Beginning in the late 1960s, diverse strands of the modern women's movement—liberal, radical, and African American feminists—envisioned childcare as a right.Footnote ¹ In movement tracts, organizational newsletters, and underground journals, feminists theorized women and children's rights to universal childcare, the state's obligation to provide funding for childcare centers, and the social changes that publicly-funded, community-controlled childcare would help to realize.Footnote ² Political theorist Nancy Fraser argues that by translating needs into rights, social movements challenge the boundaries between the domestic, economic, and political spheres.Footnote ³ Feminist rights claims politicized the issue of childcare in ways that challenged the legal and social boundaries between family, market, and state.Footnote ⁴ Rights consciousness enabled feminist activists to imagine alternative social and political realities as well as the place of childcare in those social transformations. The universal character of the rights claim encouraged working-class and middle-class, African American and white, radical and liberal feminists to identify shared policy interests and to form coalitions on both the local and national levels.Footnote ⁵ Rights consciousness thus fostered the political imagination as well as the social mobilization of feminist childcare activists.

Feminists used a language of rights to articulate the role that universal childcare would play in struggles for women's liberation, black freedom, and a just economy. The feminist demand for universal childcare as a right, rather than as a class-based entitlement for low-income families, challenged gender norms for middle-class white families. In arguing for childcare as a right rather than a social service, African American feminists disputed cultural constructions of black families as deviant and black children as developmentally deficient. Welfare rights activists protested government policies that used childcare as a tool to impose stringent work requirements as a condition of public assistance. Different activists emphasized childcare's potential to facilitate middle-class women's entry into the workforce, liberate women from the oppression of the patriarchal family, enable welfare recipients' economic autonomy, free children from constraints of social convention, and empower minority communities.

In examining feminist childcare activism, I shift the lens of historical analysis away from rights claims in litigation in the courts and toward rights claims in social movements that target legislatures and local institutions. Scholars critical of rights, and in particular of the judicially cognizable rights realized by legal feminists during the sixties and seventies, have called attention to the empty formality, false neutrality, and constrained scope of rights defined through litigation.Footnote ⁶ Historians have demonstrated that attorneys' professional interests and class-based political agendas, as well as the rules of doctrinal argumentation, constrain rights claims made by lawyers arguing in the courts.Footnote ⁷ Instead, I examine rights claims from the bottom up. I offer a case study in how grassroots movements endow rights with capacious political meanings as part of broad struggles for socioeconomic transformation. This perspective contrasts with the more narrow meanings given rights in legalist efforts to achieve social change via courts.Footnote ⁸

Theoretical critiques arguing that rights de-radicalize social movements overlook historical examples in which rights consciousness serves as an important vehicle for the formation of collective political identities. Critical legal theorists warn that rights function to distance individuals from their communities and to perpetuate socio-economic subordination in the guise of legal remedies and formal equality.Footnote ⁹ Feminist scholars have built upon these insights. Wendy Brown, for example, argues that identity-based rights claims often reify the very social categories that claimants seek to contest and that the universality of rights claims veils a differential ability to exercise such rights and thus reproduces status hierarchies within social movements.Footnote ¹⁰ By contrast, I join historical literature showing that popular rights consciousness can mobilize social movements to challenge normative power structures.Footnote ¹¹ In the late sixties and into the next decade, rights proved a powerful discursive tool with which feminist childcare activists made claims on the state.Footnote ¹² Activists used the ideal of a right to invest childcare with particular political meanings oppositional to the meaning that politicians and private business gave childcare. Asserting the right to childcare as part of a feminist agenda held the danger of deepening the cultural link between women and childrearing, but also challenged the terms of women's citizenship.

By elucidating the relationship between childcare policy, rights mobilization, and grassroots feminist activism, I hope to make significant contributions to the histories of both childcare policy and the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹³ Historians of childcare policy have focused on how relatively elite actors framed the childcare issue: whether mothers should participate in the workforce and how to provide care for young children whose mothers did work.Footnote ¹⁴ These historians miss grassroots activists' far more robust and radical political imagination of childcare's social and political meanings. Just as historians of childcare policy have not studied feminist activism, historians of the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s have failed to consider the significance of the childcare issue.Footnote ¹⁵ My attention to childcare provides new insight into feminist thought regarding motherhood, the dynamics of feminist activism, and the potential for coalition building within the women's movement of the late sixties and early seventies.

By connecting the history of feminist activism to federal childcare policy, I also demonstrate the way in which changes in the national political landscape both enabled and thwarted grassroots, rights-based activism for childcare. Historians have viewed Congress's passage of the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA) of 1971 and Nixon's subsequent veto of the legislation as a lost moment in which the nation came close to achieving universal childcare.Footnote ¹⁶ But the existing literature does not adequately explore the relationship of feminist activism to either the legislative process or Nixon's fateful veto.Footnote ¹⁷ I argue that the fate of national childcare legislation and feminist childcare activism were intertwined. The feminist vision for a right to universal childcare rose in a moment when the weight of convergent interests in universal childcare made such legislation a real possibility and fell when that moment passed. Just as grassroots feminist mobilization contributed to a political culture amenable to childcare legislation, so too did the possibility of that legislation spur feminist childcare activism. Nixon exploited the association between feminism and universal childcare to legitimate his veto of the bill, and the veto, in turn, contributed to a decline in rights-based childcare activism. As the historian Sonya Michel has discussed, the defeat of the CCDA marked a deepening bifurcation of childcare policy along class lines. The shift in childcare policy toward public childcare for the poor and private, market-based childcare for the working and middle classes made it considerably more difficult for women of different class backgrounds to envision a political world in which they held shared interests in childcare policy.Footnote ¹⁸ In this constrained political context, feminists no longer claimed the right to universal childcare.

Need-Based Arguments for Childcare in the Postwar Period

Prior to the florescence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, advocates argued for childcare on the basis of children's welfare and women's needs as working mothers, rather than women's rights. Since the emergence of the modern welfare state during the Progressive Era, social welfare policy had vacillated between supporting women as mothers or as workers, yet it rarely saw them as both. During World War II, the Lanham Act temporarily stilled this oscillation, investing federal money in the expansion of New Deal-era nursery schools. The act established an important legislative precedent, but as Michel argues, the expansion of childcare provision during the Great Depression and war years rested on political support for children's interests rather than mothers' rights. The tenuous political roots that planted childcare in the welfare state apparatus meant that after the war, neomaternalist sentiment that favored childrearing in the home, conservative opposition to women's economic autonomy, and a discourse that linked family stability to democratic vitality all contributed to the elimination of federal funding.Footnote ¹⁹

Nevertheless, as historian Emilie Stoltzfus chronicles, the Lanham Act provided a basis for continued, local grassroots activism through the 1950s even after the initial funding stream had ended. Mothers in Cleveland, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., among other locales, reasoned that they needed childcare while servicemen remained abroad and that childcare would prevent juvenile delinquency. They also made a hesitant claim that women deserved economic autonomy. Yet the lack of any law protecting women's right to work, coupled with women's ancillary position in the workforce, impeded the attempt to make politically viable arguments for the extension of publicly funded childcare. Only in California, where activist mothers strategically leveraged the fact that women workers were especially important to the state's rapidly expanding economy, did women win permanent, albeit means-tested childcare funding in 1957.Footnote ²⁰

Federal childcare policy in the postwar period bifurcated along class lines. The tax structure and welfare laws constructed childcare as a mechanism to encourage poor women's economic autonomy, but it ignored middle-class working mothers' need for childcare. In 1954, Congress revised the income tax code to provide a maximum deduction for childcare expenses to low-income working mothers, widows and widowers, and divorced persons. The childcare deduction marked a turning point in federal policy regarding low-income mothers and their children. Whereas Aid to Dependent Children gave financial support to poor mothers who cared for their children at home, the tax deduction encouraged these women to enter the workforce. At the same time, an income cap limiting eligibility for the deduction to low-income women sent the message that the federal government did not support the presence of middle-class women in the workforce.Footnote ²¹ In 1960, two events—the White House Conference on Children and Youth (held in the spring), and the National Conference on the Day Care of Children (held in November)—again placed day care on the national agenda. Although the conferences advanced public acceptance of the fact that increasing numbers of mothers with young children were working outside the home, the Eisenhower administration stressed that day care would serve as a substitute for Aid to Dependent Children, strengthening familial bonds when financial circumstance forced mothers to work.Footnote ²² Antipoverty policies pursued by the Kennedy administration further intertwined publicly funded childcare and welfare reform. In 1962, Congress amended the Aid to Dependent Children program by providing “rehabilitative” services that stressed the employability of poor mothers as well as funding for day care centers that would help them access work outside the home.Footnote ²³

