Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Maurine Jorgensen to Earl Warren, Jan. 13, 1947, Governor’s Files, Child Care, 1947, Earl Warren Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento. 2. I am drawing on what Nancy Fraser terms the “politics of need interpretation.” The battle for child care in California illustrates how ordinary women with children in the state’s child care centers took their own definitions of their day care needs and directly challenged the interpretations of women’s needs held by policymakers. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 144–60; Fraser, “Struggle over Needs,” 199–225. 3. The term underclass emerged during the early 1960s and usually referred to those who could not sustain work and perpetually lived in poverty. Most used the term to describe the undeserving poor, who were blamed for their poverty and seen as not worthy of government assistance. Katz, “The Urban ‘Underclass’ as a Metaphor for Social Transformation,” 3–24; Katz, The Undeserving Poor. 4. All the interviews conducted for this study, and Mary Young’s Papers, can be found in the collections at the Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton. 5. In1965theCPACCbecametheCaliforniaParents’AssociationforChildren’sCenters. 6. The working poor avoided (for the most part) the negative connotations that came along with being in the underclass. Consequently, the state deemed social services for the working poor, such as child care, as deserving while programs like ADC as undeserving . On a woman’s wage as a “symbol of family degradation,” see Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage, 3. 7. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 1. In her discussion of women’s role in Atlanta’s massive voting rights campaign in 1946, Kathryn Nasstrom makes a similar point about only evaluating an event’s success by its result. With the election of black city officials in Atlanta in the early 1950s, the campaign’s success became measured in terms of the political leadership of black men, thus erasing from memory the vibrant and crucial role of women in the campaign. Nasstrom’s research restores women’s central role. Nasstrom, “Down to Now,” 113–44. 8. Virginia Rose, interview with author, May 28, 1998, Oakland, Calif. On African American women in Philadelphia looking to local public institutions to improve the lives and future of their families, see Levenstein, A Movement without Marches. 9. For other examples of women using conservative arguments to achieve progressive ends, see Hall, Revolt against Chivalry; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace; and White, Too Heavy a Load. 10. These women were practicing what Holloway Sparks has termed dissident citizenship . This type of activism and direct challenge to the dominant publics, Sparks maintains , is essential to the democratic process. Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women,” 75; Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Lessons on Democracy and Political Courage.” 11. These educators were most likely drawn to California for its large number of nursery schools. By 1930, close to a third of the nation’s nursery schools were in California. In addition, the state had laboratory nursery schools at some of its major colleges and universities: the University of California at Los Angeles, Mills College, and the University of California at Berkeley. Christianson, Rogers, and Ludlum, The Nursery School, 264–68; Stewart, “Preschools and Politics,” 47–55. 12. Reese, “Maternalism and Political Mobilization,” 566–89. 13. For the war’s impact on California, see Johnson, The Second Gold Rush; Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War; Lotchin, Fortress California; Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were; Nash, The American West Transformed; Starr, Embattled Dreams; and Verge, Paradise Transformed. 14. May, Homeward Bound, xviii–xx ; Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 23–41. 15. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965–1969, 704. As more recent scholars demonstrate, many on welfare worked for pay because most states provided welfare recipients much less assistance than they needed to survive . See, for example, Levenstein, A Movement without Marches, and Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace. 16. Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace, 4. 17. For connections between feminists on the left and the postwar women’s movement, see Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, and Weigand, Red Feminism. 18. Acklesberg, “Communities, Resistance, and Women’s Activism”; Orleck, “‘If It Wasn’t for You I’d Have Shoes for My Children.’” 19. Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy; Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action.” For another study of motherhood as the basis of political activism, see Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor, eds., The...