Demanding Child Care

At the end of World War II, the federal government announced plans to terminate its public child care services that had been established during the war for working mothers. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. Deftly exploring the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care as well as the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among key parties such as feminists, Communists, labor activists, working-class mothers, and early childhood educators, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.