In 1967, Congress passed the Work Incentive Program mandating that welfare recipients engage in job training or work programs. Rising numbers of welfare recipients, welfare's escalating costs, and racial anxieties about the growing proportion of African American recipients, motivated the legislation. The bill required states to make childcare available before implementing the work requirements, and the National Council of Negro Women feared that welfare authorities would force families into using low-quality care. The federal agency charged with setting standards for childcare, however—the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—included among its leadership liberal child-development scholars. These advocates embraced the philosophy of the new Head Start program: that developmental services for young, disadvantaged children could mitigate the harms of poverty.Footnote ²⁴ In the years to come, feminists and welfare rights activists would contrast their own understandings of childcare with these two strands of federal policy: the conservative use of childcare to promote workfare and the liberal commitment to child development as an antipoverty strategy.

Envisioning the Right to Universal Childcare

The emergence of a feminist demand for a right to universal childcare represented a dramatic departure in childcare politics. Whereas activists in the labor, women's, and civil rights movements had engaged in struggles for government-funded childcare during the postwar period, feminists newly employed a discourse of rights rather than older arguments rooted in economic and social need. An explanation of the shift in feminist rhetoric and political argument must begin with the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.Footnote ²⁵ In three respects, Title VII acted as a critical catalyst of the feminist movement in general and of the articulation of a right to childcare in particular. First, the new law lent political along with legal legitimacy to maternal employment.Footnote ²⁶ Growth in maternal employment during the postwar decades had far outstripped the rise in women's overall workforce participation: The latter had doubled while the former had increased eightfold.Footnote ²⁷ Arguments for childcare based on working mothers' needs, however, had repeatedly run headlong into the retort that mothers of young children should not be employed outside the home—Title VII gave women legal backing for their assertion that they had a right to work. Second, intent on pressuring a reluctant federal administrative apparatus to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of Title VII, a group of prominent women's rights advocates from the ranks of government, labor, the media, and business, formed the National Organization for Women (NOW).Footnote ²⁸ NOW, serving as an organized national political voice for universal childcare, advocated for public childcare facilities as a right of equal citizenship.Footnote ²⁹ Finally, Title VII gave individuals outside of formal advocacy groups a language of rights that enabled them to transform problems viewed as private into public, political grievances.Footnote ³⁰

NOW advanced the liberal feminist argument for childcare: Without government-funded childcare women would be tied to their homes and would not be able to participate fully in employment, political, or educational opportunities.Footnote ³¹ NOW's 1966 Statement of Purpose called upon the nation “to innovate new social institutions which will enable women to enjoy true equality of opportunity and responsibility in society.” The Statement identified the forced choice between marriage and motherhood, on one hand, and paid employment and careers, on the other, as the central barrier to women's equality. NOW advocated for government-funded childcare as a collective solution: “We reject the assumption that these problems are the unique responsibility of each individual women [sic], rather than a basic social dilemma which society must solve.” A Bill of Rights adopted at NOW's first national conference in 1967 framed demands for public goods as rights claims “that child-care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries, and public schools, adequate to the needs of children … as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.”Footnote ³²

On August 26, 1970, the Women's Strike for Equality galvanized the women's movement and drew attention to feminists' legislative demands.Footnote ³³ Betty Friedan, author of the influential 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique, and a founder of NOW, called upon women to stop work at their jobs and at home.Footnote ³⁴ Planned for the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women suffrage, the Strike date emphasized the distance women had yet to travel to reach equal citizenship.Footnote ³⁵ The Strike, which mobilized women from different strands of the feminist movement, made three demands: free, twenty-four-hour universal childcare; free, nonrestricted abortion; and equal opportunity in education and employment.Footnote ³⁶

The Strike illustrated that although liberal and radical feminists had different personal and political backgrounds, they shared some common goals.Footnote ³⁷ Whereas liberal feminists identified women's exclusion from the public realm as the root cause of their subordination, radical feminists attributed women's oppression as a “sex class” to the patriarchal social and political structures that made individual women responsible for childrearing.Footnote ³⁸ From either perspective, state-funded childcare would help to advance women's equality. Radical feminism, however, had also begun to influence liberal feminism's political agenda, which by August 1970 included far more than the equal employment and education opportunity for which it is now remembered. Free abortions would give women greater control over biological reproduction, and twenty-four-hour childcare would make the labor of social reproduction a collective responsibility rather than a personal burden. On the day of the Strike, women in New York City turned City Hall into a makeshift day care center in a visual representation of their demands for childcare.Footnote ³⁹ In effect, the Strike called for childcare as a right of social citizenship that would enable women's full civic participation.Footnote ⁴⁰ But in making that claim, the Strike contained the roots of a more radical critique that challenged contradictions between women's economic dependence within the family and the liberal ideal of equal opportunity and between the ideology that women belonged in the home and the growing importance of female workers within the economy.Footnote ⁴¹

Whereas NOW advocated for government intervention in the family to help women achieve public equality, radical and socialist feminists explicitly sought to transform the nuclear family. As historian Alice Echols describes, local groups of women began in 1967 to mobilize against male supremacy, identifying the mother role as one root of women's oppression.Footnote ⁴² These women's liberationists took cues from the counterculture and New Left's critique of sexual repression and stultifying domesticity within the bourgeois family, even as they in turn came to reject and theorize the sexual exploitation and subordination of women within these movements. Lauri Umansky argues that radical feminism's complex relationship to the New Left produced contradictory attitudes to motherhood. Some radical feminists elaborated on the New Left's essentialism by theorizing that the biological dimensions of motherhood—pregnancy and childbirth—were inextricably intertwined with capitalism and patriarchy.Footnote ⁴³ Shulamith Firestone, a cofounder of three radical feminist groups in New York between 1967 and 1969, traced the root cause of women's oppression to women's reproductive biology.Footnote ⁴⁴ In her influential 1970 text critiquing and appropriating both Marxist and Freudian theory, The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that pregnancy and childbirth caused women great pain and weakened them physically, linked mothers and children in mutual economic dependence and sexual repression within the family, and produced the sex-based division between productive and reproductive labor that served as the basis for all other economic, cultural, and caste-based hierarchies. Firestone advanced a utopian vision in which new reproductive technologies would replace pregnancy and childbirth with extrauterine test-tube gestation, the biological family would dissolve, and sex difference would no longer retain social salience.Footnote ⁴⁵

In contrast to Firestone, however, many feminists came to embrace the philosophy that women's oppression resulted from the cultural and political relations of patriarchy rather than reproductive biology itself.Footnote ⁴⁶ Radical feminists also took from the New Left a distinction between biology and culture, which gave them leverage to challenge social constructions of motherhood without rejecting motherhood altogether.Footnote ⁴⁷ Another radical New York feminist, Ti-Grace Atkinson, wrote that the exploitation of women's biological capacity to bear children—the manipulation of this capacity to make domestic work and childrearing women's function in society—linked women as a political class.Footnote ⁴⁸ Linda Gordon, then an activist in Boston and now a leading women's historian, explained that “families have chained women to their reproductive function by implying that first, sex is inevitably connected with reproduction, and second, that the woman who bears a child should be solely responsible for its raising.”Footnote ⁴⁹ For Gordon, then, motherhood was not intrinsically oppressive; rather, the social and political structures that gave motherhood its compulsory, privatized, and totalizing qualities made it so.

