For the benefit of mothers and children

This article examines how day care and welfare became tied in United States social welfare policy, as programs that aimed to serve two constituencies—mothers and children—who federal policymakers had historically treated as non-workers. One set of policymakers and child welfare reformers, led by the Children’s Bureau, envisioned a universal system of social welfare protections, including welfare and daycare, specifically designed for women and children. Another set of policymakers, notably Kennedy Administration social welfare policy experts, Wilbur Cohen and Elizabeth Wickenden, reimagined welfare as gender-neutral, offering public assistance to poor families, without naming women as particular recipients of aid. The resulting Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 and 1967, pitted working-women’s desperation for federal daycare funding against federal recognition of welfare mother’s reproductive labor. This shift in social welfare policy in the 1960s created a more punitive and racialised welfare state, forced poor mothers into a low-waged and racially and sex segregated labor market, failed to acknowledge poor mothers as workers, and forced working-class women to use their unequal wage to pay for childcare or make other arrangements

Demographic economics · Developmental psychology · Economics · Labour economics · Market economy · Welfare · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Psychology

• Finding families near and far in Canada and the United States

  Evan Roberts•The History of the Family•2025

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