When feminists around the United States held the “Women’s Strike for Equality” on August 26, 1970, they had three demands: equality in educational and employment opportunities, free abortion on request, and a system of twenty-four-hour day‐care centers.^[1] Access to abortion and child care had become a foundation for most second wave feminists’ visions of equality within the home and the ability to pursue opportunities outside it. Feminists emphasized that these changes would allow for women to have choice over such intimate and fundamental decisions as childbearing and childrearing.^[2] Less than a year after the strike, on May 17, 1971, feminist Congresswomen Bella Abzug (D-NY) and Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) responded to the demand for child care with H. R. 8402.^[3] Abzug and Chisholm presented their bill in the form of amendments to the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA), another child care bill introduced by Congressman John Brademas (D-IN) a few months earlier.^[4] The Abzug-Chisholm bill would have created twenty-four-hour child care centers with educational programs across the country.^[5] It also framed child care as a women’s issue, as Abzug and Chisholm critiqued the CCDA for “deemphasiz[ing] the needs of women.”^[6] The Abzug-Chisholm bill did not pass, but an amended version of the CCDA passed both the Senate and the House on December 7, 1971.^[7] Nixon vetoed the CCDA on December 10, 1971, and the Senate failed to override his veto.^[8] While Congress was debating this child care legislation, radical feminists were coming up with their own solutions to the child care issue. Feminists proposed a variety of programs during these years — federally funded child care centers, city-run day care, child care collectives organized by parents, university-provided day care, and children’s play groups that would give mothers time to hold meetings and socialize.^[9] Radical feminist advocates emphasized the need for a few key features in child care centers: affordability, twenty-four-hour care, and gender equality within the centers. But very few radicals mentioned the Abzug-Chisholm bill or the CCDA in their writing, even though both bills included provisions that would at least partially meet these demands.^[10] In this paper, I consider the myriad visions for child care proposed by grassroots feminists in the early seventies in comparison with the Abzug-Chisholm bill and the CCDA. How did the radical feminist visions of child care differ from the programs envisioned by these pieces of legislation? What were the consequences of these more radical attempts at child care?

Scholars studying the feminist movement in the seventies have not focused on child care, likely because of the failures to enact significant legislation. Psychologist Edward Zigler, who served in the Nixon Administration and worked on child care legislation in the early seventies, summarizes the state of the literature in this way: “despite the success of Freidan’s strike [The Women’s Strike for Equality] and early rhetoric from women’s groups,” he writes, “most reviews of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s allow only a few pages to feminists’ role in creating publicly available child care arrangements.”^[11] Writing some years after Zigler, legal historian Deborah Dinner addresses the relationship between feminism and child care legislation in her article, “The Universal Childcare Debate: Rights Mobilization, Social Policy, and the Dynamics of Feminist Activism, 1966–1974.” Dinner argues that the goal of child care as a right united different factions of the feminist movement and that “rights proved a powerful discursive tool with which feminist childcare activists made claims on the state.”^[12] Dinner considers the perspective of grassroots, radical feminists in this argument. However, she does not give much attention to the intricacies of their different proposed forms of child care and the consequences and challenges that came with them.

By focusing on the perspective of the radical feminists, as they appear in feminist newspapers from 1970-1973, I tease out how the values of this side of the movement appeared in their proposed child care programs.^[13] First, I review relevant literature and show that when historians have considered the question of feminism and child care, they have focused more on the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) efforts for universal child care than other women’s organizations. Second, I discuss how the Abzug-Chisholm bill and the CCDA only partially addressed the radicals’ demands for child care. Third, I consider the differences between various radical feminist ideas on the best approach to child care. Lastly, I look at the challenges that these different forms of child care faced in practice. I argue that despite feminist attempts to dignify the work of child care and child rearing, the failure of some of the radical feminist child care collectives resulted from internal disagreements on who bore responsibility for children. These disagreements show that in practice, the community members necessary to facilitate feminist visions of community-controlled child care rejected this burden. Further, feminists themselves were ultimately not always willing or able to execute the more radical aspects of their vision for collective child care and the broader societal changes they hoped could come with it.