The chains Gordon identified had psychological, material, and social dimensions. The founding manifesto of The Feminists lamented: “We are bored and isolated in our homes.”Footnote ⁵⁰ An article on day care in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, underground journal Old Mole explained that the cultural identification of women's role with childrearing—a role that a woman performed “alone, in her own house, all the time”—both distorted women's personalities and justified discriminationFootnote ⁵¹: “That is why she is taught to be passive and self-sacrificing, that is why she is paid less, educated less, torn by guilt, isolated, and harassed.”Footnote ⁵² Radical and socialist feminists called attention to “the super-exploitation of [women's] 24-hour unpaid domestic labor” and called for the recognition of “raising children, doing daily maintenance, and caring for people's emotional needs” as “socially necessary” work.Footnote ⁵³ Socialist feminists, members of such groups as the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, the Boston-based organization Bread and Roses, and the Socialist Workshop in Berkeley, California, believed that capitalism estranged women from production outside the home and offered them, as well as racial minorities, access only to low-pay, low-status jobs.Footnote ⁵⁴ In coercing women to perform the labor necessary to reproduce the workforce without pay, capitalism perpetuated the family by enforcing women and children's economic dependence on men.Footnote ⁵⁵

If women's oppression took root in their physical relegation to the home, in the social mandate that they assume sole responsibility for childrearing, and in capital's extraction of their unpaid labor, then “free, full-time, non-compulsory childcare centers” would mean freedom.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Southern Female Rights Union, located in New Orleans, placed “free, non-compulsory, public childcare” first on the list of the Union's “Program for Female Liberation.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The essence of radical and socialist feminists' articulation of the right to childcare lay in the assertion that “children are the responsibility of a whole community, the whole society.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Making childcare a collective responsibility had the potential to redefine the family by enabling women to pursue work outside the home and to gain economic autonomy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Universal childcare would also give women “elbow room to fight for all of what is necessary.” Childcare centers would relieve women “of the thousands of tedious tasks they daily perform to maintain … the family” so that they may participate actively in the movement.Footnote ⁶⁰

Feminist literature challenging women's confinement to the childrearing role critiqued a middle-class and implicitly white ideal of womanhood. By contrast, African American women did not see themselves as oppressed by these same gender roles. In an essay on the dual oppression of black women that became a theoretical guide for African American feminists, Frances Beal wrote: “It is idle dreaming to think of Black women simply caring for their homes and children… . Most Black women have to work to help house, feed, and clothe their families.”Footnote ⁶¹ Contemporary Department of Labor statistics reported that in 1971, 50 percent of minority women were employed, compared to 43 percent of white women.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, the 4.1 million minority women in the labor force composed its lowest-paid sector.Footnote ⁶³ The Black Women's Liberation Committee rejected social norms that limited women's social function to the “sex role.” Beal critiqued white, middle-class gender ideals: “A woman who stays at home caring for children and the house … must lead her entire life as a satellite to her mate. He goes out into society and brings back a little piece of the world to her… . [S]he cannot develop herself as an individual having been reduced to only a biological function.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Black women critiqued what they identified as the childlike social position of white women who did not work. They also took a skeptical stance toward the white women's liberation movement, questioning whether it would enable white women to achieve equality with white men, while only exacerbating inequality between black and white women. Despite their suspicions, however, black feminists supported childcare as a movement goal that would improve their economic position both objectively and in relation to black men and white women.Footnote ⁶⁵

The nation's first African American female Congressional representative, Shirley Chisholm, had a different perspective on the purpose of publicly funded childcare than did Beal. Chisholm directed her concern toward minority women who were unemployed and who received Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Chisholm understood childcare as a means to alleviate poverty among “minority women [who] have the greatest occupational needs and the least chance of fulfilling them.”Footnote ⁶⁶ She wrote about single mothers unable to work because their children were on waiting lists for day care centers. For Chisholm, childcare's economic and social purposes were inextricable: “Until we make available the mechanisms to free mothers to work, we will continue to have a highly disproportionate number of minority women on some kind of public assistance.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Black mothers active in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) did not agree with Beal and Chisholm about the normative desirability of jobs and childcare. Historians including Felicia Kornbluh, Premilla Nadasen, and Annelise Orleck have explored the political philosophy of welfare rights activists, who believed that their labors as mothers should be recognized as work and deserved public support. Activists in the NWRO critiqued the racial and cultural double standard suggesting that middle-class white women should act as full-time mothers, while black and poor women enjoyed no similar privilege and had to leave their children to work in menial jobs.Footnote ⁶⁸ For welfare recipients whose employment experiences involved low-paid, back-breaking jobs as domestic workers and sharecroppers, the right to work did not have the same appeal it did for middle-class feminists. Many welfare rights activists feared that welfare authorities would use substandard childcare to force mothers into dead-end jobs and that poor-quality childcare would harm their children. The 1967 passage of the Work Incentive Program, which reinforced the association between public childcare and welfare policy, deepened welfare recipients' cynicism.Footnote ⁶⁹

NWRO leaders, however, were not wholly opposed to government-funded childcare. Instead, they distinguished between exploitative workfare and government aid that would help poor mothers obtain respectable jobs with decent wages and between custodial and quality, community-controlled childcare.Footnote ⁷⁰ NWRO vice chair Beulah Sanders supported more federal funding for childcare, but she wanted to be able to choose specific childcare arrangements rather than be forced to accept whatever childcare program welfare administrators deemed appropriate.Footnote ⁷¹ Welfare recipients were not as quick as middle-class feminists to welcome government intervention in the family as a means to advance women's rights. Instead, welfare rights activists used what legal scholar Patricia Williams has identified as the protective, distancing elements in rights discourse to reclaim the privacy as well as the affirmative entitlements so long denied their families.Footnote ⁷²

Welfare rights activists cared about the issue of childcare from the perspective of childcare workers as well as mothers. Since the time of slavery, physical, economic, and political coercion had forced some African American women to place caring for their own children second to caring for other families' children. Los Angeles activist and NWRO chair Johnnie Tillmon saw continuities between this history and modern childcare centers. Although Tillmon made the creation of childcare centers for those welfare recipients who wanted to work an advocacy priority in California, she worried about the exploitation of poor women as childcare workers.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, the feminist literature from the late 1960s says little about the workers who would presumably staff the envisioned childcare centers.Footnote ⁷⁴ Inattention to the specifics of who would work in the childcare centers at what wages, or to the character of an alternative cooperative work arrangement, reflected a class bias in the demand for universal childcare. Today, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts warns that when there is a lack of social respect and concern for the well-being of day care workers themselves, the feminist vision for universal childcare has the potential to reinforce a dynamic in which racially and economically privileged women retain the spiritual elements of reproductive labor and delegate the menial elements of that labor to less privileged women.Footnote ⁷⁵

Feminists who differed in their political, racial, and class backgrounds all identified childcare as an issue at the heart of their fraught relationships to the family as a social institution, paid employment, and the state. Liberal feminists advocated for the right to childcare as a prerequisite to women's full participation in public institutions, and radical and socialist feminists argued that the transformation of patriarchal families depended on securing the right to universal childcare. African American feminists understood childcare as a necessary element of black women's independence from men. While Shirley Chisholm believed that childcare would help public assistance recipients gain economic autonomy, welfare rights activists were profoundly ambivalent about state-sponsored childcare. What all feminists and welfare activists shared in common was a language of rights that endowed childcare with oppositional political meanings distinct from the meanings given childcare by the federal government, employers, and other interested entities.

