Title: Demanding child care : women's activism and the politics of welfare, 1940-71 /
Authors: Fousekis, Natalie Marie.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press,
Year: 2011
Subjects: Child care California History; Child care United States History; Women political activists California History; Women political activists United States History; Public welfare California History; Public welfare United States History
Abstract: During World War II, as women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men in the armed services, the federal government established public child care centers in local communities for the first time. When the government announced plans to withdraw funding and terminate its child care services at the end of the war, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these services rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among these key parties as well as the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States. --Publisher description.
Contents: Californians secure wartime child care -- Postwar hopes: the fight for permanent child care, 1945-47 -- Child care "is a state problem": working mothers and educators take action, 1947-51 -- "We need to stand together": Theresa Mahler, Mary Young, and the coalition's victory in the 1950s -- "We do not consider ourselves welfare cases": education-based child care and low-income working families, 1958-65 -- A different kind of welfare state: California's child care coalition in the age of protest, 1966-71.