Literature Review

Historians looking at the relationship between child care legislation and the feminist movement at this time have focused on the CCDA as the main legislative attempt to satisfy feminist demands for universal child care. The CCDA would have made child care free for low-income families, while other families would pay on a sliding-scale based on income.^[14] The success of the CCDA in Congress came largely from the efforts of the Ad Hoc Coalition on Child Development, which formed with representatives from NOW, child-development experts, labor groups, and civil rights groups.^[15] This coalition worked with Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Representative Brademas to guide the CCDA through Congress as part of a bill that would extend the operation of the Office of Economic Opportunity.^[16] But even before Nixon’s veto, the bill began to lose its bipartisan support when the more conservative members of the Republican party mobilized against it and characterized the bill as an attack against the American family.^[17] This mobilization of the right eroded the bill’s support, made its passage in Congress more difficult, invited Nixon’s veto, and killed any chances of a Senate override.^[18]

Several scholars have argued that the feminist movement failed to lobby successfully for the CCDA and other child care legislation proposed at the time. Political scientist Kimberly Morgan contends that “one irony of the child-care legislation in the 1970s is that it became associated with the women’s movement when the latter was, in fact, fairly disengaged from the legislation.”^[19] But, Morgan claims, even within the Ad Hoc Coalition on Child Development NOW remained marginalized, and “[NOW representatives] never even testified on behalf of the legislation in congressional hearings.”^[20] She cites a member of the coalition who attributed this marginalization to a lack of receptivity for NOW’s more radical goals. Morgan summarizes, “the demands of NOW representatives for free, universal day care fell on deaf ears and failed to attract many allies in the group.”^[21] Zigler makes a similar argument.^[22] He maintains that “the women’s movement had problems of its own,” and that child care policy brought up too many controversies for feminists over class differences, the role of the state, and the role of mothers.^[23] Further, Zigler argues that “the feminist movement never materialized into a powerful player in child care,” and he partially blames feminists for the absence of an effective child care lobby today.^[24] In “An Unrequited Labor of Love,” historian Anna Danziger Halperin attributes NOW’s minimal lobbying efforts to its concentration on other feminist goals: “although NOW espoused rhetoric that child care was central to women’s liberation, advocating for the CDA [sic] was not a high priority and never garnered the attention of its small staff.”^[25] Halperin also explains what she calls NOW’s “ambivalence” for the CCDA as a result of their mainly middle-class membership. Since the bill provided more support for lower-income families, middle-class women lost interest in the CCDA.^[26] In addition, Halperin blames poor leadership of lobbying efforts and describes NOW’s only lobbyists as “task force volunteers who were poorly organized and underfunded, and thus not capable of either shaping the legislation to their desires or lobbying Congress enough to overturn Nixon’s veto.”^[27] NOW’s official staff instead focused on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and they did have staff testify before Congress on the ERA.^[28] Halperin, Morgan, and Zigler’s explanations of the uninspired feminist lobbying efforts for the CCDA illustrate the complexities of child care politics within women’s organizations. Yet, none of these scholars look much beyond NOW’s efforts for child care, and even then they place an emphasis on NOW’s shortcomings.

However, Dinner and historian Kirsten Swinth have shown that this narrative of inactive feminist groups ignores the efforts of both liberal feminist groups such as NOW and more radical feminists. Both Dinner and Swinth identify universal, twenty-four-hour, free child care as a “unifying political demand of second-wave feminists.”^[29] In the Childcare chapter of Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, Swinth acknowledges the generally accepted idea that “feminists were secondary partners” in the coalition lobbying for the CCDA.^[30] But she goes on to argue that “NOW records indicate strong action behind the scenes, especially in keeping the feminist perspective on child care in the conversation.”^[31] As evidence, Swinth references statements made by Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, a leader of the Ad-Hoc Coalition on Childcare. Swinth draws on Edelman’s explanation of the lobby to show that NOW first supported the Abzug-Chisholm bill and then pivoted to mobilize its membership in support of the CCDA.^[32] Furthermore, Dinner directly responds to Morgan’s assertion that child care legislation became associated with women’s liberation, despite the limited influence of the women’s movement in lobbying for child care. To make a claim for feminists’ influence on the legislation, Dinner points to the articulation of a right to universal child care that appeared throughout second-wave feminist organizations. She explains, “while nascent feminist organizations and NOW may not have been at the forefront of those lobbying for the CCDA, feminists across the country were engaged in political debate and local activism regarding child care. They channeled their ideas through representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug’s alternative child care bill.”^[33] In this more subtle way, feminist groups made their demands for child care heard in Congress, and some of these demands made it into the CCDA because of Abzug and Chisholm’s advocacy for women’s interests.^[34]