Liberating Children and Empowering Local Communities

Feminists believed that childcare held the capacity to liberate not only themselves but also their children. Feminists shared the premise that childcare had positive effects on children in common with child-development theorists, who increasingly exerted a powerful influence on federal social policy. In the 1950s and early 1960s, social scientists began to challenge the prevailing understanding of IQ as fixed and hereditary and to suggest that early learning and environment, as well as genetics, determined intelligence. That insight coupled with the political rediscovery of poverty sparked the interest of first the Kennedy and later the Johnson administrations in early childhood education. Child-development scholars in the academy, Ford Foundation officials, and government policymakers began to innovate early childhood programs with the aims of helping poor children overcome social disadvantage, lowering juvenile delinquency and crime, and breaking cycles of poverty. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson launched Head Start, an initiative designed to promote the social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development of poor children, funded and administered via the Community Action Program within the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Community Action Program involved local communities in planning and implementing antipoverty programs that focused more on human than economic development. Even as the program grew increasingly controversial in the face of accusations that it was ineffective and wasteful and empowered neighborhood activists to bypass local elected officials, the public popularity of Head Start swelled.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the late 1960s, feminists both echoed the ideas of child-development scholarship and defined their views of childcare in opposition to those of policy experts. Feminists ranging from the most moderate to the most radical came to embrace the notion that childcare served an educational rather than a custodial purpose. In contrast to politicians and child-development experts who sought to use early childhood development to overcome the disadvantages that children from low-income and poor communities purportedly experienced, feminists viewed childcare as a boon for their own children. Feminists believed that childcare would offer children the opportunity to form relationships with other children and adults, broadening their experience beyond their isolation in the nuclear family.Footnote ⁷⁷ By attributing responsibility for the daily labor of childrearing to people who “have chosen to fulfill this function,” rather than to mothers frustrated by their inability to reach their individual potentials, childcare centers would enable children to receive “love without conflict.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Rather than using childcare to instill dominant social mores and standards among children, feminists imagined that childcare would inculcate progressive and even revolutionary values in children.Footnote ⁷⁹ The emphasis on childcare that would free children from limiting social conventions reflected the influence of the counterculture's disdain for the “alienation” and “atomization” of industrial capitalism and embrace of nature, community, and holistic and authentic human experience.Footnote ⁸⁰ What feminists called “liberationist childcare” would teach children social cooperation rather than control, collective values rather than selfish individualism, free exploration rather than bureaucratized routines, personal liberation rather than sex-role stereotyping and sexual repression.Footnote ⁸¹ Though the product of a specific historical moment, the feminist vision for childcare belonged to an older, utopian tradition in the United States that sought to infuse children with new values as a means to achieve social transformation.Footnote ⁸²

The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) represented one of the most daring efforts to use childcare to effect broad social and political change. In the spring of 1965, a handful of northern, white civil rights activists brainstormed the idea of establishing preschools that would offer creative, enriching educational experiences to poor, African American children in the South and that would involve the children's parents in an empowering community action project. Somewhat reluctantly, the group decided to link up with Head Start, also in its planning stages. Federal support would lend political legitimacy, money, and access to medical and food programs, even as it posed the risk of thwarting poor people's initiative and political organization. Within a few short weeks, meetings had mobilized representatives of small, rural black communities in Mississippi to begin signing children up for the schools. When it opened schools serving 6,400 children in July of 1965, CDGM formed a bridge between the political organizing efforts of Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Johnson administration's War on Poverty.Footnote ⁸³

CDGM aimed to provide educational, medical, and nutritional care for children, to train poor people for new careers in child development, and to help African Americans in Mississippi build the pragmatic tools and inner fortitude necessary to fight for justice. The local participants who attended training to become the CDGM teachers and who made up the boards responsible for running the CDGM schools identified direct connections between their own political empowerment, their children's development, and the freedom struggle. One trainee described her racially integrated orientation program as a “real free feel of freedom” and hoped that the schools would “let the small children taste from this cup of freedom” so that they would then “grow thirsty for more.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Another participant stated her belief that “Head Start is … to give us something to run for our children the way we want it run. We will not teach the children to hate themselves and their people as the schools do. We will teach the children to be proud.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Ultimately, CDGM could not withstand the political tension between its revolutionary goals and its status as a government-funded antipoverty program. Mississippi senator John Stennis, a zealous defender of Jim Crow and a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused CDGM of funneling monies to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, created by civil rights activists to challenge the hegemony of the all-white state Democratic Party.Footnote ⁸⁶ Stennis's accusations were hyperbolic, but the Child Development Group's purpose was indeed inextricable from the black freedom struggle. Caught between conservatives' accusation that integrated CDGM schools promoted “racial mongrelization” and liberals' accusation that CDGM went beyond providing nursery schools to fuel black militancy, the program grew increasingly beleaguered. The Office of Economic Opportunity eventually caved to political pressure in Congress from southern Democrats and stopped funding for CDGM. When CDGM's last grant ran out in December 1967, the group did not have any fire left with which to fight.Footnote ⁸⁷

The end of CDGM, however, did not mean the end of activists' vision for childcare as part of the movement for black freedom. African American activists in other parts of the country continued to agitate for childcare as a means to uplift black communities and liberate their children from societal oppression. Activists were interested in federal funds for childcare centers, but they evinced a high level of skepticism toward state interference in the management of the centers. The Black Child Development Institute in Washington, D.C., believed that childcare must nurture black children's psychological as well as their physical, cognitive, and social needs by teaching children about African Americans' contributions to American history and culture.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Black Child Development Institute drew a sharp distinction between its own conception of childcare rooted in the empowerment of local African American communities and the social science mobilized by policymakers. In congressional hearings on the Comprehensive Child Development Act, Institute Director Evelyn Moore testified that most child-development research had done “nothing more than to solidify societal beliefs about the inferiority of black children.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Institute presented legislators with a set of proposals designed to maximize minority communities' involvement in childcare programs.Footnote ⁹⁰

Local political authorities as well as activists identified childcare centers as sites of community empowerment. New York City's West 80th Street Community Day Care Center founded by African American activist Dorothy Pitman, innovated a board of directors composed entirely of parents. Pitman summarized her view of childcare administration: “‘You know, I think I can live without bureaucracy. I think most black people could, too. It is the real villain,—bureaucracy is a way to exploit. I don't want my children to be stifled, to be the conformists that most schools turn out. I want them to be free.”Footnote ⁹¹ Pitman's center, which had survived for three years on private donations and small government grants, was in early 1970 negotiating for permanent funds from the city's Department of Social Services, along with the promise that the Center would nonetheless retain complete autonomy. Commissioner Jack Goldberg opposed the Center's request on the basis that “‘community-control leaders are interested in a whole community-organization effort, and they are really trying to build a power base.’”Footnote ⁹²

Goldberg's anxieties reflected New York City's and the state's volatile welfare politics in the late sixties and early seventies. In response to increases in welfare rolls and costs, Governor Rockefeller had imposed greater work requirements on public assistance recipients and had pursued the replacement of supplemental grants, which recipients had used to try to obtain a decent standard of living, with a flat grant. Welfare rights activists responded by demonstrating, sitting-in at government offices, and disrupting neighborhood welfare centers.Footnote ⁹³ Adding insult to the beleaguered administration of New York City mayor John Lindsay, Commissioner Goldberg was in the midst of defending city welfare procedure from due process challenges before the United States Supreme Court. Little more than one month before the Court issued its landmark decision in favor of the plaintiffs in Goldberg v. Kelley, Commissioner Goldberg voiced his fear to the New York Times that day care workers would use their city-funded salaries to subsidize political activity not related to childcare.Footnote ⁹⁴

A Right, Not a Commodity

Politicizing women's need for childcare in the language of rights enabled activists to resist employers and for-profit day care businesses' attempts to appropriate childcare for ends that undermined feminist objectives. Corporations possessed a dual stake in market-based childcare: as employers of female workers and as profit-making childcare enterprises. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several large corporate employers experimented with providing childcare as a means to reduce turnover and absenteeism among female workers. Federal matching funds for employer-sponsored childcare serving the children of low-income mothers and welfare recipients encouraged the trend, tying corporate to government childcare policy. In addition to employer-sponsored and voluntary, nonprofit childcare centers, for-profit day care centers also formed part of the childcare landscape in the early 1970s. Commercial centers had a financial incentive to increase profits by minimizing standards and keeping the salaries of childcare workers as low as possible.Footnote ⁹⁵

At the decade's turn, with numerous pieces of childcare legislation pending in Congress, including the Comprehensive Child Development Act, Forbes magazine reported that “sniffing possible federal largesse, some 50 firms have rushed into the business of franchising or packaging day care centers.”Footnote ⁹⁶ An article in Old Mole quipped: “Huge day care center chains are now forming on a franchise basis, like Ford dealers or fried chicken joints. Minipearl [sic] Fried Chicken, in fact, is one of the corporations now branching out into day care.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Radical feminists feared that for-profit day care, and especially the new chains and franchises entering onto the scene, would make quality dependent on price and thwart efforts to establish community-controlled childcare centers that promoted children's liberation.Footnote ⁹⁸ They warned that businesses operated childcare centers “like an assembly line, with a maximum of regimentation so that the children are easy to handle, and [with] an emphasis on discipline rather than initiative on the part of the child.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Socialist and radical feminists critical of both capitalist exploitation and patriarchy saw for-profit daycare as an attempt to regulate children's behavior in “preparation and training” for employer discipline and control of the workday.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

