I. “Beyond Their Cocoon of Privilege”: The NCJW and the “Culture of Poverty” in Service Delivery

Debates over how best to address family poverty sat just below the surface during that polite luncheon in St. Paul in late September 1964. In fact, the NCJW had made addressing inequality a central plank of its 1960s agenda. Its National Office developed “Schools for Community Action,” offering a series of forums, community meetings, and study groups that local sections could adapt to their section-level programming.Footnote ¹² The first School for Community Action topic, “Equal Opportunity for Youth,” was inspired by social theorists like Michael Harrington and Gunnar Mydral who had opened Americans’ eyes to “poverty amidst plenty,” and early-childhood experts like Frank Reissman, who had focused this newfound attention specifically on “the culturally deprived child” in the emerging “culture of poverty” discourses of the day.Footnote ¹³ Taking up this conversation, the St. Paul section brought together local experts like Dr. Beulah Compton, an associate professor in the school of social work at the University of Minnesota, and Mr. Harry Falk, the principal of Marshall Junior High, for a “one-day school with the thought of acquainting members with the problems of the disadvantaged youth in our city, and in the hope of providing some ideas as to the ways in which the problem can be solved through action.”Footnote ¹⁴ Across the country, and in St. Paul specifically, the women of the NCJW became more aware of the vast economic and social inequality in their own communities and rolled up their sleeves to see how they could help.

Indeed, the St. Paul section accomplished this goal in spades when a community survey sparked a partnership with the local public school district. Over the course of a year, an executive committee consisting of NCJW member Rhoda Redleaf (“a fantastic administrator and public relations expert”), Gretta Freeman (a “professional teacher taking a brief respite for little ones”), a school principal, and two classroom teachers (“exceptional educators specifically chosen by the Department of Education”) met weekly to develop a program to support St. Paul’s children through a compensatory education program focused on preschool-aged children, mostly Black, who lived in urban poverty.Footnote ¹⁵

In the “cultural deficit” language of the day, the section’s “Proposal for an Experimental Nursery Program at McKinley School” explained that “Because of economic, social and cultural deprivation, these people hold different standards from those held by the core culture.”Footnote ¹⁶ NCJW urged its members to “look beyond their cocoons of privilege” to expand access to early childhood education.Footnote ¹⁷ The council felt it was its members’ social obligation to focus programming specifically on children living in poverty, whom it believed entered school with “poor verbal skills [and a] limited background of experiences which are positively correlated with school success.” This rhetoric, riddled with classist and racist assumptions yet also rooted in an earnest desire to support those in need, was part and parcel of President’s Lyndon B. Johnson’s recently announced War on Poverty, which in turn was part of his broader Great Society agenda that mobilized the language and ideals of racial liberalism on a national scale.Footnote ¹⁸ The NCJW’s early childhood and workforce pilots earned the organization a central role in developing War on Poverty goals for women and children. But contests between “expert oversight” and “community control”; disagreements about the goals and purpose of means-tested compensatory comprehensive programs; and the fraught relationship between education policy, labor policy, and welfare policy made the NCJW’s programs politically complex—and therefore potentially vulnerable—from the outset.

The NCJW’s goal at the McKinley School was to expose young children to “middle-class values” to “broaden the[ir] background of experiences and to improve [their] verbal skills; two problems … consistently noted as prevalent in disadvantaged areas.” Like Martin and Cynthia Deutsch, David Weikart, and other social scientists of the era, the women of the NCJW sought to test the hypothesis that early interventions targeting childhood deprivation could offer lasting gains across social, emotional, and even intellectual domains. The McKinley Project was, moreover, a novel experiment in “civic volunteerism,” mobilizing private citizens on a voluntary basis to carry out federal priorities and programs in coordination with government agencies. NCJW women volunteered their time as classroom aides, administrative assistants, and program evaluators. NCJW took on a financial commitment, funding the services of a half-time teacher and providing additional funds for field trips, supplies, and equipment. In turn, the St. Paul School Board approved the pilot program for a 3-year period, 1964–1967.Footnote ¹⁹

While the work of scholars such as Barbara Beatty, John Rury, Maris Vinovskis, and others draws out the many problems of “compensatory” education programs, McKinley offered a window into the potential that such programs had to provide real social and educational benefits, even as they were built on a racist foundation that would later spur conflict between program operators and participants. In one session, for example, volunteers listened to a tape recording of psychologist Clay Lafferty on “Self-Image” and read a poem entitled “Emotional Needs” that surmised, “If a three or four year old could tell us his emotional needs this is the way he would express it… . I’m ME and I want a lot of people to love me.” Warning against overly didactic interactions in the classroom, the materials cautioned that “Children are concerned with experimenting with materials[,] not concerned with facts. They have their own thought-out plan. Do not impose your interpretation. You will destroy something they will discover for themselves.”Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, while compensatory education could often stereotype children from low-income backgrounds, demonstration projects like McKinley still sought to develop child-centered educational programs that focused on children as individuals with unique social-emotional needs.

In the 1960s, psychologists and early childhood experts had rejected the notion that IQ was a fixed, hereditary marker of intelligence and instead stood firmly on the side of environmentalism in the long-standing debate between “nature and nurture.” Echoing social scientists like Joseph McVicker, who published findings from his 1961 Intelligence and Experience under the sensationalized headline “How to Raise Your Child’s IQ by 20 Points” for Reader’s Digest, the McKinley School’s administrators boasted, “children showed an average increase of 12 to 13 IQ points… . After the first year or two of school, the increase grew an additional 5 to 6 points.”Footnote ²¹ These gains, meticulously documented by NCJW evaluation teams, served as a justification for compensatory programming as a panacea for a broad slate of social ills. These bold claims of effectiveness and impact would become an Achilles heel for programs that overpromised results.

IQ gains were said to have emerged in part because of the holistic nature of the McKinley program. “The children were introduced to experiences most middle-class children take for granted,” noted one report. “On field trips they traveled to the zoo, gas stations, the fire house and the airport.” There was even a “speech therapist on hand to deal with problems relating to the children’s oral skills.” It was not enough simply to provide preschool education; compensatory programs supported children through both specialized services to support their development and programs to enrich their learning. Yet, while the program asked the children’s parents to “assist with field trips, sew curtains, bake birthday cake, and repair equipment,” it did not offer them a meaningful voice in program operation.Footnote ²² Thus, while the program was indeed comprehensive, the fantastic claims of academic effectiveness, commitment to middle-class values, and lack of deep parent engagement foretold the political vulnerabilities that would soon embroil compensatory programs in controversy.