Swinth further complicates this understanding of feminists’ involvement with child care legislation by bringing in the perspective of grassroots feminists. First, she explains that “radical second-wavers generally eschewed national-level, legislative child care activism in favor of battling local and state bureaucrats,” so liberal feminists took the lead on formal lobbying for child care legislation.^[35] Still though, Swinth includes the protests of radical feminists demanding better treatment of day care centers by city officials as an important aspect of the political moment and widespread support for child care legislation in 1969 and 1970.^[36] Following Nixon’s veto of the CCDA, cooperative child care centers appeared in high numbers across the country. Swinth recounts how “feminists and women’s groups of virtually every stripe poured their energies into childcare centers” in the early seventies.^[37] These centers eventually died out at the end of the decade as grassroots feminist organizing fell apart and the responsibility for child care shifted from the community back to individuals.^[38] Swinth maintains that the utopian vision of child care for feminists in this time was that of “a far more balanced world of work and family, shared with men and supported by society, and available to all regardless of economic status.”^[39] She even calls the radical feminists idealistic in their hope that “new forms of family, community, and employment would develop as horizons expanded” once women had freedom from the burden of child care.^[40] Further, Swinth argues that the radical nature of this vision and the way it “upset [the] ordering of the family” contributed to the failure of child care legislation like the CCDA.^[41] In the following sections, I build upon Dinner and Swinth’s work to show what exactly these “new forms of family, community, and employment” looked like for radical feminists.^[42]

The Abzug-Chisholm Bill and the CCDA: How Legislation Addressed Radical Feminist Demands

Congressional Representatives Chisholm and Abzug both had reputations for boldness, sometimes flouting Congressional norms to stay true to their values. For instance, Chisholm hired an all-female congressional staff in DC, and both representatives helped to establish the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.^[43] Chisholm achieved several firsts in American politics: “the first African American woman from Brooklyn elected to the New York State Legislature, the first African American woman elected to Congress, and then the first African American woman to make a run for the Democratic Party nomination for president.”^[44] Historian Barbara Winslow describes Chisholm as “strikingly radical,” since Chisholm supported the feminist movement in addition to radical Black Nationalists, the student movement, and prisoners fighting for justice.^[45] Chisholm became a congresswoman in 1968 and served until 1983.^[46] Abzug, also a trailblazer, served in Congress from 1971-1976 as the representative for the Nineteenth District of New York, which covered the west side of Manhattan.^[47] Historian Leandra Zarnow calls Abzug one of the “boldest visionaries during a period of unsettling uncertainty brought on by great structural and societal change.”^[48] In addition to advocating for women’s issues such as child care and equal pay for equal work, Abzug supported a variety of progressive causes including gay civil rights, clean energy and clean water legislation, urban revitalization, universal health care, and a living wage.^[49] As they both represented New York, Abzug and Chisholm worked together on legislation, despite a sometimes-difficult relationship and diverging priorities.^[50] Their child care bill provides a good illustration of this dynamic. For example, they disagreed on the allocation of funding for child care for low-income women versus middle-class women. Abzug sought to initially prioritize low-income women and then favor middle-income women whereas Chisholm supported a sustained prioritization of low-income women. However, they found compromise by reserving more funding for low-income women initially and slowly reducing the allocation for only low-income women over the first three years of the program.^[51] This instance of compromise shows how Chisholm and Abzug worked together — guided by similar values but also having to concede to each other’s differences in prioritization of interests and in methods of implementation.

Chisholm and Abzug were working on child care during an intense period in American history. In The Seventies, Bruce J. Shulman captures the political atmosphere following the turbulent end of the sixties — the air of hopefulness in the sixties ended with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., popular support for the Vietnam War was also waning at this time, and inflation was rising at the turn of the decade, signaling the end of “the long post-war boom.”^[52] Many traditionally Democratic voters in the early seventies felt lost, disappointed by liberalism and critical of conservatives they considered elitist.^[53] When Richard Nixon began his presidency in 1969, he advanced an agenda that “cunningly undermined” liberal programs and agencies.^[54] His Family Assistance Plan (FAP), introduced in 1969, would have created “a minimum guaranteed income for every American family.”^[55] But in doing so, Nixon also wanted to scrap the rest of the welfare system including Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps.^[56] In this way, he pursued a radical, seemingly liberal piece of legislation that actually furthered his own conservative goal of slimming down the federal government.^[57] By 1972, the FAP had failed, but it provides an example of the political tricks that characterized Nixon’s presidency.^[58] Nixon’s FAP also elucidates how he viewed child care: Zigler recounts that Nixon wanted a day care provision in the FAP to help welfare mothers take on employment.^[59] While this provision fell short of feminist demands for twenty-four-hour day care available to all women, Nixon’s support for federally funded child care contributed to the sense that a national child care bill could be politically feasible in the early seventies.

