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

5 “We Do Not Consider Ourselves Welfare Cases” Education‑based Child Care and Low-income Working Families, 1958–65 The passage of the Public Welfare Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1962 marked the first time since World War II that Congress had appropriated funds for child care services. These amendments were the first of many public preschool measures to be enacted in the 1960s. The goals of these new policies were twofold. First, lawmakers hoped to halt the rising cost of public assistance programs, particularly Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), which was later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). They saw funding child care as a way to encourage women welfare recipients to become self‑supporting. Second, policymakers hoped that providing preschool education to poor children would furnish them with the skills to break the “cycle of poverty.” Advocates across the country saw these funds as an important first step in placing child care to the national agenda. California’s liberal legislators seized this opportunity to extend preschool to the state’s poorest families. Laudable as these goals were, federal funding for public preschool education had unintended consequences. Although the new federal laws did not explicitly connect child care to welfare, they required that the funds be administered through state departments of public welfare rather than education departments. Mothers feared that, whether or not they were welfare recipients, they would have to prove eligibility to caseworkers, exposing them to invasions of privacy and moral judgments. Eventually, the new laws irreversibly linked the state’s child care centers with its welfare programs, which was precisely what California ’s child care advocates had worked for years to prevent. Proponents feared that this association would change both the public perception and the practices of the state’s centers and doom their hopes for a universal , education‑based program. Nursery educators saw the introduction of federal funds as a threat to the high educational standards they had developed and to their control over the education of preschool children. Mothers reacted equally strongly to these shifts. The stigma attached to welfare intensified after the war, and by the early 1960s single mothers who sought public assistance found themselves vulnerable to the charge that they had “failed” both as wives and mothers and as workers and citizens. Working women with access to California ’s 324 publicly funded centers escaped such condemnation. They could live outside the boundaries of prescribed gender roles without being stigmatized as undeserving or dependent on the state. The centers enabled women to support their families. Equally important, the program gave them greater freedom to leave abusive or neglectful husbands and divorce those who had abandoned them and their children. Because the centers were administered by the Department of Education, the women were spared the intrusive, sometimes insulting, scrutiny of welfare department caseworkers. They did not have to justify their status as independent wage‑earners and single mother status or fear the state’s moral judgments on their life choices. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s they fought fiercely to maintain those opportunities. The re‑entry of the federal government into child care services pitted mothers and educators against some of their erstwhile allies, liberal state legislators. Lawmakers sought new federal funds regardless of their welfare stipulations, and advocates worked to keep child care aligned with public education. The campaigns engaged negative views of working women, degrading stereotypes of single mothers, and hostile images of welfare recipients. The legislative battles and resulting policy changes transformed the state’s child care program, altering the nature and meaning of child care and reducing the political power of the child care coalition. Persevering as Single Mothers During the two decades after the establishments of California’s child care centers, women’s place in American society changed dramatically. By 1961 U.S. Department of Labor statistics revealed that 37 percent of all women between fifteen and sixty-five had joined the labor force, and the proportion of employed women who were mothers with children at home had increased from 11 to 38 percent between 1940 and 1960.1 Rising divorce rates and increases in births to unmarried women meant that more and more working women were single mothers.2 The high cost of private child care and the dearth of publicly funded child care services forced many of the nation’s single‑parent families to turn to public 122 . war on poverty and the age of protest [3.19.31.73] Project...

Share