The Caretakers of Women’s Pandemic Stories

For two years, the staff of the National Women's History Museum has collected journals to capture women's experiences. Here's a sliver of the 500 entries.

A stack of journals archived at the National Women's History Museum in Alexandria, Va.Credit...Jennifer Chase for The New York Times

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By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

In spring of 2020, when other history museums began amassing Covid-19 artifacts, like masks and photographs of empty streets, Lori Ann Terjesen noticed that no institution was specifically capturing the experiences of women — "the architects of society," as she described them last month.

Women represented a majority of essential workers, including grocery store cashiers and nurses in hospitals. When schools shut, they took on the lion's share of child care and remote teaching — a responsibility Terjesen, who has three children, ages 8, 6 and 3, knew intimately.

As the vice president of education at the National Women's History Museum, she wanted the institution to start collecting journals, which have long served as primary sources of women's experiences but have often been omitted from textbooks.

"Women's history has kind of been overshadowed by male-dominated history, not because it's not there," she explained. "It's just in the archives — their stories really live in journals."

Her team interpreted the term journal loosely to include voice notes, videos, even paintings. Terjesen said she received an email from a nonbinary diarist saying, "‘I’m a Gen Zer — we don't communicate via journals and letters. We communicate via memes.’ So I said ‘OK! Give me the memes!’"

The result, after almost two years and 500 entries, is a rich Gestaltian time capsule of the pandemic, parts of it housed on the museum's website or archived in the cabinets of its office in Alexandria, Va. There are handwritten and typed-up poems; voice notes between friends who live far apart; an interpretive dance recorded in a solitary bedroom; even a hand-stitched quilt. These physical and digital artifacts brim with emotion and reflection.

"With this project, we were really hoping women would feel that their stories have value," Terjesen said. "And that they felt safe and comfortable knowing that we would be a good caretaker of those stories." Below is a small sliver of the entries, edited for length and clarity.

Illustrator, 78, Manhattan.

When New York City went into lockdown in March 2020, Chiverton saw her illustration work dry up overnight. While on walks with her dog, she would observe the world around her, then go home and sketch "to keep my sanity," she said. The ink-and-watercolor drawing below captures what became a nightly ritual in the city: a cheer at 7 p.m. for frontline workers.

Creative technologist, 33, Somerville, Mass.

At six and a half months pregnant, Aizman was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia — a dangerous but common condition of high blood pressure while pregnant. In April 2020, she was kept at a hospital under observation and in complete isolation. In a 5,000-word Google Doc, Aizman describes how she and her husband, Sam Stites, navigated the turbulent, uncertain few weeks before their baby's arrival a month later.

At home, in a daze, I throw random clothes into a suitcase and scarf down two-day-old chili while Sam gathers enough backup chargers to stock a small-size electronics retailer. As we rush out to leave, the sight of dirty dishes on the table makes me inexplicably sad.

Sufficiently frightened, I find myself alone in Room 620 in the hospital's antepartum ward. I am instructed sternly by the admitting nurse to stay in my room at all times and not open the door. For a claustrophobic person, being moored in a hospital during a pandemic is a mean cosmic joke.

The window, like in many global hotel chains and every hospital, is bolted shut. Air is still. It is quiet. Room 620 contains a round table, two chairs and a green sleeper sofa. A window looks out onto two buildings, one beige and one blue-gray, meeting at an angle under the cloudy sky. "Today is / 23 / Thursday / April" reads a tearaway calendar on the wall.

New Jersey.

Established in 1995, this guild promotes the legacy of African American quilting. To reflect on the pandemic, its members Bernice Paschal, Minnie Melvin, Carolyn Davis, Marcella Booker, Lynda DuBois-Jackson and Glendora Simonson crafted textile blocks using fabric, needles, thread and buttons. They were stitched together by Simonson, then mailed to the museum, where the quilt is now in its archives. "Although the pandemic postponed the celebration of our 25th anniversary, we are grateful that none of our members succumbed to this virus," Simonson said.

Brooklyn.