NCJW was aware of the benefits and drawbacks of such targeted programs and would come to understand them even more intimately as McKinley became a model program for the War on Poverty’s early childhood program, soon to be known as Head Start. Through her father’s journalistic connections, program organizer Gretta Freeman brought the program to the attention of then-US senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. To Freeman, Humphrey wrote, “my good friend, Irv Reddick of the Minneapolis Star, has called my attention to the preschool program with which you are involved in the McKinley school district. It appears to be a most important development in our struggle to break the reoccurring cycle of poor home environments and low educational achievement among disadvantaged young people. I would appreciate if you would forward me [information about the] specific results and cost of your program.” In response, Freeman sent a nine-page report not only to Humphrey but also to Hyman Bookbinder of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).Footnote ²³

II. “NCJW Joins the War on Poverty”: Head Start and Women in Community Service Bring NCJW into Partnership with the Federal Government

Highly innovative and housed within the Office of the President, the OEO had a broad mandate to fight poverty. As President Johnson declared, “We will work with them through our communities all over the country to develop comprehensive community action programs—with remedial education, with job training, with retraining, with health and employment counseling, with neighborhood improvement. We will strike at poverty’s roots.”Footnote ²⁴ Crucially, all OEO programs, including Head Start, were to include the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor through a parallel innovation, the Community Action Program (CAP). Thus, the OEO and CAP together represented a novel approach to fighting poverty through community participation in federally funded programs. Johnson selected Sargent Shriver, a passionate advocate who was not always the most effective administrator, to lead the OEO.Footnote ²⁵

Inspired by emerging research as well as demonstration projects like McKinley, the OEO set out to develop federally funded, comprehensive, multigenerational early childhood interventions. The task was massive, and the seeds of conflict bloomed early. As one of Head Start’s founding fathers, Edward Zigler, recalled, “True to his eccentric way of thinking, Shriver began planning the preschool program through multiple channels.” While assembling a team of child development experts under Dr. Robert Cooke, a Johns Hopkins pediatrician, Shriver also brought together a separate group from CAP to approach the project from a community-centric angle. The “Cooke Committee,” like NCJW, emphasized poor children’s physical, social, and emotional health and cognitive capabilities. It too envisioned a two-generational program of children and parents to support “positive social relations,” with child development at the core of its mission.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, CAP representatives saw Head Start as a resource for supporting the whole family and, indeed, the family’s broader community. Tensions between these approaches (one focused closely on child development, the other on broader community welfare) shaped the contentious evolution of Head Start. Like other OEO programs, Head Start became a site of struggle over the interrelationships between poor people, middle-class interests, and the state. As one CAP planner later reflected, “I understood that Head Start was a wedge made of appealing little children which would help the administration wiggle itself into the heart of the poor, minority groups, and liberals.”Footnote ²⁷ Through a burgeoning relationship with the federal welfare apparatus and in partnership with community organizations, the NCJW navigated this complex policy terrain.

The “miracle at McKinley” was one of five NCJW pilot projects that served as demonstration programs for the federal government’s Head Start program.Footnote ²⁸ In turn, NCJW’s local sections around the country established their own programs, often affiliated with Head Start. In Milwaukee, after finding none of the existing programs “suitable,” the local section enlisted the help of the Jewish Community Center Nursery School to set up a volunteer program at the Lee Elementary School’s Head Start program.Footnote ²⁹ Many NCJW sections, along with the NCJW National Office, took on policy roles as well. Minneapolis Section member Viola Hymes attended the White House Conference on Education in 1965, participating in debates about Head Start’s national implementation. Indeed, NCJW sections around the country took a variety of paths to develop, operate, and advocate for comprehensive, compensatory programs for young children.

NCJW initiatives offered members new avenues for participating in civic life. Throughout its long history, NCJW had attracted acculturated American Jewish women, often of Germanic descent, into local volunteer work. Typically women of means, the NCJW “ladies” rarely held paying jobs outside the home. For Viola Hymes, for example, roles within NCJW fostered opportunities within the Jewish community in Minneapolis, in city politics, and even in national politics.Footnote ³⁰ In 1960, President John F. Kennedy invited Hymes to join 300 women—“organizational leaders from across the country and across the barriers of race and creed”—to serve on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). He challenged commission members to “act for social change as partners with the government and with one another.” NCJW took up this call—independently and together with other women’s groups—through federal partnerships, state-level advocacy, and volunteer programs in their local communities. In the first half of the 1960s, NCJW was committed to both racial liberalism and women’s rights. It developed an incrementalist, individualist approach to addressing both racial and gender discrimination—an approach that historians have shown did little to challenge the larger economic condition of poor women, particularly poor women of color, who faced profound structural and institutional barriers.Footnote ³¹

At the start, however, hope ran high. The PCSW introduced the NCJW to two key concerns when it came to creating labor policy for women. The first was how best to support women in the workplace—through protective (“compensatory”) legislation for the poor or through equal treatment for all (the Equal Rights Amendment in particular). The NCJW advocated for protective legislation and thus took a different path than most of this era’s mainstream feminist organizations. The second key concern was how to connect sex discrimination to questions of racial discrimination. The PCSW had not initially advocated for prohibitions against sex discrimination in civil rights legislation. As one PSCW administer explained, “We were so deeply concerned with the problem of larger opportunities, equality of opportunities, on the basis of race—where perhaps the hardest problems has resided—that we did not want to introduce any issue which might impede the progress of [race-based] civil rights legislation.”Footnote ³²

Thus, like this period’s racially oriented “compensatory” programs related to child development, emerging theories about “compensatory” programs for poor women often targeted Black families. In 1964, when Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan’s The Negro Family: A Case for National Action leaked to the press, it helped to inspire the War on Poverty. Moynihan’s report was best known for arguing that matriarchal Black families disempowered fathers and were incongruent with the larger American social structure.Footnote ³³ Its sexist, racist, and heteronormative postulations emphasized the male breadwinner household as a solution to Black family poverty and attacked the existing welfare infrastructure—namely, the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which Moynihan said discouraged women from marrying and becoming homemakers. His report was one of several analyses of family life in this period to link child policy, labor policy, and welfare policy as sites of contestation over the relationship between the federal government, social reformers, and poor (often Black) women.

