Sitting in a café on the Buda side, Julianna and I intimated our post-COVID narratives: the use of our time, the expectations of society, and the role that we women took up, just as our ancestors did during all the war times in history. In the US, women's role during the wars sparked a revolution. In the Soviet Bloc, no such revolution was necessary because both men and women already worked. Women like us, single parents and heads of households, along with millions of others just like us, lamented the loss of the village that sustained our independence, which indeed, is not independence at all. The cost, we concluded, was our creative being—the one in flow, where time has no meaning. Acknowledging that we are privileged to even have awareness of what was lost for us, we are writing this book about the pre-conditions of being a whole human, which we define as the creative person. Since many books about the optimization of living are written by men, for men, we want to write this book for the group who is closest to us, single parents, man or woman, and those in a couple, who are desperate for a new way of working, which is as far away from auto-pilot, robotic existence as possible. The book examines how sub-groups fared during the pandemic crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic both accelerated social and household inequalities and made them more visible as the spatial and social divide between work and home life was broken down. Historically, during times of crisis or huge systematic change, women have served as shock absorbers. Shock absorption of systemic change by women, as well as that of our planet's natural resources, is not a new phenomenon, and this dynamic persisted even during state socialism; however, in the current institutional setups, there seems to be no logical solution because of the orientation around marketization and externalization by central actors. Currently, during a time of great precarity in our "digital revolution," old institutions are still counting on women, the planet, and other vulnerable groups to support this transformation, with no clear protection of "whole personhood." Whole Person Promotion, Women, and the Post-Pandemic Era: Impact and Future Outlooks provides the latest empirical research findings in the post-pandemic era with the household as the central unit of analysis. It improves understanding of how old institutions persist and are even reinforced during times of crisis as well as generates a discussion about to what extent there is variation in experiences, how satisfied we are with these dynamics, and what internal and external interactions we can attribute to the world that we envision. Covering topics such as individual wellbeing, platform capitalism, and gender inequality, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for lawyers, policymakers, government officials, politicians, business leaders, managers, economists, non-profit organizations, libraries, students and faculty of higher education, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, and academicians.