while doing something society says she’s supposed to be good at, something that’s supposed to be easy—and something that isn’t easy at all. 

Then think about the reverberations of that feeling within relationships. Calls to assaulted women’s helplines have gone way up during the pandemic.

Epidemiologists now say the pandemic will ease next year, even with the Omnicron variant, at least if we can pull of a worldwide vaccine rollout. But both historians and futurists point out that things never go back to “normal” after a war or a global emergency like COVID 19. It usually leads to a time of great societal unrest. 

Technological change will accelerate, the futurists say, with industrialists not wanting to depend on a vulnerable human labour force. And while economists expect a period of economic recovery, they also note that historically, the social peace this brings often lasts for about two years. After that, have-nots tend to notice that they’re worse off than they were before. 

One result was the barricades that rose in Paris after the 1832 cholera epidemic, a revolt that would give Victor Hugo the climax of Les Miserables. Another was the explosion of bitter labour strikes during the early 1920s, a few years after both the flu pandemic and the First World War.

Most of the studies trace what men do. I would like to think that women will back get out of the kitchen and go back to jobs they like, presuming they had them in the first place. The quality of paid work is something else to consider, and people seem to be considering it, refusing to go back to lousy jobs. How’s that one going to play out? But being a novelist and not a historian or futurist, I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. My job is to ask questions, not answer them.

But I have to say, reading texts from my women friends, I hope that a little bit of Happily Ever After lands in our time-travelling world. Even if I have my doubts that it will.

If you’re a woman in Toronto and need help, please call the Assaulted Women’s Helpline at 416-863-0511. There’s a toll-free line, 1-866-863-5011, for those in the rest of Ontario.