These contested fields intersected in the work of the federal Women’s Bureau, part of the Department of Labor. By the 1960s, the Women’s Bureau had “taken it upon itself” to encourage states to develop Governor’s Commissions on the Status of Women under the leadership of Mary Keyserling, a Columbia-trained economist. An embattled New Dealer, Keyserling had learned how to be politically pragmatic after coming under investigation during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s. In response, her political ideology moved toward the center, and she retreated from the public eye. By the 1960s, however, she had sufficiently redeemed her image to attract President Johnson’s attention. She was appointed director of the Women’s Bureau in 1964 and used her position to advocate for working-class women. She worried that the pro-ERA movement prioritized the interests of professional over working-class women, a position that put her out of step with the largely middle-class feminist movement of her day.Footnote ³⁴

Keyserling offered a significantly modified vision of Moynihan’s framework that focused on training poor women and girls for the labor force, and the NCJW, through its partnerships with the Women’s Bureau, embraced her vision.Footnote ³⁵ Under Keyserling’s guidance, NCJW joined the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the National Council of Catholic Women, and the Churchwomen United to establish “a new national grouping” called Women in Community Service, Inc. (WICS), to “undertake the task of recruiting young women” into the workforce.Footnote ³⁶ WICS contracted directly with the federal government to recruit women and girls for Job Corps programs. As one Women’s Corp administrator recounted of her peers in the OEO who did not understand the key role of middle-class volunteers in promoting poor women’s employment through WICS, “some of those men thought that was just about the dumbest thing that they ever heard. One of them said, ‘Little old ladies in tennis shoes?’”Footnote ³⁷

In 1965, its first year of operation, WICS screened 15,000 women for 2,000 available spots in a 1-year residential job training with locations in Florida, California, and Ohio. As the NCJW’s national newsletter explained, “They find and interview girls for Job Corps… . They maintain contact with the girls during their stay at the Job Corps Centers by writing letters and cards. From first to last, they also provide a host of support services.”Footnote ³⁸ Through its Job Corps partnership, in conjunction with WICS, NCJW joined a coalition of middle-class women looking to apply the “culture of poverty” logics they had learned through compensatory early childhood education to workforce development for young poor women. As the Milwaukee NCJW chapter’s bulletin explained, “WICS is determined that every girl who takes even one step toward helping herself move up and out of poverty will get all the help her community has to offer.”Footnote ³⁹

The NCJW’s partnership with the National Council of Negro Women offered new opportunities to work across barriers of race. As an NCJW volunteer at the Mobile, Alabama, WICS office explained in a letter to the editor of The Council Woman, “at the formation of WICS, relationships between the races were obviously polite and over-cautious… . Slowly, signs of strain disappeared.”Footnote ⁴⁰ While the partnership did indeed erode long-standing social norms, it did not challenge NCJW’s belief in middle-class values. As NCNW member Trude Lash observed, “For the white women the realization that we were obviously middle-aged women with some standing in the community … created an uncomfortable challenge to firmly held prejudices.”Footnote ⁴¹ By 1969, Grace Gumnit of the NCJW’s St. Paul Section observed that her NCNW contemporaries were “quite complacent, have ‘made it’, and prefer being called Negroes not black. They are not representative of [the] common black community.”Footnote ⁴² As NCJW’s work with NCNW revealed, cross-racial program development did not necessarily foster cross-class program operation. The women of both the NCJW and the NCNW were proudly middle class.

At the same time, WICS, like all OEO programs, was mandated to work with CAP, consisting of community leaders from more diverse backgrounds. As the Milwaukee section of the NCJW explained, “WICS and local Community Action Programs—which are an arm of the OEO—will cooperate in developing such new projects as referral services, homemaker training and special classes.” The section continued, “Funding will come through the OEO after the projects are approved. So, to the letters WICS we now add the letters CAP.” WICS volunteers took pride in their efforts to help poor women find jobs in coordination with federal agencies, concluding, “We have come a long way from the philosophy of the Thanksgiving basket of food for the ‘poor’ family in the other part of town.”Footnote ⁴³ But, as Johnnie Tillmon, a founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization, explained, WICS administrators and CAP participants often came from very different places, and cooperation proved challenging. In her words, “I’m sure whoever wrote those words ‘maximum feasible participation of the poor,’ wished they had not done that!”Footnote ⁴⁴ In some cases, the liberal “experts” of WICS marginalized local participants from CAP.

In their direct service work, the women of WICS were at once supportive and paternalistic. In an article entitled “W-I-C-S Spells Community Action,” councilwoman Dorothy Gold from South Carolina advised fellow volunteers to “drop all your conventional moral outrage” to work with girls for whom “life since childhood has been one long struggle … [and whose] only concept of morality is to survive.” Gold worked closely with a young woman named Margie, who was not identified by race. She judged her “a remarkably good mother” and helped her to “board her baby with another WICS volunteer who runs a day care center in the country” so that Margie could attend a residential program. Gold served as a “big sister,” and Margie evidently felt close enough to “call at 10 o’clock to tell me that the baby had a new tooth.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Not all relationships were so positive, however. Tazzalean Rogers in Milwaukee, for example, identified WICS as simply offering “crumbs from the rich man’s table” intended to “pacify the militants who protested the lack of jobs for the minority people.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Despite practical, philosophical, and political tensions, NCJW programs like the McKinley Preschool Project and WICS, “conceived in civil rights and nurtured in the War on Poverty,” stood at the forefront of targeted compensatory interventions in federal young family policy, even as NCJW volunteers recognized how their own social position made them “privileged members of the middle-class keeping millions of fellow Americans entrapped in a vicious circle of poverty.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Already by the mid-1960s, as the McKinley School project and WICS got underway, the excitement of the Great Society—and the racial liberalism that informed its policies—had started to give way to uncertainty. NCJW’s 1964 “School for Community Action,” acknowledged that “In the year that has passed, the government, to be sure, has declared an unprecedented war on poverty. But still, the informed student knows that only the surface has been scratched.”Footnote ⁴⁸

III. “Trembling a Bit, but Not Afraid”: The NCJW Confronts Critiques of War on Poverty Programs

By 1966, the rosy national optimism of the War on Poverty was dissipating. As the war in Vietnam intensified and revolt swept urban centers, racially marginalized communities across the country rejected moderate paternalism and instead sought a voice in welfare program development and operation. As the NCJW’s national president Pearl Willen observed,

NCJW was sympathetic to—but wary of—Black demands for “community control,” which represented a rejection of its “compensatory” approach to social-welfare programming.