Indeed, Morgan describes 1971 as a moment when the idea of community responsibility for child care held popularity. ^[60] In the preceding decades, Morgan argues that day care had a reputation as “a social-welfare service for poor and dysfunctional families.”^[61] But in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty programs, government spending was increasing and the “acceptability of federal involvement in social and educational policy carried over into the domain of early childhood care and education.” New psychological research on child development also emphasized the importance of early childhood educational programs. Morgan summarizes this perfect mix of factors: “the confluence of the women’s movement, rising female labor-force participation, the new developmental theories, and concerns over welfare dependency spurred growing public support for the concept of day care, as well as federal involvement in it.”^[62] These conditions created, in Morgan’s words, a “window of opportunity,” or in Zigler’s, “a golden moment” for child care.^[63]

Amidst this favorable political landscape, Representative Brademas, with the help of the ad-hoc coalition on child care, introduced the CCDA to the House of Representatives on March 25, 1971.^[64] In his statement in the May hearings on the CCDA, Brademas underlined the importance of the bill in the early development of children: “the legislation we are to consider today would extend the benefits of Headstart-type programs — including health, educational, nutritional and family counseling services — not only to poor children, but to millions of other children of preschool age, particularly to the children of working parents.”^[65] This framing of the bill highlights its benefits for children and clarifies what “comprehensive child care” means. The CCDA aimed beyond custodial care, simply giving children a safe place to stay while their parents worked. It sought to create programming that would help children “to attain their maximum potential.”^[66] The bill did not create universal, free child care but its statement of purpose includes the goal to “establish the legislative framework for the future expansion of such programs to provide universally available child development services.”^[67] Further, the CCDA would have made child care free for families with income “below the cost of family consumption of the lower living standard budget,” defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics within the Department of Labor.^[68] Notably, this first version of the CCDA left a blank in the spot defining the size of prime sponsorship units, which Dinner defines as the “the local, state, and tribal governments or nonprofits authorized to coordinate child care services within a region.”^[69] The size of prime sponsors determined whether child care centers fell under local or state control and this part of the CCDA became a major point of contention in debates over the bill’s amendments. Of course, as the CCDA became the dominant child care bill and moved through Congress, its details evolved in response to such debates. But the features of the CCDA as originally introduced by Representative Brademas show how child care advocates without a focus on the needs of women envisioned a federal child care system. In response to these features of the CCDA, Representatives Chisholm and Abzug focused their own bill on provisions that catered more explicitly to the feminist movement.

In the May hearings on the CCDA, Representative Abzug made her statement immediately following Brademas’ introduction of the bill. She argued that “H.R.6748 needs more emphasis on the needs of women; it needs coverage for small communities as well as for large urban areas; and above everything else it needs enough money to make it work.”^[70] These three changes appear in the Abzug-Chisholm bill as amendments to the CCDA.^[71] Dinner points out how these and other feminist goals materialize in the Abzug-Chisholm bill: an expanded statement of purpose on the importance of the bill to women, increased funding authorizations of $5, $8, and $10 billion dollars for the first three years of the program, “providing for twenty-four-hour child care and prohibiting sex discrimination in the staffing and administration of the centers,” and no lower-limit on the size of prime sponsors.^[72] The Abzug-Chisholm bill included more amendments that spoke directly to even radical feminists’ child care needs. First, the Abzug-Chisholm bill ensured that sponsorship could extend to only nonprofit groups, and it thus discouraged profit making on child care.^[73] For-profit day care at this time provoked serious concern within radical feminist groups.^[74] In an Up From Under article on child care from February, 1971, Vicki Breitbart and Beverly Leman denounced for-profit day care, arguing that, “the parents will not determine the program for their children and decisions will be made on the basis of the profit motive alone.”^[75] This fear stemmed partially from a concern about the level of parent control. Feminist Phyllis MacEwan, who had a reputation for writing “one of the most widely reprinted pieces on daycare in the movement” in January 1970, asked, “how could parent-participation and community control fit into this model of private day care centers run by private corporations?” in a later article in July 1970.^[76] The Abzug-Chisholm bill had another amendment that addressed this concern for adequate parental involvement. Their bill required “two-thirds parent representation on child development councils instead of one-half [that the CCDA required].”^[77] These councils had the responsibility to plan and monitor the child development programs in the prime sponsorship area.^[78] Increased parental involvement in the councils at least recognized a priority of radical feminist advocates for child care.

