‘We didn’t value child care at all’
History shows Americans’ antipathy toward caring for children
Child care ranked low on the list of jobs a mother had in 18th century colonial America.
What mattered more was survival. Wives and husbands toiled on farms, or in shops, and the work of bathing and feeding young ones fell to older children or other women, either enslaved or servants.
“We didn’t value child care at all,” said historian Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit based at the University of Texas that disseminates data on parents and kids.
As years went by, American children were put to work themselves. It wasn’t until the 19th century, when husbands in middle-class families began leaving in the morning for jobs and women stayed home with the kids, that the importance of caring for one’s children was elevated.
“Soon after, contempt developed for any families who had to hire someone to care for a child,” Coontz said.
Not only did society abhor the idea of entrusting child care to someone other than the children’s own mother, the concept also ran afoul of the burgeoning American notion of self-sufficiency: “If you can’t afford to raise kids on your own, you shouldn’t have them,” Rutgers University-Camden sociologist Laura Napolitano said of the parroted sentiment of the time.
That antipathy toward child care has contributed to devastating results: The
United States has never developed a coherent child care system, experts say.
And now, just as the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the ubiquity of racism, the pandemic has laid bare the stunning paucity of opportunities for children and their parents — a situation that’s brought financial and emotional disaster not just to American mothers, but to the U.S. economy missing the labor of 2.3 million women as of February.
“COVID was a reckoning,” said Mai Miksic, early childhood policy director for Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY), a child advocacy nonprofit in Callowhill. Forty percent of child care centers closed in the U.S in the last year. “Parents were needing those centers as never before.”
But, she added, Americans live in a “misogynistic society where women’s work is undervalued and women are underpaid. Society expects women to care for children, and women, typically because they’re mothers, take on that burden.”
By the end of the Civil War, many white, middle-class women were entrenched as in-home caregivers, historians say. It was, people reasoned, a duty performed out of love.
After the war, widows’ pensions were awarded so that they wouldn’t have to leave their children to work. “This was the first recognition in America that some women would need assistance,” said sociologist Joan Maya Mazelis of Rutgers University-Camden.
In keeping with racist policies, though, the
pensions were not offered to Black women, Mazelis said. At this point, many newly freed Black women were working outside the home.
Around the same time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black and white educators were encouraging young Black women to attend schools such as the so-called Black Mammy Memorial Institute in Georgia to train them in domestic skills to help raise white children in white homes, the report says.
Between 1890 and 1960, the white women’s workforce grew to 34%, while the number of Black women workers remained at 40% throughout, according to economist Abby Cohen. Black women had few occupations to choose from, however, with caring for white children being
one of the more acceptable options, historians say. Increasingly, immigrants joined American Black women performing such duties for middle- and upper-class white women in their homes.
These domestic workers were “thrown under the bus” and excluded from New Deal labor laws, according to Nicole Kligerman, Pennsylvania director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group for 2.5 million U.S. nannies, in-home caregivers, and house cleaners.
“The way America treats women who perform the work of raising others’ children indicates very little regard is given to child care as real and dignified work,” she said.
During WWII, America experimented with universal child care.
Government dollars funded 3,100 child care centers serving 600,000 children of women working in men’s jobs for the war effort, historians say. It was a success, but U.S. officials collapsed it once soldiers returned. “There was a huge push to get women back home with their children,” said Jessica Calarco, an Indiana University sociologist.
In 1971, Congress made an attempt to address child care by passing the Comprehensive Child Development Bill, which would have established a national child care system. “But it became a victim of the culture wars, and President (Richard) Nixon vetoed it,” Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families said. Interestingly, she added, the military offers child care that’s often praised.
Society rocketed forward and by 1986, 63% of U.S. women with kids under 18 worked outside the home, federal figures show. By then, the need for child care was acute: A woman making $33,000 annually who leaves the workforce for five years forfeits $477,000 in lost wages and benefits, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security.
But convincing Americans that caring for children is noble, let alone work, remains difficult. “We’re still seen as babysitters,” said Keisha Wright-Daniel, who runs C.A.R.E. For Me Children’s Learning Center in Pennsauken, New Jersey, “and that’s how we’re paid.”
Beyond that, noted Napolitano of Rutgers, “we lack concern for all kids, as opposed to just my kids.”
In the end, she added, child care is dismissed as a woman’s issue:
“And, in America, women’s issues are just not given the gravitas they deserve.”