Indeed, with the rise of Black Power and “community control,” the basic logic of both WICS and Head Start fell into jeopardy, not only because program participants challenged liberal paternalism but also because, at the very same moment, the reactionary “New Right” harnessed Americans’ broad dissatisfaction with War on Poverty programs by calling into question their effectiveness, with an eye toward dismantling them altogether. By the second half of the 1960s, political conservatives sought to defund these programs and develop increasingly punitive welfare legislation that moved away from the “targeted opportunity” model of Great Society programs. As Mitchell Ginsberg, former commissioner of human resources for New York City, reflected in The Council Woman, “I think it’s no secret that almost everybody connected with welfare has been extremely dissatisfied with the program. So, welfare reform is an idea whose time has come. Now the question is what kind of reform.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By virtue of its involvement with WICS and Head Start, NCJW found itself at the center of a national debate about the future of the welfare state.

The NCJW asked its members in 1967, “Head Start: Has it Really Worked?” Like the McKinley project, Head Start programs across the country had been quick to declare themselves a silver bullet to improve academic performance and, in turn, life chances for children in poverty. Many had followed the tack of psychologist Joseph McVicker Hunt to advertise dramatic IQ gains. As the program expanded, the Council Woman noted that “there is no doubt that OEO has been overselling in steam-roller fashion—it creates the public impression that an easy solution has been found and that the lucky Head Start children are safely on their way to salvation.”Footnote ⁵¹ But a growing set of longitudinal studies questioned these claims.Footnote ⁵² Citing a study from the Center for Urban Education (and sponsored by Yeshiva University), national president Pearl Willen similarly noted in the Council Woman that while Head Start bestowed children with a love of learning, “there was no measurable difference” between Head Start graduates and their kindergarten peers only 6 months into the school year. Moreover, with articles like Arthur Jensen’s “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” conservative psychologists swung the pendulum back from McVicker Hunt’s “environmentalism” back to hereditarian views rooted in racist pseudoscience.

The NCJW found the “severest critics” to be “shallow” and instead pointed to the monumental mission the nation had given to Head Start, explaining that “society and education themselves must change in order to effect the desired change in the disadvantaged.” NCJW recognized that “public schools fail dismally to continue the kind of stimulation offered by Head Start,” which perhaps accounted for the “fading” gains. The NCJW had also come to see the danger of preaching middle-class values, explaining, “Another important problem is that in the middle-class oriented school, the home environment of the poor or minority child is not only ignored, but stigmatized as inferior.” While in the NCJW’s eyes, contemporary criticisms failed to account for the “great many simple things [Head Start offered], many of which are difficult to measure,”Footnote ⁵³ Head Start’s big claims and poorly developed theory of social change—was it a preschool program or an antipoverty initiative?—nevertheless placed it on precarious footing, not only with white conservatives but also with its own constituents.

Head Start parents across the country challenged the idea that early childhood centers were the domain of the expert. Instead, they advocated for Head Start to serve as a site of broader Black liberation and employment.Footnote ⁵⁴ Increasingly, Head Start Parent Action Groups offered politically marginalized parents opportunities for local civic engagement, emboldening them to claim more agency in federal programs that affected their lives. While the most well-known confrontations between federal officials and local groups took place in Mississippi, struggles led by Head Start parents raged across the country. For example, the Milwaukee Parent Action group “crashed” a Head Start staff meeting at the Jewish Community Center. While 27 parent representatives had been invited to the meeting, the protesting parents rejected what they saw as tokenism, declaring that “Unless you work with us there won’t be no Head Start. Why not treat us with a little more dignity?”Footnote ⁵⁵ The NCJW too understood the need for more meaningful parental involvement, explaining in the Council Woman, “If the parents are given the right to influence the purposes and goals of their children’s education, perhaps that education will be more realistic, more successful, less frustrating to all concerned.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Meanwhile, WICS participants also seized the political moment by demanding a greater role in program operation and evaluation and more respect from program administrators. As the director of the Cleveland Job Corps told WICS planners in 1970, participants were “demanding to be a part of the decision-making process in all matters that relate to them. More and more people are flexing their muscles and their voices to that end.” She understood this activism as essential to the larger policy process, explaining, “It’s entirely important that these people be capable of making an intelligent contribution to this decision-making process.”Footnote ⁵⁷ When it came to job recruitment (WICS’s main role), leaders answered this call by offering their middle-class volunteers, who were “not issue-oriented or politically-oriented—just sweet, dear ladies,” more training on how to work with poor women with “an extra dimension of sensitivity.” A new training manual, entitled “The People Who are Poor,” encouraged volunteers to develop increased “cultural awareness,” but it failed to assuage the growing call for the administrative inclusion of poor people themselves.Footnote ⁵⁸

In this context, the NCJW’s membership began to decline. Already by the fraught year of 1968, the NCJW had noted a “severe drop in numbers,” particularly within its urban sections. The situation was so dire that one chapter said WICS was “practically going down the drain” because of a lack of volunteers. In response, the NCJW national office assembled a study committee to investigate the “consensus of thinking and feeling” among the organization’s suburban members. It found, “the predominant attitude alienating our white middle class liberals and in turn our programs is fear—fear of going into distressed areas.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, the NCJW’s liberal theory of social change was a poor match for the growing urban unrest and rebellion in America’s cities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Shirking responsibility, some NCJW women tied this “fear” to “Black anti-Semitism,” a concern that was gaining traction in response to the “ugly overtones of racial and religious bigotry” of the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teacher’s strike in New York City as well as Black radicals’ criticism of Israel’s Six Day War.Footnote ⁶¹ But another source of conflict was the original compensatory ideology of Head Start and WICS and participants’ increasing demands to administer these programs themselves.

