In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

297 The other day I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen in a long time, a veteran feminist , and within minutes we were talking about child care problems. Her horror story reminded me, as if I needed reminding, of how precarious, really, are our arrangements, so crucial to a household’s ecology, so vulnerable to changes—in the caretaker’s situation, the parents’, the child’s—that we can never quite relax even when things are going well. The ironies were not lost on us: as feminist activists we, along with the thousands of other young, childless women who dominated the movement, had of course understood that sexual equality required a new system of child rearing, but the issue remained abstract, unconnected with our most urgent needs; as mothers in the political vacuum of the ’80s, along with millions of other working parents, we pursue our individual solutions as best we can. The political has devolved into the personal, with a vengeance. The influx of mothers into the work force has produced a child care crisis with radical implications—for the family, work, the condition of women. Yet except for the far right, virtually no one is discussing it on that level. For purposes of media agonizing, the problem has been defined in narrowly pragmatic, thoroughly sexist terms: how to get mothers enough help so they can keep doing their double duty, inside and outside the home. (This approach has recently nosed out the even more parochial idea that we need day care to get poor women off welfare.) If there is any issue that can revitalize contemporary feminism, this is surely it. But it’s not simply a question of getting out there and organizing . We have to have a vision, to figure out what we really want. What is good child care, anyway? And what needs to change for us to have it? Before I had a child, I had lots of opinions on the subject. Two years afterward , some of them have stuck with me: I’m still convinced that staying home The Diaper Manifesto We Need a Child-Rearing Movement 298 THE EIGHTIES full-time with a healthy, rambunctious kid would turn me into squirrel food, that child care should be as much men’s job as women’s, that communal child rearing in some form holds out the most hope of resolving the collision between adults’ and children’s needs, as well as the emotional cannibalism of the nuclear family. But for the most part, figuring out what kind of care best meets my daughter’s needs has been—continues to be—a process of disentangling prejudice from experience. In the beginning I hoped to avoid paid child care altogether. At best, I felt, it had to be inferior since it was done for money, not love. And in this society child care was a devalued occupation: without any serious public subsidy no one could afford to pay child care workers what they deserved, and the relations between workers, parents, and children were bound to be poisoned by class and racial exploitation. Since Stanley (my lover, Nona’s father) had committed himself to equal sharing and we were both in the privileged position of having jobs with flexible hours, I didn’t see why we couldn’t do it all ourselves. Stanley, who had had children before, insisted that flexible hours or no, if we were going to do our jobs we would need help. Just like a man, I thought, or words to that effect. Sometime during three months of total immersion (for the first two we were both home full-time) I grudgingly admitted he was right, and as I prepared to go back to work we started looking for part-time care. I still had fantasies of avoiding the class implications of being an employer. My idea was to find a student or artist or housewife who needed a part-time job, liked children, and hated office work—someone with educated-middle-class psychologically oriented attitudes toward child rearing and, equally important, someone who was not taking a child care job simply because she (probably, though of course I wouldn’t rule out he) hadn’t much choice. We interviewed one such person who asked for more money than we could afford and hired another who quit after a couple of weeks to take a clerical job. I could hear Portnoy’s analyst saying, “Now ve are...

Share