Demanding Child Care: Women’s Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 by Natalie M. Fousekis (review)

Natalie M. Fousekis’s chronicle of working mothers’ and preschool educators’ struggles to maintain state-funded child care in California between World War II and 1971 is in some ways a small story. On the one hand, despite the best efforts of activists, there was never enough child care to meet working mothers’ needs, and the program never spread much beyond California. On the other hand, California’s activist mothers managed to extend wartime federal funds for child care into state and federal funding for day care over the next thirty years, creating a grassroots political movement that, as Fousekis points out, lasted as long as the civil rights movement (172). The success activists had in organizing and maintaining coalitions and in achieving policy goals, Fousekis argues, puts California’s fight for state-funded child care at the center of historical debates about women’s grassroots activism as well as policy negotiations over the gendered rights of citizenship in the post–World War II era.

Federally funded child care centers first appeared in California as a result of the Lanham Act, which was passed in 1941 as a federal wartime measure. It aimed to solve the labor crisis surrounding wartime industrial production by offering child care to women war workers, and it marked the first time any level of government had offered child care to women who were not on public assistance. As a result, child care briefly became a benefit of citizenship accorded to workers, like social security or the minimum wage. This change was especially radical, since most other federal programs passed during the New Deal—especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or welfare—assumed that women were caregivers, dependent on a male breadwinner for support. As Fousekis argues, child care activists remained committed to state-sponsored child care that was not tied to welfare programs, because it “enabled them to support their children through employment rather than depending on the state . . . [and offered them] benefits of American citizenship, previously reserved for men” (80). As California’s war industries expanded, the state quickly became the epicenter of this shift in ideas about gendered citizenship. By May 1945, California’s day care centers cared for more than twenty-five thousand children, and the state hosted three times more centers than any other state (37).

Lanham funding, which federal politicians had always viewed as a wartime measure, finally ran out in 1946. Federally funded child care centers had, however, existed long enough to draw the interest of myriad grassroots organizations, including labor unions, middle-class women’s organizations, the Communist Party, early childhood educators, and, most important in Fousekis’s estimation, working mothers who depended on the centers. After the war, this diverse group came together to lobby for state funds to replace lost Lanham funding. The group wanted the centers to be available to working mothers regardless of financial need and to offer their children an educational environment instead of just custodial care. In response, California extended state funding for the Lanham centers for one more year, but the centers’ supporters had to make a critical compromise. In exchange for keeping the centers open and under the jurisdiction of the state’s Department of Education, California legislators instituted a means test. Although California now maintained more than one-third of the nations’ remaining Lanham child care centers, many working mothers who no longer qualified for state aid could not afford to use them.

This extension of funding was temporary, and the new child care coalition went back to the state legislature multiple times to keep the centers open. In the meantime, California’s child care centers became important political organizing sites. Experienced activists communicated political tactics to mothers who were new to the centers. Mothers who had worked all day stayed late at their children’s child care centers to talk politics and...