Alongside debates over decision making, the racial distribution of program participants became a proxy issue for conservatives to push back against WICS and, indeed, racial liberals’ whole strategy of targeted compensatory programs for people of color. As integrationist school busing dramas unfolded nationwide, OEO programs increasingly had to justify themselves as accessible to participants of all racial backgrounds—including poor white Americans. For example, the Atlanta Residential Manpower Center, a Job Corp. location WICS supported through recruitment, delayed its opening until “the student strength was at least 30% white.”Footnote ⁶² This composition proved challenging, however, because, as prominent NCNW councilwoman Dorothy Heights recalled, WICS struggled to recruit poor white girls who had “the same kind of drive that the black girls had.” WICS saw this lack of white participation as “more than a recruiting problem,” acknowledging that “WICS would have to learn how to deal with the deep-seated attitudes of the poor whites” and other marginalized groups who doubted that conventional employment would pay off. WICS leaders told volunteers, “outreach to the rural girl—to the Indian girl, to the Spanish-speaking girl, and to the girl in the migrant camp.” But they often struggled to retain participants from these groups.Footnote ⁶³ While Lyndon B. Johnson had conceived of the War on Poverty as a means of not just “opening the gates of opportunity” for Black Americans but offering them the “the ability to walk through those gates,” the conservative ascendence of the 1970s rejected the race-conscious opening (and, as they saw it, closing to others) of these gates. And, increasingly, conservatives used the issue of racial distribution in federally funded welfare programs as a political wedge meant to slam them shut entirely.

But questions of program effectiveness, community control, and racial balance paled in comparison to the greatest threat to these programs—financial starvation. In September 1969, OEO programs across the country shuttered their doors for 2 weeks due to lack of funding. As This is WICS recalled in 1970, “there were moratoria on recruitment, the closing of centers, and the threat to abolish the Job Corps.”Footnote ⁶⁴ While Congress ultimately funded the OEO for two more years, the so-called Greene Amendment not only moved control of Job Corp program operations from local to state agencies (which often put them below other priorities) but also shifted the participant composition requirements as part of a larger strategy to center the (white) “silent majority” in program operations.Footnote ⁶⁵ As the Milwaukee Star reported in October 1969, when the city contracted with local private agencies like WICS, “a very high percentage of Blacks were recruited and given a real opportunity to train in the fields they felt interested them. But now, with the state doing the recruitment and screening, past performance indicates Blacks will be the last recruited, and most definitely the last to be placed in the training program of interest for them.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Threats to the OEO were part of a larger “welfare crisis” in this period. As more poor women of color brought challenges to court and claimed the public benefits to which they were legally entitled, growing welfare rolls set off alarm bells for conservatives who decried the bloat of government spending and welfare “dependency.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As early as 1967, Congress amended the Social Security Act to require, for the first time, that women on welfare seek employment to claim benefits through a program called the Work Incentives Program (WIN). NCJW had long understood AFDC as well as WICS programs as a way of making middle-class values attainable to single-mother families, but it emphatically rejected mandatory work requirements. As Mary Keyserling explained to Congress in 1970, “A mandatory work requirement is not necessary. Most women welfare recipients would take employment voluntarily rather than stay at home, were jobs available.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Eileen Gallagher, a Minneapolis mother who received ADFC benefits, echoed Keyserling, explaining, “What we want the most is to get off AFDC. But if you work, your salary is deducted from the grant. And there’s no money left over to pay a baby-sitter!”Footnote ⁶⁹ WIN ushered in a new era of conservative welfare reform that the NCJW saw as out of touch with the original objectives of AFDC. While the NCJW’s own model was based on a retreating goal of making the male middle-class bread winner model available to all, WIN offered a new, punitive vision for how to address the fading of that ideal.

With the inauguration of Richard Nixon as president in January 1969, the OEO’s fate was all but sealed. As journalist John Herbers surmised in the pages of The Council Woman, “It is certain that he will seek a reduction in federal controls, and the institution of block grants to states and communities in place of categorical grants.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, it seemed that Nixon sought to reshuffle the broader welfare system. In response, WICS women rallied to save their program. Soliciting more volunteers, the Milwaukee bulletin explained, “It is necessary for us to volunteer [in WICS] because the center does not have the necessary funds.” Members also “urged the sending of telegrams to all Wisconsin senators and representatives in Washington protesting the closing of the centers and suggesting that they help to retain the concept of the Job Corp.”Footnote ⁷¹ WICS participants were aware of the program’s precarity. As participant Sandy Thompson explained in a letter to NCJW member Sharron Steinfeldt, “Everyone was worried that Nixon would close this Job Corps down. They closed the Job Corps center in New Jersey and sent some of the girls here. Now I hear that Nixon has signed a contract that will keep the Job Corps open.”Footnote ⁷² Ultimately, 59 Job Corps centers closed, but the advocacy of WICS women extended the program’s life, at least for a while. As This is WICS explained, “The response was phenomenal. Any government agency, having encountered such a force, would make double sure of the validity of its position before chancing another such encounter.”Footnote ⁷³

Even as WICS faced budget cuts, the first longitudinal study of Head Start revealed uneven and “fading” educational gains, which led some to say that Head Start’s administration should be taken away from the OEO. Head Start administrators seized on this opportunity to disassociate from the OEO and from CAP in particular. In 1969, Head Start relocated to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as the founding program of the new Office of Child Development.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the process, it transitioned from a program directed at targeted compensatory early childhood education to a program directed at providing daycare, as competing visions reignited long-standing tensions between programs designed for children’s education on one hand and programs designed for women’s work on the other.

With national discourse turning to a language of “urban crisis” and “welfare reform,” NCJW attempted to push back against the most conservative implications of federal welfare-to-work policy and sometimes even adopted a more radical conception of racial and economic justice. In Minneapolis, an ongoing speaker series called “A Way Out of the Welfare Mess” invited both professionals and program participants to “Tell it Like it Is.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Grappling with the implications of broader disillusionment with the Great Society and the rising tide of racial conservatism in American politics, a 1969 Council Woman article entitled “White Volunteers and the Black Revolution” asked three Black women leaders, “Is there still a place for the white volunteer who wants to aid in the sharpening struggle for equal rights?” For the NCJW and its partners, “The answer is still ‘yes’ … but the place is different now.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, as the NCJW pulled back from earlier forms of engagement, its withdrawal from racial liberalism fed new beliefs about poor women’s responsibility for their own welfare and that of their children, too. Going forward, the NCJW would shift the focus of its family policy efforts away from targeted programs for the poor toward universal day care programs for all working women regardless of their race or social class.

