Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (review)

Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy. By Sonya Michel (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999) 410 pp. $35.00

There has been a great deal of recent literature about mothers' pensions, maternalist reformers, the Children's Bureau, race and social welfare, and gender and public policy. ¹ Michel synthesizes much of this wide-ranging scholarship and distills it into a tightly argued treatment of child-care policy in the twentieth-century United States. Like much work on American social welfare policy, this book explicitly asks why the United States has not adopted the same social policies as other "Western" "democratic" nations. That is, in this instance, why has the United States never instituted publicly funded child care as a fundamental right of all citizens much like public education?

Michel answers this question by surveying the history of child-care policy from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The story is almost uniformly bleak. Americans have traditionally tarnished child care with the stigma of "poor relief"; condemned working mothers, as well as the policies that facilitate maternal employment; underfunded whatever public programs existed and then publicized the poor quality of public programs; and distinguished between "child care" and educationally oriented "nursery schools," the former being "good enough" for the poor and the latter being desired by the middle class. Although families of all classes and races utilize child care in some form, these child-care "consumers" never organize politically to demand universal child care, partly because of racial, class, and ethnic divisions that prevent them from perceiving common interests and needs.

Unlike many historians content merely to critique past social policy without offering an alternative solution to social problems, Michel offers a general policy recommendation. Only high quality, universal child care, funded by governments at all levels, can "neutralize the discriminatory effect of motherhood on women, enabling them to pursue education and training and enter the labor force on a (relatively) equal footing with men" (1).

In a brief epilogue, Michel summarizes the child-care policies of several other countries, including Sweden, France, and Japan. Drawing on literature from sociology, which categorizes welfare states into several types (liberal, conservative corporate, and social democratic), the author places the United States into a comparative framework. This comparative perspective, one of the most fascinating sections of the book, is also frustrating. Each country receives only perfunctory coverage that is often insufficient to explain its evolving social policy.

Elna C. Green
Florida State University

Note

1. See, for example, Katherine G. Aiken, Harnessing the Power of Motherhood: The National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1883-1925 (Knoxville, 1998); Joanne Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929 (Chicago, 1997); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana, 1994); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

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