Beyond the Double Day

Abstract

This study examines how student-mothers navigate the intersecting demands of academic work and caregiving, challenging conventional understandings of the gendered “double day” concept. Drawing on qualitative data from twenty-six student-mothers in the Philippines, it introduces the concept of the academic double day to capture the dual burden of unpaid domestic labor and intensive academic responsibilities. The findings argue that education or academic work functions as a form of productive labor that is systematically undervalued, thereby obscuring the full extent of the gendered burdens experienced by student-mothers. Through an intersectional lens, the study demonstrates how student-mothers experience overlapping inequalities shaped by age, class, and educational status while simultaneously engaging in the process of identity reclamation. By reconceptualizing gendered labor beyond paid employment, this study extends existing theories of the double day and highlights education as a critical, yet overlooked, site of both constraint and agency in contemporary motherhood. Ultimately, it calls for a broader recognition of carework as labor in its own right, emphasizing the need to value caregiving not as invisible or secondary work, but as socially necessary work that sustains both household and educational systems.