IV. “Speak for the Middle”: Universalism as Panacea

The Fall 1968 edition of The Council Woman opened with a letter from National President Josephine Weiner to her fellow NCJW members, running off a litany of “facts of national life that troubled them.” As the Great Society weathered attacks from both the Left and the Right, Weiner urged the women “to see gray where there is no black or white, to refrain from throwing the proverbial baby out with the cloudy bathwater, to espouse the moderate, constructive point of view.” Increasingly, the NCJW came to believe that protecting its agenda meant expanding it to a broader coalition of women and families. But in setting out to “speak for the middle,” the NCJW walked a politically precarious tightrope.Footnote ⁷⁷

To mark the Council’s 75th anniversary, Weiner announced a three-pronged “new national plan.” In addition to a renewed commitment to direct service, Weiner revealed a new policy agenda to help “build an indivisible society.” At the center of this agenda was a call for universal access to children’s daycare services. As she explained, “we hope to establish, with national sponsorship and funding, new and different kinds of pilot daycare projects designed to test new concepts in daycare.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Integration—not just racial integration but also integration for children with disabilities and from varying family income brackets—was the watchword of the day. By developing universally accessible high-quality daycare—in partnership with both government and the private sector—NCJW sought to expand the welfare state even in the face of Nixonian retrenchment. The targeted model of Head Start was out; a universal model of daycare for all families was in.

NCJW believed that expanding access to childcare was imperative, as women of all backgrounds entered the workforce at unprecedented rates and feminism was becoming an increasingly important political orientation. As early as 1968, the organization’s Blueprint for Effective Action: Daycare had described “a tremendous increase in the number of working mothers in the U.S. within the last two decades—somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million women.” And working mothers needed childcare. Universal daycare offered a way to welcome feminists into a broader political coalition that included all women in the workforce. As the Blueprint explained, “These problems strike with greatest force the lowest income families, but manifest themselves in families of all socio-economic levels.”Footnote ⁷⁹ While the NCJW knew that financial duress exacerbated need, its members also believed that all families (including those of its own members) could benefit from better childcare options.

Starting in the late 1960s, the NCJW filled an overlooked niche in communities around the country—researching funding strategies for childcare centers. As one NCJW report explained, “The research done by volunteers into sources of federal and local funds have often enabled a center to tap money which they had no way of reaching before.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, by wading through “the technicalities of means test, categorical assistance, guaranteed income, work incentive and other concepts that sounds so dryly abstract but translate into such painful realities,” NCJW members learned how new directives could yield new entitlements for childcare—entitlements that could be accessed by all women.Footnote ⁸¹ WIN, for example, authorized the federal government to pay states up to 75% of the cost for current or “potential” AFDC recipients to enroll their children in daycare under its Title IV-A. NCJW saw this provision as a potential opportunity for more working women.Footnote ⁸²As Emilia Fairchild, president of the St. Paul AFDC League explained, “a lot of mothers want to go on WIN, but can’t find daycare and worry about their children.”Footnote ⁸³

This quest for broader access raised two key questions. The first was whether federally funded early childhood programs should be available only to poor mothers or, instead, to all mothers. If the latter, then the second was whether federally funded early childhood programs should focus on the comprehensive needs of children and their families (along the lines of costly programs like Head Start) or, instead, should be limited simply to custodial supervision for children while mothers worked (along the lines of local daycare centers). In short, who was entitled to government-sponsored childcare and for what purposes? By the early 1970s, the NCJW had shifted away from its previous emphasis on targeted categorical and compensatory family supports towards universal daycare.

Of course, the fact that young family policy cut across the domains of education policy, labor policy, welfare policy, and daycare policy made it administratively unwieldy. As early as 1968, the Federal Interagency Day Care Regulations had taken steps to outline a minimum level of care to regulate all federally funded programs. It introduced strict ratios of children to adults but counted volunteers alongside teachers in these ratios, which made programs less expensive and also less education oriented. Similarly, according to the regulations, daycare facilities had to be only “adequate.” This compromise yielded a model known as “developmental” childcare, a concept half-way between comprehensive and custodial care with support for limited early-childhood learning opportunities but not broader social services.Footnote ⁸⁴

The NCJW accepted these compromises even as it continued to resist the broader retrenchments that accompanied Nixonian reform. For example, the NCJW was wary of Nixon’s “New Federalist” funding formula, known as “revenue sharing,” which devolved federal resources to states and deregulated program oversight. The NCJW explained, “The plan to provide financial assistance to the States, by giving each State a proportion of federal income tax receipts, without strings attached, is known as revenue sharing. This method of assistance to the States has been under discussion for several years, but has been given impetus; now by strong support from President Nixon as part of his philosophy of a New Federalism.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The question: Would states fulfill the NCJW’s hopes for universal access to childcare, particularly if the NCJW itself partnered in this effort?

As funds for Head Start dwindled, NCJW sections sought to expand access to high-quality child care for parents from all income levels. Many chapters partnered with the OEO and local organizations such as hospitals to provide on-site care for employees. For example, in Washington, DC, NCJW sponsorship of a childcare center at the Georgetown University Hospital showed “the advantages to the child, the parent, and the community of providing year-round quality care at the site of the parent’s employment.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Meanwhile, in Camden County, New Jersey, a local NCJW chapter noted that “no subsidized day care, Head Start or otherwise, had previously existed. For lack of funds to undertake a more comprehensive program, a center [focused on custodial care] was opened in the McGuire Gardens Public Housing Project providing childcare two mornings a week.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The Minneapolis Section of the NCJW helped establish the North Star Daycare Center in 1970. As “the first center in Hennepin County to match the federal Title IV-A funds [designated for academic enrichment in schools],” North Star offered full-day childcare services to 24 young children “from Indian, white, black and Korean families,” all of whom were “actual or potential ADFC recipients.”Footnote ⁸⁸ As with former projects, the NCJW provided 25% of the seed money as a “local match” for the Hennepin County Welfare Department. In keeping with the principles of developmental care for the children of working mothers, a neighborhood group called the Northside Settlement Services supported research and evaluation, while the Greater Minneapolis Daycare Association (GMDCA) provided technical support, and in a nod to prior forms of comprehensive care, the federal Model Cities program supported preventative medical services for the children.Footnote ⁸⁹

