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Introduction In 1947, a recently divorced mother, whose two young children were enrolled in a publicly supported child care program that had its funding threatened , penned a letter to California Governor Earl Warren: “If there were fewer children affected by this action, I would not be writing to you. Because while this is a personal letter, it is not a personal program. There are so many of these children. Adequate care of children is the basis of things—the home, the government —even civilization itself. We cannot let the extended day care measure fall through. We must have your help.”1 Maurine Jorgensen of Sherman Oaks explained how her former husband had stopped paying child support and how the state’s child care center had enabled her to survive as a wage-earning mother. Her letter expressed a sense of solidarity with women facing similar circumstances. She understood child care not as a special circumstance but as the key to mothers’ participation in the labor force and as a social need that the government must address. I discovered Jorgensen’s letter and the letters of hundreds of mothers like her on a spring day in 1997 at the California State Archives in Sacramento. As I waited in the bustling reading room for the reference librarian to bring me the 1947 folders on child care in Governor Warren’s papers, I had no inkling of what I would find. To my surprise, the archivist delivered not just one box, but three filled with petitions signed by thousands of Californians and hundreds of personal letters written by concerned citizens, most of them mothers with children in the state’s centers. As I turned the pages, I read the dignified, determined , and forceful words of one working mother after another. Their heartfelt letters allow a rare glimpse into the lives of California’s working mothers. They reveal not only their views on child care but also their individual stories. Taken together, their words document the network of parents and educators that sus- tained a movement for publicly sponsored child care in California from World War II into the 1970s. The letters inspired me to tell the story of women’s activism for child care in California. I undertook a decade-long search to reconstruct the history of the women who conducted letter‑writing campaigns, traveled to the capital to lobby their representatives and public officials, and coordinated statewide political action. These women acted on the conviction that they had authority as mothers and advanced a vision of their rights as citizens to social programs.2 They spoke on behalf of themselves and other working-class women, gaining a new sense of collective identity that included a commitment to making their voices count in the political process. In their campaigns, working mothers had the support and guidance of a group of female educators who supervised and taught in the state’s centers. These educators spoke passionately in defense of the program, emphasizing the benefits of education-based care to the children of working mothers and to society at large. The efforts of mothers and educators to save child care in California put them at the center of state and local politics, and their struggle illuminates the nationwide contest after World War II over the contours of the social welfare state. Thanks to these women, for almost thirty years California maintained a vision of how the liberal state could serve the working poor. Unlike other states, California put education-based child care at the core of that service. Although the program these women upheld did not offer a comprehensive alternative to the federal government’s main welfare program, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), their efforts ensured the autonomy of California’s low-income mothers by caring and providing education for their children while they earned money to support their families. In the end, their efforts prevented tens of thousands of the working poor from dropping into the ranks of the underclass.3 Although the letters at the state archives constituted the paper trail left by this movement, the story told in Demanding Child Care came to life as I conducted oral histories with the mothers and educators who animated this network of publicly sponsored centers.4 Many of the movement’s main players, especially in the parents’ groups, have been forgotten by history until now—Mary Young, Winona Sample, Virginia Rose, Ellen Hall, Sharon Godske, Barbara Gach, Willie Mae Addison, Fay Williams, and Lynne Beeson...

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