On June 22 and 23, 1970, one hundred women twice invaded a New York City conference titled “Profit Possibilities in the 70's in Early Learning and Child Care.” Breaking through guarded doors, thirty of the women managed to assume the stage and take over the microphone, insisting “that the conference be ended, that all delegates' fees be turned over to people-controlled child care centers, that government funds go only to parent-controlled, non-profit child care.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The protesters used the notion of a right to combat businesses' co-optation of childcare and to stand up for the socioeconomic transformations they believed that publicly funded childcare would enact: “There is one thing that the representatives from government, Wall Street, and day care franchisers agree upon: selling day care is okay. We believe that good child care programs are a right… . [W]hat should rationally be a right, has become a commodity.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Employer-sponsored day care programs, meanwhile, offered corporations the attractive possibility of increasing the hiring and retention of female workers. Fortune magazine identified companies “tied to central cities and heavily dependent on relatively low-paid female labor” as “the vanguard of the move toward company-sponsored day care.” Among other examples, Fortune offered a sidebar and pleasant photos depicting day care services at telephone companies. The spread, “In Ma Bell's maternal arms,” promoted the companies' sympathetic image while reinforcing the cultural association between women and childrearing.Footnote ¹⁰³ Feminists were skeptical of the manner in which employers and politicians connected the provision of childcare as a benefit for female employees to sex segregation in the workforce. The Los Angeles underground journal Everywoman satirized a publication of a government-funded research institute that admonished employers to use childcare “to tap a new source of workers, particularly if his production process involves the repetitive or manipulative procedures of a type that can be serviced best by women.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

From the feminist vantage point, employer-sponsored day care aimed to diffuse the social and political “explosion” caused by the women's movement: “Day care is the managerial solution for keeping the ‘quiet’ revolution quiet.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Aware of the precarious position of feminist ideals in the corporate rush to day care, one women's journal warned:

Rather than challenging the subordination of women in the home, corporate day care threatened to further the subordination of women in the workplace.

While the feminist politicization of childcare had disrupted conventional boundaries between the family, market, and state, government and corporate attempts to set the childcare policy agenda threatened to privatize the issue once again, albeit in a new form. The trend toward commercial childcare centers, absent public funding, would make paying for childcare a private family responsibility. As a result, commercial centers posed a lesser challenge to normative gender roles than public, universal childcare that, on symbolic as well as pragmatic levels, would make responsibility for childrearing a societal as well as a familial responsibility. Employer-sponsored childcare would serve the interests of businesses in hiring and regulating low-paid female workers as well as those of politicians in moving poor mothers off of public assistance. By defining childcare as a right not a commodity, activists hoped not simply to dissolve the boundaries separating public from private institutions but rather to demarcate these boundaries anew so as to prevent the commodification of childrearing and the exploitation of female workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Organizing for Childcare

Although universal childcare could only come to fruition via federal legislation, targeted, local campaigns for childcare had the greatest potential to foster coalitions among women across class, race, and other differences. As historian Stephanie Gilmore argues, even though local coalitions among grassroots activists may not have been formal or sustained, they nevertheless illustrate that women's grassroots political activism is more complex and varied than abstract identity politics might suggest.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Evidence of childcare coalitions reminds historians that the divisions among women along race and class lines are not the preordained result of essential identities. Rather, such divisions are the result of women's diverse historical memories, social and economic experiences, and subject positions before law and policy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The aspiration toward childcare as a right encouraged feminists to identify a shared policy interest. This common goal and the real political potential that existed in the late sixties to win broad childcare legislation encouraged feminists to build coalitions across their differences. Local campaigns for childcare, however, also reflected tensions between whether middle-class women or working-class women would serve as the leading theorists and strategists of childcare campaigns and whether liberal or radical political styles would predominate.

Middle-class white feminists identified childcare as an issue of particular concern to working-class women and women of color and, therefore, as an organizing target that might broaden the base of the women's liberation movement. For young, radical feminists who did not themselves have children, the issue of childcare served as a means to apply their own political ideology to women in far different circumstances. An essay on the “revolutionary potential of women's liberation” reasoned that although the nuclear family oppressed women, “organizing ‘against the family’ [could not] … be the basis of a [political] program.” The essay argued that limiting the movement to women who repudiated the family reflected a “class chauvinism” on the part of those whose privilege enabled them to avoid economic dependence on men. The essay's rhetoric contained strains of condescension as well as sympathy: “An uneducated working class wife with five kids is perfectly capable of understanding that marriage has destroyed most of her potential as a human being … but she is hardly in a position to repudiate her source of livelihood and free herself of those children.” The essay's authors believed that the fight for childcare would heighten the political consciousness of working-class women: “Struggles … which may begin around demands for a neighborhood or factory child care center can lead to consciousness of the crippling effects of relations of domination and exploitation in the home.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

While middle-class white feminists saw promise in the possibility for cross-class and interracial unity in organizing for childcare centers, a gap existed between that potential and its realization. Middle-class feminists occasionally expressed a sense of common needs shared with working-class women: “It's beginning to make more sense to me that we should develop alternatives out of our own experiences… . Perhaps organizing around childcare … there are many bases for unity.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Often, though, activists expressed feelings of greater difference than commonality. In one letter circulated among middle-class white feminists, two activists wrote about the distance they felt from working-class women, whom they perceived as possessing a “gut sense of their oppression” but as unable to “act on their rage because they have no place to move.”Footnote ¹¹² Another activist expressed a similar ambivalence about how women's varying economic positions yielded divergent political views. She wrote, “working class people are different… . There are reasons to work with the working class; to learn a lot, to give skills to people, to help inspire a vision. But we don't face the economic problems they do.”Footnote ¹¹³

For their part, working-class feminists at times accused middle-class feminists of hypocrisy. Some claimed that the intractability of the childcare dilemma, which implicated deep emotions about the family, kept the right to childcare more of a slogan than a pragmatic agenda in the women's liberation movement.Footnote ¹¹⁴ An essay in the Berkeley Tribe claimed that when middle- and upper-income feminists had children they shed their previous political commitments and instead “quietly use[d] their economic resources to solve the problem—hire[d] a nanny, b[ought] into very scarce, very expensive existing group child care, or use[d] their mates as child-caring partners because both of them have flexible enough work schedules to allow that.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Differences in political style and ideology, as well as class, fractured fragile alliances. The New England Women's Coalition, which grew out of the collaboration among a number of area women's groups organizing the Boston Women's Strike for Equality, campaigned to place a childcare referendum on the November 1971 Cambridge ballot.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Coalition crafted the referendum language to address the needs of women workers: “To be of any use to mothers with night-shift jobs or evening classes and other activities or emergencies, there must be child-care centers open 24 hours a day … they must be free and open to all children.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ A mass meeting attended by over 200 women at Boston University in February 1971 catalyzed the effort, which the New England Congress to Unite Women then endorsed at a March conference attended by 800 women.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Despite what appeared to be escalating momentum, however, the Coalition dropped the initiative to obtain a childcare referendum.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It is unclear what prompted the Coalition's decision, but Eastern Massachusetts NOW's break with the Coalition may have played a significant role. Not a deep ideological divide but rather NOW's fear of being associated with more radical elements of the women's movement precipitated the break. The chapter president admitted to the Boston Evening Globe, “‘And after all N.O.W. is reformist. There's a distinct difference in the style of our membership. We're not rally, demonstration oriented. N.O.W. is in fact itself a coalition… . It's obvious that if we're attempting to reach a wide variety of women, we have to play it safe.’”Footnote ¹²⁰ Perhaps the fact that the chapter had recently established its own childcare center reduced the urgency of members' desire to achieve state childcare legislation.Footnote ¹²¹

While the coalition behind the Cambridge childcare referendum dissolved in the face of political fragmentation, in other notable instances women formed local coalitions that launched successful campaigns to extract childcare funding and resources from employers, universities, and city governments. Although radical feminists critiqued employers' co-optation of childcare, many working women also viewed their employers as a potential source of resources for childcare. As historian Dorothy Sue Cobble relates, feminists in the labor movement had fought for both employer- and government-sponsored childcare since World War II.Footnote ¹²² In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several unions used collective bargaining to extract support for childcare from corporations. After workers at Indiana University, Bloomington requested release-time from work in order to participate in childcare cooperatives, nearby workers at Westinghouse and General Electric discussed similar actions.Footnote ¹²³ The Amalgamated Clothing Workers in a five-state region headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, set up union-operated childcare centers financed through a health and welfare fund paid by employers.Footnote ¹²⁴ Women composed a majority of the workforce employed by the fifty participating clothing manufacturers.Footnote ¹²⁵