Despite North Star’s promise of expanded access to childcare, many of the same tensions about parent partnerships that had plagued Head Start resurfaced, as did concerns about the adequacy of financial support for the program. The NCJW’s seed funds leveraged state and federal aid, but these resources were hardly sufficient to meet some observers’ aspirations of comprehensive care for the children of all working mothers. Moreover, these resources were heavily monitored. As the North Star board recounted, the GMDCA was “impressed with our program and personnel, but they are concerned over our budgetary problems, and emphasized the necessity of our being super conscientious over it.” The NCJW representative Ruth Brin defended North Star and implicated the county, explaining that, “Hennepin County has promised to help us set up the books and has not done so.” Yet, even while Brin understood the politics behind the funding, she too fell into some of the same patterns of racism that undergirded national discussions of financial responsibility in community programming. Reflecting on her previous Head Start engagement she explained, “I was chairman of Head Start for OEO,” she explained. “I was very distressed with how they were managing it… . And a lot of Blacks were really in control of that group, and they were using their money, the money, the way they thought to use it… . This became a scandal all over the country.”Footnote ⁹⁰ While NCJW savvily leveraged its financial commitment, it failed to truly grasp (let alone challenge) the racialized politics that drove the strict oversight.

Furthermore, while Title IV-A meant that eligible parents were not required to pay, board members preemptively considered a sliding income scale for program participation, before “the county forces one on us.” While one parent was willing to contribute a dollar a week “to stay at North Star or to be pooled to form a new [daycare center],” another felt “her budget [was] so strained she’d hardly have enough left over.”Footnote ⁹¹ North Star sought to “serve the needs of the community more completely,” and by 1972 it had expanded to include over 100 children, but this number obviously fell short of high-quality childcare for all.Footnote ⁹²

The NCJW continued to focus on children and families in need, but it also imagined the extension of services to a broader constituency. Council members across the country joined the “Community Coordinated Child Care (4-C)” program, also funded by Title IV-A, and by 1970 twenty-six NCJW sections served on 4-C Committees that brought together parent delegates and representatives from city, county, and state welfare agencies to share resources and advocate for daycare needs. That year, the St. Paul section, along with the Community Health and Welfare Planning Council of the United Fund, sponsored a convocation to assess daycare needs in the city. After a year-long study, the section proudly announced the Greater Saint Paul Council for Coordinated Childcare, to which the NCJW contributed part of the 25% of local funds that were matched by a 75% federal grant.Footnote ⁹³

The 4-Cs had a mandate to include diverse stakeholders, placing a special emphasis on “parent consumers.” In St. Paul, the election for the local Policy Board in 1972 included parent candidates from across the city. Some, like Eloise Adams and Lynda Smith, had previously served on community boards like the Model Cities or Head Start parent councils. Others, like Beverly Propes and Sandy Swanson, had medical experience and “hoped to voice some input regarding the need for medical screening and evaluation.” Still others, like Catherine Harris and Hattie Jet, were getting involved in social welfare and local politics for the first time. The NCJW was formally represented by Joanie Bream and Grace Gumnit, and other prominent NCJW members represented other community organizations. Rhoda Redleaf represented the Minnesota Association for the Education of Youth (MAEYC), and Emily Seesel represented the Hallie Q. Brown Day Center.Footnote ⁹⁴

V. “The Magnitude of Unmet Needs”: Childcare on the Federal Radar

It was in this context that the OEO contracted with the NCJW to design the first national study of US childcare. The NCJW, in turn, asked Mary Keyserling to lead this project, which she did.Footnote ⁹⁵ The scale of the project was unprecedented. During the summer of 1970, NCJW representatives from 77 sections across the country went door to door investigating the state of childcare provisions in their communities. “They visited daycare homes—licensed and unlicensed… . They talked with mothers who had not been employed to discuss their interest in daycare services and whether difficulties in obtaining them were barriers to work. They met with a wide range of leaders in their localities [who were] knowledgeable about daycare services, and they gathered views as to the magnitude of unmet needs and the ways to cope with them.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Through both quantitative and qualitative research, they documented a high level of need as well as the awful state of privately operated centers, nonprofit centers (including Head Start), and “day care homes.” The result was a 248-page document, Windows on Daycare: A Report of the Members of the National Council of Jewish Women on Daycare Needs and Services in their Communities.

Windows on Day Care offered eleven recommendations. Above all, it declared, “Comprehensive developmental child day care services should be available to all families who wish their children to benefit from them.”Footnote ⁹⁷ While the Council continued to advocate for “fees scaled to income,” it predicted that childcare for all would be politically appealing, even if it was expensive. It recommended federal appropriations of at least $2 billion for fiscal year 1973 and each year that followed, “well into the 1970s.”Footnote ⁹⁸ These funds, the NCJW believed, should be available to both public and private programs as well as to family-run childcare homes. The NCJW advocated for streamlined delivery, emphatically calling for the decoupling of education and childcare from “welfare” services. It explained, “Daycare should not be regarded as a ‘welfare’ service, any more than public education. Daycare is a service needed and wanted by families at every income level.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The NCJW and its partners put childcare at the center of modern American social welfare policy reform. Walter Mondale, the US senator and childcare champion from Minnesota, took up this mantle in Congress and established a Subcommittee on Children and Youth within the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. By 1972, what began as five distinct proposals had coalesced into three viewpoints.

