Demanding Child Care

Natalie M. Fousekis recounts the history of a unique advocacy effort that preserved publicly funded child care in California after World War II yet made it available only to low-income people. This well-argued book is far more than a state-level case study. It includes thumbnail sketches of individual advocates, quotations from low-income women's letters to state officials, and astute analyses of state and national policies. Fousekis reveals unfamiliar dimensions of the “other women's movement” (prior to and separate from the “second wave”) that Dorothy Sue Cobble has located primarily in trade unions. Fousekis locates it as well in coalitions of parents and child-care-center employees who argued for mothers' rights to work. The main strength of the book is its engagement with a history that is still so unknown. In 1999 Sonya Michel published a single-volume history of child care, Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights, inspired in part by failed attempts to create a universal child-care system during the 1980s (in which I participated as staff of the U. S. House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families). A few scholars have followed Michel. But Fousekis's study is unique: she offers local views of nursery schools run by the Works Progress Administration (rarely noted in New Deal histories) and centers in areas of defense production under the Lanham Act during World War II (commonly thought to have been more widespread than they were). She details the virtually unknown attempts of wage-earning women to preserve their Lanham Act benefits, and she follows this history through the Cold War, the War on Poverty, and successive waves of welfare reform. Fousekis describes a robust movement on behalf of working mothers as breadwinners and parents, underlining the findings of Alice Kessler-Harris and others that women did not simply leave the labor force, willingly or unwillingly, after the war

Child care · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Welfare · Welfare state · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Race, History, and American Society

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