Yet even the level of parent involvement in the Abzug-Chisholm bill might not have met some feminists’ standards. In her statement during the hearings on the CCDA, Chisholm stressed the importance of having professionals in the child care centers and ensuring proper licensing.^[79] However, radical feminists had mixed views on what role professionals should play in child care. Many advocated for parents to work in child care centers as volunteers or part-time workers.^[80] Feminists also had trouble obtaining licenses from city governments or chose not to because they did not want to comply with city regulations.^[81] For example, women who tried to open their own child care centers in Chicago faced harassment from the city, and the Action Committee for Decent Child Care described Chicago’s licensing policies as “arbitrary.”^[82] In one instance, a child care center in Chicago faced a lawsuit for not having a three-compartment sink while serving food.^[83] Chisholm’s description of unlicensed centers as “dumping grounds where children are tied to furniture in dismal surroundings” contrasts with this kind of account of small and arbitrary violations of city regulations.^[84] Chisholm’s support of proper licensing of child care centers thus touched on a point of frustration for some radical feminist child care groups. These women-focused amendments in the Abzug-Chisholm bill, while in support of many feminist goals, begin to show where Abzug and Chisholm’s legislation diverged from the vision of the more radical feminist groups. In some ways, a federally managed child care system was simply incompatible with the forms of child care that radical feminists envisioned.

Radical Visions of Child Care

Before the CCDA failure, radical feminists were not waiting on the federal government to take the lead on child care. They started their own collectives or co-ops, staffed by parents as well as childless community members, that gave them more control over the policies and day-to-day functioning of child care centers. Given that radical feminists generally avoided legal and policy-based methods of creating change, this emphasis on parent-controlled child care aligns with their broader strategies. In From margin to mainstream: American women and politics since 1960, historian Susan Hartmann describes this difference between radical and liberal feminists: “believing that institutions were not amenable to the reforms promoted by their counterparts in NOW through the avenues of traditional politics, radical feminists created collectives controlled by women and designed to meet their needs.”^[85] By eliminating almost any dependence on city or state governments, radical feminists could come close to enacting their ideal vision of child care. In “On the Road to Child Care for All,” published in The Second Wave, self-described as “a magazine of the new feminism,” Marnette O’Brien outlines what this kind of center would look like:

Child care facilities must be under the direction and supervision of parents and concerned members of the community. This is the only way to insure [sic] that the services are what we want and what we need. The Community should decide how to get the money and how to use the money, where the centers should be, when the centers should be open, who will staff the centers, what programs will go on in the centers. Should Black consciousness be emphasized in the curriculum or will there be bi-lingual education, or should we have a curriculum designed to counteract sexual stereotypes?^[86]

This control over every aspect of child care ensured that the logistics of the centers worked for parents, but as O’Brien explained, the centers also became a way for feminists to instill their values in their children and change the structure of the community to follow feminist ideals. Still, even within this category of collective child care, radical feminist centers took a variety of forms.

Like Hartmann, Dinner argues that women’s liberationists who turned to independent child care collectives did not envision a strong role for the federal government, if any. She maintains that “their interest in the state extended only to the technicalities of obtaining a day care license, negotiating regulations, and securing funding for community day care projects.”^[87] However, some of these cooperatives saw their independent status as temporary. A notice in Pandora, a Seattle-based newspaper, announced the opening of a child care cooperative and specified that the center was “not as a solution to providing free child care for all who want it, but only as an interim project until institutions in America provide such crucial services.”^[88]A similar announcement in the The Spokeswoman describes a local group that would “help people to organize for universal publicly-supported, community-controlled day care systems where they live and then draw on the support of these groups as the Council presses for these goals nationally.”^[89] In both of these cases, feminist groups viewed child care cooperatives as important resources for mothers and families but resources that should ultimately become state-sponsored.