The first, represented by the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA or S.1512), took a universalist approach to childcare centered around local control. It suggested that daycare would be offered on a sliding-cost scale so that a family of four making under $4,320 a year would qualify for free childcare. The plan represented a compromise between longtime education champions like Senator Mondale, who believed communities of any size should be able to control federal funds, and Congressman John Brademas, who believed that radical localization of federal aid would be a “a logistical nightmare.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the end, the CCDA allowed communities with populations as small as 5,000 to apply for funds. Of course, such an expansive vision would be expensive—$2.5 billion a year—but the NCJW wholeheartedly endorsed it. As Keyserling testified to the Subcommittee on Children and Youth in May 1971, “It recognizes comprehensive child development programs as a matter of right of all children and [stresses] that these programs must include health, social, cognitive and other services.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

A second viewpoint was represented by the Nixon administration through its Family Assistance Plan (FAP or HR 1). In contrast to Mondale’s child-centered CCDA, FAP sought to move women off welfare and into the workforce. The NCJW supported FAP’s idea of a guaranteed family income but felt Nixon’s plan “left much to be desired.” Most notably, the NCJW saw FAP’s work requirements as a “political play.”Footnote ¹⁰² Keyserling, noting that FAP was half as costly as CCDA, testified to the Senate Committee on Finance in September 1970, “Unless much more far-reaching legislation is enacted to more adequately provide facilities, mandatory registration and training of a large number of AFDC mothers who head their households and who have young school age children would be an exercise in futility.” She added, “This has been conclusively proved by experience under the WIN program.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, for women’s work requirements to become a reality, the federal government would have to expand the nation’s daycare infrastructure, a step the NCJW favored even as it rejected the coercive nature of mandatory welfare to work.

Meanwhile, a third viewpoint emerged from Congressmembers Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, whose cosponsored bill, HR 8402, made a much more ambitious pitch for universal childcare rooted in the rights-based framework of Second Wave Feminism. Their proposal for “twenty-four hour childcare” was far more costly than any other bill being considered and included “an amendment prohibiting sex discrimination in the administration of the program.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, whereas CCDA made federal funds available to municipalities of 5,000 residents and FAP made funds available to municipalities of 500,000 residents (to achieve economies of scale and, simultaneously, to marginalize the members of the CAPs that had exercised greater power over smaller communities), the Chisholm-Abzug plan allowed prime sponsorship for cities of any size.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The NCJW found something to support in each of these proposals, but its members were divided. Some continued to appeal for more targeted programs, whereas many, particularly those who identified with a more feminist orientation, supported a more universalist approach.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Like Keyserling, the NCJW had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1960s, but its approach to women’s issues had become more explicitly feminist over time.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Many of its suburban members had personal experiences with childcare needs and therefore concerned themselves with the prospect of achieving material gains for themselves as much as for others—even though their primary interest in daycare had emerged from their involvement with Head Start and WICS. When the famed feminist Gloria Steinem spoke to the Chicago NCJW chapter in 1971, the announcement of her speech noted the childcare issue. “To really ‘liberate’ those attending (at least during the session),” it stated, “babysitter services will be available.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Ultimately, after extensive negotiations, the CCDA gained bipartisan support. The NCJW was confident that childcare reform was around the corner. But when the bill’s cobbled-together coalition successfully got the legislation in front of Nixon as an amendment to Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act, the same political fractures that had plagued childcare reform on the local and state level reemerged.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Nixon took aim at the idea that federally funded childcare would enable—or even incentivize—(middle- and upper-class) women to work outside the home. “For more than two years this administration has been working for the enactment of welfare reform … to bring the family together,” he said with implicit reference to male breadwinner models of the household economy. “This child development program appears to move in precisely the opposite direction.” He criticized not only the CCDA’s “family weakening” incentives but also its expansion of welfare entitlements for the poor. He vetoed the CCDA on December 10, 1971, but signed the Revenue Act the very next day to provide tax breaks for middle-class families who relied on proprietary childcare centers. This legislation not only provided middle-class earners new access to a Nixonian “hidden” welfare state but also, in keeping with conservatives’ support for private business enterprise, supported the burgeoning propriety market in for-profit childcare services.

The NCJW was crestfallen. According to one report, in 1972, “A mood of almost helpless frustration and fierce indignation over President Nixon’s recent veto of daycare legislation pervaded the executive board meeting of the NCJW.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ But the Nixon administration was not done yet. After his veto, he starved OEO financially through “the (legislative) War on Poverty” until, finally, it was dismantled entirely. WICS barely survived. From its peak of 40,000 participants in 1967, enrollment dropped to 21,000 by 1974. The Jobs Corps, too, was under threat. As national NCJW President Josephine Weiner explained, “The Job Corps, [saved] from termination by [the] devotion and testimony of determined supporters, was assigned to the Department of Labor[,] which shifted much of its administration to regional offices.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Head Start, in many ways the prime example of young family policy under the Great Society, sat on similarly shaky ground.Footnote ¹¹²

NCJW sections across the country continued to lobby for childcare, but with hopes for federal support all but dead, the organization was forced to focus on state- and local-level reform.Footnote ¹¹³ The NCJW continued to support individual centers in local communities, but this piecemeal arrangement was disappointing for the centers, for the NCJW, and for parents. For example, the Minneapolis chapter strained under the financial pressure of supporting North Star. Writing to the Hennepin County Welfare Commissioner in 1973, NCJW representatives focused once again on the specific needs of poor families, pleading, “We are urging you to consider the future of daycare programs for children on AFDC and children of the working poor … it is urgent to make a plan of the future of these programs.” They continued, “Our major purpose was, and still is, to contribute to the development of the whole child, to help him in every way towards physical, intellectual, psychological, and social health. This involves not only the child himself but his family as well.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although the NCJW continued its work to support families, the window on federally funded daycare had largely closed.

The NCJW’s targeted compensatory agenda for poor women and children during the 1960s represented a novel approach to ameliorating poverty through social policy. However, NCJW’s programmatic agenda—like that of the federal government—was rooted in a narrow view of middle-class values. Thus, poor people exposed the fundamental fissures in its approach when they demanded greater control over federally funded programs. As conservative critics simultaneously raised questions about the overall effectiveness of War on Poverty and threatened programs like Head Start and WICS, the members of the NCJW shifted their focus away from targeted models of poverty relief for young families toward a universal vision of childcare for all. Ultimately, NCJW’s political gamble was futile, as President Nixon vetoed this idea to appease conservatives who opposed more robust public-sector service provision (as well as white middle-class women’s labor-force participation). Nixon’s veto entrenched a two-track system of childcare: scattershot funding for poor families on one hand and subsidized access to proprietary centers for middle-class families on the other. Never before or since has the United States come close to realizing a broader vision of federally funded universal childcare.