When schools shut down in New York in March 2020, Buckley, a social worker, started a weekly meeting for kids in Prospect Park (the meetings continue to this day). One fall day in 2020, three 11-year-old girls, Caroline, Hannah and Ada, recorded this podcast on Buckley's phone. "I thought the chance to speak to an imagined future audience might be a meaningful way for them to process what it felt like to currently be living through a pandemic," she said.

Physician, 55, Niskayuna, N.Y.

"My work can't be done remotely," Bitar, an oncologist, said. "Cancer does not wait." At the start of the pandemic, she would go to work at her hospital and then self-quarantine at home, socially distancing from her husband and two children. During that time, she typed up 17 poems in a Word document, providing a peek into her life as a frontline worker.

How much time do I have? The man asks.With words muffled behind my double mask,I mumble something. He accepts the answer,the non-answer.Sometimes, you ask just to hear your questionand not the response.Is death disguised in the cancer cells inside him?Or is it floating in the air around us?I give him chemotherapy to chase the first oneI wear a mask to trap outside the other. Equal fight?Unknown.The answer hides behind the mask of uncertainty.The truth is what I’ve mumbled read:How much time does life on Earth have?I am glad he didn't hear it.He is glad too.Talking to people behind masks is trickyThey can only see your eyesand the frown in them can't hide behind a smile.Truth. The truth is more naked behind a mask.

Occupational therapist, 34, Columbus, Ohio.

Misko, who had Covid-19 in October 2020, is one of the millions of people with long-term symptoms — a phenomenon that researchers are still trying to understand. "At this point, I’ve been sick for one and a half years," Misko said. "I never returned to work; I cannot drive or do basic household chores." On her phone, she took photos of her journey through long Covid, from get-well cards to stacks of medications.

Writer, 63, Chicago.

As soon as some restrictions lifted in May 2020, Hertenstein began a cross-country bike trip to see her daughter in Seaside, Ore., cycling 2,500 miles. "After staying with her for a few weeks, I went back to Chicago, but nothing felt right; my life was off in so many ways," she said. So she returned to Oregon in December 2020 and stayed for a few more months. All that time, in a single Word doc, she recorded her experiences, such as receiving her first dose of the vaccine.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021 I got the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. My daughter and I here in Oregon drove to a Walgreens and waited, then were called into a room together. The nurse explained which shot we were getting and any after effects such as soreness in the injection area.

What was it I felt? Not the needle, not the pain (there wasn't any) but relief.

Then I cried. I burst into tears when a minute before we’d been joking around. My daughter and the nurse gave me a second as I sobbed, my face in my hands. I couldn't believe it, Luck? Destiny? God's grace? Why me? But, yes, I’d made it. I was alive.

Computer science professor, 65, Greenville, S.C.

Violence against Asian Americans has been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, Con, who grew up in Taiwan and has lived for decades in the American South, typed up her phone call with a repairman who refused to serve a Japanese American tenant. "It was a bitter fact that I had to endure," she said.

Masuka was a model tenant. Rent directly deposited into my bank account before the due date. Grass edges trimmed clean, neat, like a piece of tofu. My drowsy little house refreshed after he scrubbed down the tired red bricks with his water hose and brush. I wished his lease was longer than a year.

Randy, my plumber for 20 years, maintained all my rental houses and dashed to my rescue time and again with gallantry. I never had the need to look for a plumber — there was always Randy.

After Masuka reported a problem with his toilet's flapper, I asked Randy to fix it. Then I received a call from Randy: "Ms. Con, I went to your downtown house. Was the man inside from Wuhan? He had a mask on. I was afraid to go in. I am sorry, Ms. Con, please find someone else."

"Randy, Masuka is from California, an American citizen, not from Wuhan," I said. "Just keep a six feet distance. It will be all right." Randy was always calling me a China doll and envied how lean Asian people were. What happened now?

An earlier version of this article misstated the city in Ohio where Alexis Misko, an occupational therapist, lives. It is Columbus, not Columbia.

An earlier version of this article misstated when Asya Aizman, a creative technologist in Somerville, Mass., gave birth to her child. It was in May of 2020, not June of that year.

How we handle corrections

Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a gender reporter covering politics, business, technology, health and culture through the gender lens. She writes the In Her Words newsletter. @alisha__g

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