Other radical feminists wanted universities and employers to take on the responsibility of child care, or at least provide space and funding for it. Women at Indiana University campaigned for “parent-operated cooperative day care centers on the campus.”^[90] Rose-Ellen Appel, a child care advocate at the University of Michigan, argued, “we should be pressuring factories, businesses, the University, and all other institutions to provide child care for working parents”^[91] A 1970 article in It Ain’t Me Babe demanded that the city of Berkeley pay for child care centers with taxes from “the same employers, Bell Telephone Co., The University of California, PGE, Cutter Laboratories, who oppress women and men as workers and who make large sums of money from our labor, can afford to be taxed.”^[92]Another 1970 article from the Iowa-City-based newspaper Ain’t I a Woman? argued for the precedent that “all large places of employment provide day care for their female employees.”^[93] Critiques of these kinds of child care systems argued for a more limited role for employers. MacEwan and Gross wrote in their famous child care article that “when we make demands for day care they should be solely in terms of money and space. The corporations and universities should have no control.”^[94] In “How to Build a People’s Health System,” Lynn Phillips expressed a similar concern: “the demand for free and government financed workplace child care is tricky, since any source of funds tends also to be a source of control…The best choice is to get it together first — with women deciding how exactly they want to run it, before demanding funding.”^[95] These criticisms of employer-sponsored day care focused on funding and on what level of control employers would have if they supported child care. Other feminist critiques extended to more of the details of how employer-sponsored day care would work.

In their critique of employer-sponsored day care programs, Breitbart and Leman focused on the policy that required parents to make up fifty percent of the center’s policy board. They viewed this policy, which seemed to promote parent-control of centers, as disappointing and inadequate. Notably, this is the same method of parent involvement included in the CCDA.^[96] Breitbart and Leman claimed that, “programs may be called parent controlled, but when vital services are controlled by management, when management sits on the policy board, when the worker/parents are under management’s control, and when the center itself is not controlled by its staff workers, then the people are not in control.”^[97] Furthermore, Breitbart and Leman argued that industry-related child care centers made mothers “more vulnerable and socially dependent on the work place.”^[98] When women depend on their jobs for child care, then they may not be able to leave poor work environments as easily. The tying together of work and child care makes it “harder to struggle for better work conditions or against racist hiring practices.”^[99] In general, radical feminists hesitated to create child care centers that diminished any part of their freedom to struggle for broader societal change or to have full control over centers.

Many feminist child care centers started simply because mothers needed support from other mothers. One young, non-working mother recounted her thinking in starting a child care group in her community in Manhattan: “I didn’t look forward to years of taking care of my baby all by myself, cut off from other mothers, existing only between my apartment, the super market, and the park. It would be so much more interesting, and less isolating, to share some of this time with other young women like myself.”^[100] She then made a playgroup that worked a rotating schedule, giving mothers a few afternoons free every week. Creating a playgroup or a “tot lot” not only gave mothers the opportunity to spend time away from their kids and socialize, but these groups could also quickly become sites of organization for women’s issues.^[101] An article in Ain’t I a Woman? described how feminists came together to help each other with child care since bigger institutions like universities and city governments were not providing that resource. The article proclaimed, “day care centers not only serve the needs of the community, especially women with children, but are an organizing tool to demonstrate that by coming together we can make changes for our needs and that we must work together to get anywhere near where the money and the power really is.”^[102] The group viewed their day care center both as something that filled mothers’ needs on a day-to-day basis and as a group which could advocate for their broader goals. This idea follows Dinner’s claim that “local political authorities as well as activists identified child care centers as sites of community empowerment.”^[103] In particular, Dinner notes that Black feminist activists advocated for child care centers to function “as a means to uplift black communities and liberate their children from societal oppression.”^[104] The idea of collective child care that liberated children as well as women became a popular argument in support of radical feminist centers.

Radical feminists who wanted cooperative child care centers thought that exposing their children to multiple adult caregivers, some parents and some not, would aid in their children’s development more than parent-only care. MacEwan and Gross framed non-sexist child care as beneficial for children as much as for mothers. The key point here was to include both men and women as caregivers; they argued that this kind of “group child care — if well conceived — has a radical potential through the impact it could have on children’s early development.”^[105] Beverly Leman similarly emphasized the importance of parents not simply controlling the decision-making in child care centers but doing their share of taking care of kids. She explained, “[the parents’] sharing of the actual work is important not only in their own lives in that they learn to work in groups, to have enjoyment, understanding, and compassion for each other, but also for the lives of the children who see a model in their parents for their own behavior.”^[106] Leman viewed cooperative child care as a practice that made parents better and kinder people and thus better role models for their kids. Further, this model dignified the work of child care, and Leman argued that it taught children an important feminist lesson. She wrote, “the children learn too that child care is not drudgery work assigned to the females of society.”^[107] In these ways —providing multiple strong role models to children, involving men in the centers, and elevating the work of child care — feminists framed cooperative child care centers as an early education that liberated children from sexist societal norms.