Student activists pressured colleges and universities to provide funding and space for childcare. On a Monday morning in May 1971, a group of thirty female and male students and community members assembled with their children to conduct a “Wet-in” at Wayne State University in Detroit. They planned to take their children to the administrative offices and leave them there for university officials to watch while they attended class. The university quickly closed off the offices, but a vice president listened to the protesters' request for immediate day care space, informing them that none was available.Footnote ¹²⁶ After a year of meetings, the vice president told the persistent parents that a nearby church had offered them space.Footnote ¹²⁷ At Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California, students first gathered 1,500 signatures on a childcare petition, then built a sandbox and play yard on the campus lawn, and finally, a year later, brought their children to the student lounge and put up signs marking it as the student nursery. By December 1970, the nursery was serving thirty children a day and seeking university and government funds that would enable it to serve more than 200 children.Footnote ¹²⁸ Students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Florida State University, Peralta Junior College in Berkeley, California, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Portland State University, the University of Oregon, Ohio State University, and Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, all won campaigns for university-funded childcare.Footnote ¹²⁹

Grassroots feminists also pursued cities as sources of financial support for childcare. In New York City, Jamaica Plain and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., childcare activists demonstrated for childcare funding in public protests, sometimes going so far as to move children, toys, and tables into the street to demonstrate “the strength of their intentions.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The Action Committee for Decent Childcare developed as a project of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which formed in 1969 and over the next eight years developed into one of the largest grassroots feminist organizations in the country. Historian Margaret Strobel has described the Union as composed almost entirely of white, middle-class women with a history of activism in the New Left. Although they tended to be single and childless, just over one-third were married or parents.Footnote ¹³¹ The Union mobilized women around their self-interest. Accordingly, the Union did not organize white women against racism directly, even though their members were committed politically to the goal of racial equality. Union members believed, however, that “uniting white and black groups around common concerns would be a concrete way to objectively also fight racism.”Footnote ¹³² Childcare proved to be one such common concern. Heather Booth, a founder of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, and Day Piercy, who had recently completed social work training at the University of North Carolina and whose experiences organizing working-class women led her to an interest in childcare, formed the Action Committee for Decent Childcare.Footnote ¹³³ An interracial organization soon formed: “In a black area, women demanded the creation of child care centers, because there were none. In an adjoining white area, women demanded that the few existing centers not be closed down.”Footnote ¹³⁴

In formulating their strategy, the Action Committee for Decent Childcare encountered two barriers. First, the vision of “free, 24-hour, client-controlled childcare … seemed so wild-eyed, so far from the existing situation, that it appeared completely unrealistic.” The Action Committee needed to win some specific goals before the women they organized gained a sense of their power to effect change. Consequently, organizers spent three months gathering information about the constituencies in need of childcare and potential institutional targets at the state level, in city government, and in the private sector. Second, the Committee's founders realized that the population most in need—mothers with children under the age of six—were also the least likely to participate. Accordingly, the Committee coupled citywide action with local community groups more responsive to mothers' limited time and mobility.Footnote ¹³⁵ Action Committee for Decent Childcare conducted petition campaigns, hosted community forums, researched local conditions, and organized citywide direct actions. The Committee worked with local government to change onerous licensing procedures, opened city meetings on childcare to the public, and coordinated services and resources to meet community needs.Footnote ¹³⁶

In grassroots struggles, activists popularized the vision for a right to universal childcare, which inspired middle-class and working-class, African American and white, liberal and radical feminists to identify a shared political goal and to build coalitions across their differences. But local childcare activism also bore unique limitations. First, the colossal effort required to mobilize repeatedly in cities and states across the country would be less efficient than securing childcare funding from a single national source. Second, because state and city governments had less money to devote to childcare than did the federal government, local groups could do little more than redirect or slightly increase social service funding.Footnote ¹³⁷

By late 1970, U.S. Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, of New York City's Nineteenth and Twelfth Congressional Districts respectively, had begun to hold local hearings exploring federal solutions to the childcare problem. Women's groups on the West Coast also organized events to promote national legislation.Footnote ¹³⁸ Chisholm and Abzug believed that childcare should be framed as a women's right as well as a social service for children. In hearings before the House, Abzug exhorted: “Everyone says that this is a children's bill. This bill, however, is also a woman's bill… . Indeed, I find it highly ironic that a bill which talks so much of the potential of growing children fails even to mention the undeveloped potential of over half our adult population.”Footnote ¹³⁹ To that end, Chisholm and Abzug expanded the statement of purpose to recognize the harms to women created by the dearth of childcare.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ While another leading bill proposed authorizations of $2, $4, and $7 billion in the first three years of the program, the Chisholm-Abzug bill proposed authorizations of $5, $8, and $10 billion for those years.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Chisholm-Abzug bill encompassed feminist objectives by providing for twenty-four-hour childcare and prohibiting sex discrimination in the staffing and administration of centers.Footnote ¹⁴² Abzug explained that the requirement of sex-neutral administration would extend to the character of the childcare as well as hiring: “Little girls must be educated equally with little boys in the projects themselves. This is one place we don't want girls told they can be nurses but boys can be doctors. That's where sexism begins … and that's where we've got to stop it first.”Footnote ¹⁴³

Chisholm and Abzug, however, disagreed about the extent to which the legislation should prioritize low-income women's access to childcare before that of middle-class women. In the context of a limited public fisc, the proposed legislation would not enact wholly universal childcare; debate over the distribution of finite resources highlighted class-based fault lines within the feminist coalition for childcare. Abzug agreed that low-income women's access to childcare should be prioritized initially, but she wanted to expand rapidly the number of childcare spaces open to middle-class women. Specifically, Abzug favored reserving 65 percent of funds for economically disadvantaged children in the first year of the program, but then reducing that allotment to 50 percent in the program's second and third years.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Abzug's stance reflected the perspective of middle-class feminist advocates for universal childcare, who opposed making childcare services a means-tested entitlement program. Abzug's legislative assistant wrote in a memorandum that maintaining a reserve of nearly two-thirds of the childcare funds for poor children “leave[s] a hell of a lot of women who won't be covered … I think we owe it to women to … [make] day care universal once the desperate needs of low-income women are met.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

In contrast to Abzug, Chisholm favored keeping the 65 percent reserve for low-income women throughout the childcare program's initial three years.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Chisholm's approach reflected the different priorities that antipoverty and welfare rights activists held compared to middle-class feminists. Given the constraint of limited funding, the claim to universal childcare as a right of all women threatened the legislation's ability to improve the quality of childcare available to children of low-income and poor mothers. Perhaps the most powerful of the coalition's advocates, Marian Wright Edelman, an African American civil-rights lawyer who had been a key activist in the Child Development Group of Mississippi, recalled the class tensions that characterized legislative drafting sessions: “Welfare mothers almost came to blows with some of the middle-class liberationists who thought they should have access to day care if they wanted time to go to an art gallery… . But welfare mothers who have no choice but to work wanted their kids' needs to come first.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Welfare rights activists might have found middle-class feminists' advocacy for childcare at best a bid for state support these women did not need and at worst a political claim that silenced welfare activists' own political voice. Chisholm and Abzug, however, managed to reach an agreement. In the end, their bill favored reserving 65 percent of funds for economically disadvantaged children in the first year, but then reducing that allotment to 60 percent in the second and 55 percent in the third year.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The compromise and the fact that both NOW and NWRO were active players in the Ad Hoc Coalition on Child Development illustrates that feminists were able to build a coalition that bridged the differences in their visions for childcare.

The Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971

The Chisholm-Abzug bill was one of numerous childcare bills in Congress. The confluence of several factors—feminist mobilization, rising maternal employment, the emergence of child-development theory, and political interest in day care as a component of welfare reform—had created “a window of opportunity” for Congress to pass universal childcare legislation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Throughout 1969 and 1970, Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Rep. John Brademas (D-IN) drummed up support for the Comprehensive Child Development Act in federal legislative hearings. An alliance of twenty-three groups ranging from NOW, to NWRO, to churches, to child-development scholars formed the Ad Hoc Coalition on Child Development. Coordinated advocacy resulted in the passage of the CCDA, which would have allocated $2.1 billion for a national childcare program offering free services for children whose family income fell below a specified level and services on a sliding-fee scale thereafter. Conservatives within the Nixon administration and Congress, however, targeted the bill and began to mobilize against it. On December 10, 1971, President Nixon issued a veto message based closely on a draft authored by speechwriter Patrick Buchanan that characterized the CCDA as “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the Ninety-second Congress” and “a long leap into the dark for the United States Government and the American people.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Kimberly Morgan has explicated fluidly the high political dimensions of the veto. First, the CCDA interacted awkwardly with the Family Assistance Plan: Nixon's proposal to replace a service-based welfare system with a national guaranteed income.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Congress's version of the Family Assistance Plan would fund day care for the children of welfare mothers engaged in job training and other work programs. By contrast, the CCDA raised the likelihood that childcare would become an entitlement of the middle class that would expand in the future as the result of political pressure.Footnote ¹⁵² Second, Congress linked the CCDA to the reauthorization of the Office of Economic Opportunity, but Nixon was engaged in a campaign to destroy the Office, which had lent federal resources to local civil and welfare rights struggles.Footnote ¹⁵³

In addition, childcare activists had won a controversial debate about the size of primary sponsorship units: the local, state, and tribal governments or nonprofits authorized to coordinate childcare services within a region. Feminists, civil rights leaders, and welfare activists wanted to keep sponsorship units small to give local communities more power over the administration and character of childcare centers. Conservatives, however, opposed the connection between childcare and movements for women's liberation and black freedom. They advocated for sponsorship units as high as 500,000, which would effectively give many states control over childcare.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Chisholm and Abzug entered the debate at the most liberal end of the spectrum, taking the position that local government units of any size should qualify and that nonprofit organizations such as a local NOW chapter might also qualify.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The final version of the CCDA realized community activists' vision and set the minimum prime sponsorship unit size at 5,000 persons.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The small sponsorship unit size reinforced the association between the CCDA and community action programs, placing the childcare bill squarely in the middle of a backlash against the Great Society.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Morgan, however, presents as a puzzle the fact that the CCDA retained associations with women's liberation even though representatives of the women's movement were relatively marginal within the coalition behind the CCDA, compared to civil rights activists such as Edelman.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The answer lies in the history of grassroots feminist activism and rights articulation on the subject of universal childcare. While nascent feminist organizations and NOW may not have been at the forefront of those lobbying for the CCDA, feminists across the country were engaged in political debate and local activism regarding childcare. They channeled their ideas through representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug's alternative childcare bill. To the extent that the political meaning of a piece of legislation is constructed in the streets, popular newspapers, and in the political aspirations of social movements, as well as the halls of Congress and the chambers of the White House, the CCDA was a feminist bill.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Nixon knew this and associated the CCDA not only with the 1960s War on Poverty but also with women's liberation.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Indeed, it was the CCDA's aspiration toward universal childcare—the fact that in the words of one congressional opponent the bill would “cover the children of 32% of all American families, not just these in the low-income level”—that most animated the legislation's critics.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The libertarian magazine Human Events explained that the CCDA would “widen the child care planned for the poor to all of the nation's children” and derided the legislation's attractiveness for “middle-income couples that would like to farm out their children while they pursue individual careers.”Footnote ¹⁶² Social conservatives accepted childcare as a service for a narrow slice of families in which financial need compelled women to work. But they sought to protect the middle-class family, constructed as private within political discourse, from government intervention. The CCDA's most virulent opponents warned that the bill would “destroy … the institution of the family” by putting “government in place of the parent.”Footnote ¹⁶³ New Right mobilization against the CCDA occurred, as historian Matthew Lassiter has argued, at a time when the decline in two-parent households and in the nuclear-family ideal of a breadwinning father and stay-at-home mother had provoked a sense of familial crisis. Social conservatives attributed these changes not to economic causes but to cultural factors including moral permissiveness, sexual libertinism, racial integration, and the feminist movement.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The feminist vision for a right to universal childcare had challenged the boundaries between the family, market, and state, and the CCDA's opponents sought to restore what they understood as the proper social order. Nixon's veto depicted the CCDA as part of a transformation in the gendered structure of childrearing that threatened the foundation of democracy. If, in Nixon's words, the nuclear family formed the “keystone of our civilization,” then a feminist effort to transform the family's structure posed the deepest danger for the American state.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Local Activism and the Law after the Decline of a Rights-Based Vision

From the standpoint of federal policy, Nixon's veto brought the struggle for universal childcare to a devastating conclusion, disappointing feminists and child-development advocates alike. After the CCDA's demise no universal childcare legislation ever gained widespread support in Congress. The veto marked a turning point in the history of childcare in the United States, dividing policy between stingy public day care for the poor and tax incentives supporting childcare for the middle class.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Of equal significance, Nixon's veto also changed the character of childcare activism. By shattering the political hope for the right to universal childcare, the veto unraveled a fragile coalition among liberal and radical, middle-class and working-class, white and African American activists. As the optimism of the 1960s gave way to conservative backlash, recession, and the political anxieties of the 1970s, rights discourse lost its rhetorical appeal in political battles for childcare.

While continuing to support publicly funded childcare for families on welfare, Nixon attempted to mitigate the childcare problems of middle-class families through the tax code. One day after he vetoed the CCDA, Nixon signed into law the Revenue Act, amending Section 214 of the Internal Revenue Code to increase deductions available for childcare and household-service expenses. By broadening eligibility, the legislation made the benefits under Section 214 available to an estimated additional 1.4 million families. The act also increased the maximum deduction from $600 for one child or $900 for two children to $4,800 per household.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ An article widely published in the underground media juxtaposed Nixon's veto of comprehensive childcare legislation, which would have benefited working-class and poor as well as middle-class women, with his support for Congress's expansion of tax deductions that encouraged private solutions to middle-class families' childcare needs.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Section 214 offered class-specific benefits, categorized childcare as a private responsibility of the nuclear family, and established incentives for domestic work rather than day care centers. First, the new tax policy helped middle-income women reconcile paid employment with childrearing responsibilities, but it did not benefit poor families who paid no taxes. Neither did it benefit working- and lower-middle-class families who elected the standardized deduction. These families did not spend enough income on “personal” expenditures to warrant itemizing their deductions and, thus, could not take advantage of the childcare deduction.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Second, by classifying childcare as a personal living expense rather than as a business expense the legislation reinforced an understanding of childcare as the private responsibility of the family.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Had Congress included childcare as a legitimate deduction under the existing business-expense provision of the tax code, moreover, then a family's childcare expenses would not be subject to a maximum and would be deductable in full.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Third, by allowing lesser deductions for services performed outside rather than inside the home, the revision to Section 214 encouraged middle-class families to hire domestic workers rather than to place their children in daycare centers.Footnote ¹⁷² By promoting the creation of domestic-service jobs to be filled by poor women moving off welfare, the tax bill also served Nixon's welfare policies much criticized by feminists. Indeed, Congress expected the reduction in public assistance monies to significantly offset the cost of the increased tax deduction.Footnote ¹⁷³

While some feminists critiqued Nixon's tax policy, other liberal, middle-class feminists made tax deductions rather than publicly funded childcare centers their primary policy goal. The trajectory of the Eastern Massachusetts NOW chapter's childcare advocacy well illustrates the shift in liberal feminist activism after 1971. Recall that the chapter split from the New England Women's Coalition over tensions with radical feminists, contributing to the unraveling of an effort to place a childcare referendum on the Cambridge ballot. Following the split and Nixon's veto of the CCDA, Eastern Massachusetts NOW fell into a class-stratified framework for childcare policy. The chapter pursued government funding for centers serving public assistance recipients, orchestrating a lobbying day in April 1972 to pressure Massachusetts to exploit existing federal funding sources, namely Title IV-A of the Social Security Act.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Eastern Massachusetts NOW focused the majority of its energies, however, on gaining childcare tax deductions benefiting middle-class parents.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The shift in Eastern Massachusetts NOW's political goals, from public childcare to tax deductions, illustrates how middle-class feminists increasingly emphasized individualized solutions enabling mothers to work. Middle-class feminists continued to stress women's right to equal employment opportunity following Nixon's veto, but the right to universal childcare no longer remained central to their political agenda. Activists' political vision thus existed in symbiotic relationship to the state, broadening and narrowing within the limits posed by the political landscape.

