During World War II, as women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men in the armed services, the federal government established public child care centers in local communities for the first time. When the government announced plans to withdraw funding and terminate its child care services at the end of the war, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these services rapidly vanished in other states.
Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor.
Deftly exploring the possibilities for partnership as well as the limitations among these key parties, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publically funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.
As ever more women work outside the home, ever more families employ childcare workers. In the absence of government regulations or social models that clearly define the childcare provider’s role, mothers worry about the quality of care their children are getting. By connecting the personal level of mothers’ daily experiences to the larger political, economic, and ideological context of childcare, Lynet Uttal describes and explains how mothers rely on their relationship with the providers to monitor and influence the quality of care their children receive. Whereas other studies have emphasized how mothers undervalue and exploit providers, this book paints a more nuanced picture, arguing that the ties between adults who share in the care of children creates neither heroes nor victims. This ethnography reveals that mothers are often reluctant to discuss their concerns with their childcare providers. Uttal shows how mothers walk a fine line between wanting to believe in the quality of care they have chosen, and the fact that they might have made a mistake. Catalyzed by their worries about the quality of care, mothers develop complex relationships with the women—and most are women—who look after their children.
When Jacquelyn S. Litt interviewed African-American and Jewish women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, she found that these women responded to experts' advice in ways uniquely shaped by their ethnicity, race, and class. For middle-class African-American and Jewish women, medicalization took place in ethnically/racially segregated networks and functioned as a collectively held strategy for social advance as much as a set of technical practices for raising healthy children. For poor, single African-American mothers, everyday networks offered limited access to medical institutions or mainstream norms. Medical discourse was largely controlled by white women and men, which left these women disempowered in medical institutions and marginal to dominant definitions of acceptable mothering.
Litt's book is enriched with many narratives from the mothers themselves. Both the women's voices and her acute sociological research bring to light how medicalized motherhood, while not the single cause of difference and inequality among the women, was a site where they were produced.Nearly three-quarters of American mothers work full- or part-time--usually out of financial necessity--and require regular child care. How do such arrangements affect children? If they are not at home with their mothers, will they be badly behaved, intellectually delayed, or emotionally stunted?
Backed by the best current research, Alison Clarke-Stewart and Virginia Allhusen bring a reassuring answer to parents' fears and offer guidance for making difficult decisions. Quality child care, they show, may be even more beneficial to children than staying at home. Although children who spend many hours in care may be unruly compared with children at home, those who attend quality programs tend to be cognitively ahead of their peers. They are just as attached to their mothers and reap the additional benefits of engaging with other children.
Ultimately, it's parents who matter most; what happens at home makes the difference in how children develop. And today's working mothers actually spend more time interacting with their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago.
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