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6 A Different Kind of Welfare State California’s Child Care Coalition in the Age of Protest, 1966–71 In the fall of 1970, Lynne Monti and Willie Mae Addison composed a letter rallying the mothers in the California Parents’ Association for Children’s Centers (CPACC) to action. “This has been a bad legislative year for Children’s Centers in Sacramento,” wrote the two activist mothers. Association members needed to do more than send in dues; they needed to motivate other parents in their centers to rejoin the fight for child care.1 The letter was occasioned by an impending major defeat for the child care coalition: the passage of a bill that moved the centers into the Department of Compensatory Education and gave enrollment priority to former, current, and potential welfare recipients. Monti and Addison were both divorced, single mothers. Monti was white, and Addison was black. Both had spent short stints on welfare before taking the helm of CPACC. Both worked for community agencies created with War on Poverty funds and had become involved in a political movement that reached beyond child care, Monti in the women’s movement and Addison in the welfare rights movement. Both saw child care as central to poor women’s quest for autonomy, dignity, and equality. To take advantage of new poverty‑related federal child care funds, California legislators proposed legal and administrative changes to the children’s centers. The coalition vociferously fought the shift to federal funding in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whether as a result of well‑intentioned but underfunded War on Poverty programs, or of politicians wanting to reduce the welfare rolls, federal child care funds threatened a unique segment of the social safety net that had persisted in California into the 1960s. This alternative vision grew out of a public assistance philosophy that put women at its center and assumed that the key to keeping women and their children out of poverty was affordable, good-quality child care. Early childhood educators believed (and rightly so) that the shift to federal funds and the welfare policy priorities connected to these funds would undermine their professional status and the quality of the centers. Federal child care funds had two goals: employment for welfare recipients and serving the greatest numbers at the lowest cost. As a result, the state’s working poor feared that access to child care would be limited to welfare recipients. Most working mothers did not see themselves as fundamentally different from those on welfare (many, in fact, had been forced onto welfare for short periods of time themselves), but they desperately did not want their child care program to be viewed as a welfare service. Unfortunately, fears of a stigmatized welfare identity, whether applied to the mothers themselves or their children’s centers, made it difficult for the working poor to navigate the volatile political vortex of the late 1960s and early 1970s. TheexplosionofsocialmovementsintheperiodmeantthatmothersinCPACC were no longer the only voice of poor mothers in political debate. A generation of poor women had been galvanized by the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program (CAP), which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” from poor people and drew many of the nation’s impoverished citizens into politics and activism. Others took political action because of the degrading nature of the welfare system. As a result, the nation’s poorest women began speaking for themselves and forming welfare rights organizations. They pressed for increased publicassistancewhileestablishingchildcarealongsideothercommunityservices. Concurrently, middle‑ and upper-middle‑class women, many of whom had participated in other movements for social change, began to speak out for women’s rights and women’s liberation. They also made demands for child care, although they did not focus their efforts on public child care legislation. Yet even with new activism from welfare recipients and middle‑class feminists, the front‑line advocates for publicly subsidized care remained those who benefited from the state’s centers—working mothers and the teachers who cared for their children. Despite the experience and political savvy of the child care movement, the unique welfare vision that had persisted in California fell victim to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s: generational shifts in the child care coalition, new ideas about child care that emerged from the War on Poverty and the women’s movement, and increasing hostility in the state and the nation toward welfare recipients. A Leadership Transition By the mid‑1960s, early childhood educators and teachers in the child care coalition were seasoned advocates...

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