By utilizing group care, child care cooperatives posed a challenge to the nuclear family structure. In her conclusion, Dinner explains that “while liberal feminists argued for child care as a right of social citizenship, radical and socialist feminists launched a trenchant critique of the family itself as the site of women’s oppression. Both these groups of feminists believed that liberationist child care would free children from authoritarian and sexist social conventions.”^[108] Here, Dinner draws a distinction between liberal and radical feminist approaches to child care — radical feminists went further in their condemnation of the family. Dinner also explains that for radical and socialist feminists, “making childcare a collective responsibility had the potential to redefine the family by enabling women to pursue work outside the home and to gain economic autonomy.”^[109] In addition to giving women the freedom to work, part of this radical feminist argument against the nuclear family included the substitution of norms of family life with new ways for parents to relate to their children. In her article on liberated child care centers, Leman claimed that “when women are free from individualized, isolated child rearing, the family can change its form, since one of its primary functions will have become the responsibility of society.”^[110] Leman then moved beyond critique of the family and outlined how child care centers could create a better system: “collective child care can break down the concept of ownership: ‘my’ child is ‘my’ problem and responsibility and therefore ‘I’ must conform to whatever demands the system makes of me so that ‘I’ can care for ‘my’ child.”^[111] Eradicating “ownership” of children constituted a radical concept in this time, and Linda Gordan acknowledged the foreign nature of the idea when she made a similar argument in her 1970 article “Functions of the Family.” Gordon admitted that “it is very, very difficult for most women, including myself, to conceive of a society in which children do not belong to someone or ones.”^[112] Gordon clarifies that eradicating parental ownership of children does not mean breaking up the loving parent-child relationship: “to insist that children are not the property of their parents is not to deny that children may want and benefit from the special love of a small number of adults, adults who cherish certain children above others….Love is not ownership.”^[113] Rather, in Gordon’s view, breaking down the nuclear family and its structures of child ownership meant “find[ing] ways of raising children in a community that is close and reliable but without possessiveness.”^[114] To these radical feminists, community-controlled child care collectives could facilitate the breakdown of the nuclear family by providing children with several consistent caretakers instead of one or two parents who “owned” them.

Gordon and Leman were not alone in this critiquing of the nuclear family structure. The “Mother’s Manifesto” in the 1973 child care issue of Ain’t I a Woman? also expressed the stance that “to fight the children-as-property attitude, and encourage viewing children as people, collective child care should integrate physical, social, and political welfare.”^[115] The Manifesto further declared that “collective living situations must be organized as a counter-institution to the nuclear family.”^[116] While collective child care took the burden of childrearing off of the nuclear family, collective living took over other responsibilities traditionally assigned to families as well, such as housekeeping.^[117] Another article in the 1973 child care issue of Ain’t I a Woman? described how a group of eight lesbian feminists came together to raise one child named Teri when her mother needed help taking care of her. Each woman had one day a week to take care of Teri, and two women would “double-up” on one day.^[118] This structure of childrearing, however rare, presents another example of how feminists might reject the nuclear family structure in favor of group care. Of course, not all radical feminists fully bought in to this rejection of the family. In a 1972 article on collective child care, four feminist women pushed back slightly to the idea of ending parental ownership of kids: “most parents do not feel that they own their children as property — rather, they have special concern for them and would like them to know what they know and to be happy.” Even so, these women advocated for a more flexible relationship between children and parents. They asserted,

It is romantic and whimsical to suggest that parents should give up identifying with their children; the relationship between parent and child is too close. But it can be freer and more creative if there is [sic] more shared responsibilities in the home, in schools, in the community and in the workplace. The availability of good quality group childcare can help.^[119]

This vision of a “freer and more creative” parent-child relationship still rested on group child care helping to lighten the burden and responsibilities on the nuclear family.

Several feminist newspaper articles advocating for community-controlled child care cited a need to make their day-to-day lives and the time they spent with their children more sustainable. The young mother who made a play group in Manhattan explained that women in her group had more time and “enjoy[ed] their children more” after joining.^[120] She also confessed, “I know a few women who haven’t been away from their children more than two or three hours at a time within an entire year and cannot admit their resentment even to themselves.”^[121] The play group thus became a relief to mothers completely burnt out from raising their children on their own. An article in the paper her-self, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, recounted the work of the Child Care Action Center, which “encourage[d] mothers to take an active part in the Center, and thus alleviat[e] their fright and guilt through parent participation. And this, in turn, [gave] women the real option to work.”^[122] The description here highlights a key factor in creating a sustainable child care system — the center needed to give mothers time to themselves without shutting them out of the childrearing process. A 1970 article from Ain’t I A Woman? took an analogous stance in explaining the radical feminist goals in child care: “[women] want to change the relationships between adults and children, between the sexes, content and form, so that the human qualities that make life worth living — joy, compassion, understanding, and growth — can live.”^[123] These articles convey a common point that community controlled child care aimed not only to help women to pursue other goals and aspirations outside of the home but also to create space for joy and a less strained relationship with their children. Radical feminists sought to achieve these goals through a restructuring of child care and the creation of what Swinth calls “a far more balanced world of work and family.”^[124]