Radical and socialist feminists, meanwhile, turned away from the state almost completely after Nixon's veto. Some of the most successful radical and socialist childcare projects continued for a short time. The Action Committee for Decent Childcare under the umbrella of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, for example, reported in 1972 that “with all of the frustration, disappointments, difficulties, and hard work, we are slowly learning and helping each other to learn the meaning of power and how to fight for it.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Yet, the Action Committee soon fell apart in the shadow of the CCDA's veto.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The demise of the Committee and other radical feminist childcare initiatives illustrates how the sense of political possibility and its lack, at the national level, influenced local organizing efforts.

Some women's liberationists turned from advocating for the right to childcare to establishing independent childcare collectives. Their interest in the state extended only to the technicalities of obtaining a day care license, negotiating regulations, and securing funding for community day care projects.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ And they engaged not in a politics of rights articulation but in a politics of childcare provision that heightened their sensitivity to differences among women. By 1972, mothers involved in women's liberation, who had made working in childcare collectives their political priority, confronted childless women in the movement who they perceived as not having performed a fair share of the work.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Childless women who had once not understood childcare as their problem came to feel that “doing childcare” was “respected political work … expected of women active in the women's community.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ As one childless activist explained in 1973, “personal rather than social responsibility for children maintains the oppression of ALL women. All are treated as potential mothers who must be supported by men.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Independent collectives held the potential to radicalize local feminists and their communities by engaging activists, who might otherwise have depended on state intervention, in both the organization and provision of new childcare forms that embodied their political values. Independent collectives, however, were not a viable, long-term political strategy for working-class parents pressed for time and financial resources.

Sexuality, furthermore, emerged as a new axis of difference that complicated the work of doing childcare. Tension erupted between straight women, who wanted to involve men in childcare centers as a way to challenge the sexual division of labor, and some gay women, who were committed to building lives separate from men and resented working in a heterosexual environment.Footnote ¹⁸² Whereas many straight women believed that the example of male childcare workers would provide an antidote to the socialization of children according to gender stereotypes, some lesbians argued that women provided the best care for young girls. An article in an Iowa City feminist journal, for example, argued that “a dyke is a better mother [than a straight woman] … because a dyke's concept of herself and other women offers the child much more space for the growth and development of aggressiveness, initiative, self-confidence and other dykey qualities.”Footnote ¹⁸³

As working-class and poor people's needs for childcare increased during the early seventies, the political environment grew more hostile. Even as Congress and Nixon turned to the tax code as a stopgap to middle-class families' childcare dilemma, recessionary economics also led Congress to reduce public funding for childcare. During his second term, Nixon orchestrated a revenue-sharing scheme that resulted in the devolution of administrative power over social service programs to city governments. Some scholars have praised Nixon's revenue-sharing program as a vision for well-funded and decentralized social policy. Revenue sharing, however, also came at a time when Congress repeatedly tried to cut back an exponentially expanding social-services budget. Senator Russell Long proposed a rider to the revenue-sharing bill in October 1972 that capped the amount states could spend on social services; the states had too much at stake in the legislation to risk making an issue out of the rider.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ At a time of economic scarcity and budgetary contrition, the revenue-sharing scheme threatened the direct relationship that community childcare activists had sought to establish with the federal government and pitched these activists into desperate struggles with state and local governments for both limited funds and control over childcare centers.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

In a new political context, poor and working-class childcare activists shifted their political energies from rights articulation to heightened battles over funding, eligibility criteria, and community control. Activists in New York City, for example, found themselves in the midst of a political “football game” between the city, state, and federal governments.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Each level of government could shift blame for the lack of childcare funding to another during a time of economic recession and budget deficits. In the fall of 1970, New York State mandated that the City implement a new fee scale in its centers, narrowing eligibility and increasing fees by 400 percent. Parents and advocates saw these trends as a simultaneous attack on women's right to work and on poor and largely minority women's right to quality care for their children.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ An underground newspaper opined on the threat the fee scale posed to political organization and action: “Laws like these … create a situation dividing the working poor from the non-working poor, third world people from white people.” The newspaper acknowledged the immediate necessity for state-funded childcare but warned that “we must never loose [sic] sight of our own needs or our understanding of the state and how it functions, especially when it is trying to exercise more control.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸

The majority of New York City's day care centers at first refused to comply with the new regulations, but many capitulated when threatened with an elimination of funding. Mayor John Lindsay, then campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, threatened to close down the holdout day care centers by the first of February 1972. To protest the fee scale and Lindsay's threats, on January 20, 400 mostly African American and Latina mothers, children, and day care workers flooded his presidential campaign headquarters at nine in the morning to set up a one-day, makeshift childcare center: “The Mayor's TV was tuned in to Sesame St., his official stationary was soon covered with beautiful pictures, and a whole slew of purple campaign benefit invitations were thrown out the 13th floor window to let passer[s]by know that something extraordinary was going on in the usually staid office building.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Dorothy Pitman, founder of the West 80th Street Community Day Care Center, accused Lindsay of hypocrisy by campaigning for president while neglecting New York: “‘It's not like they don't have the money, it's a matter of class war.’”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Over the next two years, Mayor Lindsay and the governor's office played off one another, each making promises designed to placate the childcare activists that depended on fiscal commitments from the other.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Amid the political buck-passing that characterized revenue sharing, childcare activists fought a battle of attrition that ultimately withered their energies and resources.Footnote ¹⁹² Struggles in other locales, such as Atlanta, mirrored that of New York activists for both funding and community control.Footnote ¹⁹³ Only three years after Nixon vetoed the CCDA, the vision for universal childcare, which might have provided a service to working families and challenged middle-class gender norms alike, seemed distant. Federal, state, and local governments had narrowed the grounds of political contest to keeping public day care open for more than the poorest families and to expanding daycare's political and social purpose beyond welfare reform.

For some African American communities, the state represented not only bureaucratic obstacles to local control over childcare but also the threat of violence. On a Tuesday in January 1972, for example, seven policemen in High Point, North Carolina, forcibly entered the Angela Davis Free Day Care Center organized by the Black Panther Party. According to the Panther Party, the police “had their hands on their guns, ready to fire.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The police were purportedly searching for a Panther Party member, but the Party believed that “this was just a lie, something fabricated to intimidate the people, to keep them from bringing their children to the Day Care Center. The pigs know that the children not only receive love and care, but also an education that teaches them how to survive this racist society.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Parents and workers at the Albina Childcare Center, located in a predominantly black neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, held similarly fervent beliefs about the importance of community control over childcare. They attempted to organize into an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) local with the purpose of pressuring the city to fire the Center's white, suburban director, whom they perceived as “insensitive to the demands and needs of those which the Center is supposed to serve.” African American childcare workers who tried to sign IWW authorization cards, however, experienced harassment that caused at least one teacher to quit. A sympathetic underground newspaper reported that city authorities also harassed the IWW and community spokesmen supporting the Albina Center's battle, vandalizing IWW offices and burglarizing the homes of IWW members.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

The Albina Center controversy reflected the rise of labor organizing as a significant dimension of childcare politics. By 1972, childcare workers located in cities across the Northwest, Northeast, and Midwest had begun unionization campaigns in pursuit of better work conditions and higher-quality centers. These workers marched, protested, and picketed in efforts to gain union recognition from local government agencies; their substantive goals included increased staffing, higher wages, overtime pay, more time for lesson planning, improved training, and a greater voice in childcare programming.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The reason for the rise in childcare workers' labor consciousness can be attributed, in part, to the demise of the political potential for national legislation establishing universal childcare. The international socialist journal Workers' Power theorized that “day care at state expense for all who need it” was the only permanent solution to the childcare dilemma. In the face of political intransigence, labor needed to organize for employer-sponsored daycare while allying with nonunionized, mostly female workers, to mobilize for state-funded childcare.Footnote ¹⁹⁸