In practice, attempts to achieve this more balanced world meant a change in how parents worked. Alice Kessler-Harris explains in Out to Work that as women demanded job equality in the seventies, they ran into the problem that “the rules of work…seemed incompatible with a family life that involved two working adults or a single working parent.”^[125] Child care co-ops responded to this incompatibility of work and family by trying to limit work hours. In Beverly Leman’s vision, collective child care “demand[ed] a new work routine in which all adults [had] enough time to share in child rearing.”^[126] An article in The Spokeswoman similarly reported that the Women’s Caucus at the White House Conference on Children in 1971 took a position “strongly urging a flexible and/or shorter work week hours for women and men, to provide wider opportunities outside the home for women and more leisure and home life for men.”^[127] A child care campaign in Bloomington demanded that Indiana University provide “release time from work for employees who want to participate in cooperative centers.”^[128] Other radical feminist stances on child care collectives saw these changes as secondary to larger goals such as equality for women within “career-producing areas of education,” employment opportunities, and pay.^[129] The Ain’t I a Woman? “Mother’s Manifesto” stated that, “until economic realities [such as these] are dealt with, demands of women will be met only under conditions prone to co-optation. Paid maternity leaves, 24-hour child care, salary supplements for child care, paid time off to work in day care co-ops; these demands fall into this category.”^[130] But even these policies, “prone to co-optation,” would have changed the structure of work in American communities by valuing child care and making time for parents to spend raising their children. More broadly, these calls for changes to the weekly work routine used child care to argue for a less work-centered lifestyle.

Problems with Child Care Collectives

Both Dinner and Swinth have noted that child care collectives did not become long-term solutions because working-class parents and community members did not have the time or resources to work in the centers.^[131] When discussing feminist child care activist Rosalyn Baxandall’s liberation nursery in New York, Swinth maintained that “a certain cluelessness about poor and working-class women’s motivations in seeking daycare colored Baxandall’s vision. But she shared with most radicals the conviction that all women, including those on welfare, deserved time for themselves, away from children.”^[132] Feminist critiques of co-ops support Dinner and Swinth’s contention. Even the “Mother’s Manifesto” acknowledges these shortcomings of the centers, describing “day care co-ops [as] white, middle-class, university affiliated.”^[133] The Manifesto continues, “co-op membership has been reluctant to deal with most issues of classism, racism, sexism, homosexism, and ageism.”^[134] An interview with a Black mother revealed how these predominantly white child care centers fell short of needs for Black women and their children. She explained the effects on her child of white child care centers: “any daycare center staffed by white people would be like putting [a Black child] in a white family. They cannot meet the needs of that child no matter how many of them there are.”^[135] This mother also reported that white parents would ask her to bring her Black child to the day care centers, “so that the white kids can get used to being around black children” and she added, “I think that’s a real bunch of shit.”^[136] The failure of collective child care centers to become accessible to working-class families and families of color contributed to their decline.

Another major factor in the failure of some collective child care centers was the reluctance of community members to participate. As an example of this dynamic, an article on the 1973 Festival of Country Women, a weekend gathering of feminists at a “woodland camp” in California to attend workshops and develop skills, admitted that “childcare was [their] least successful joint effort.”^[137] The article describes the volunteer-based child care tent as frequently run by “one woman alone…with children ranging from an infant to seven years old.”^[138] The failure of child care at the Festival of Country Women illustrates how even in a setting with hundreds of radical feminists, collective child care proved an unpopular and impracticable solution. Perhaps the nature of the festival as a special event explains some of the lack of enthusiasm for the collective child care effort. But, in “Babysitting Co-Ops: Another Trap,” Janis Chan expressed a similar opinion against child care cooperatives more generally:

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that a cooperative was definitely not the solution to my personal need for child care…The only real solution for women who feel that they need to step out of their mother roles, that they can give their child a more fulfilling upbringing by becoming more complete persons themselves, is a child care center staffed by professionals who have chosen their work because they enjoy caring for and interacting with children.^[139]

Chan’s point that professionals should staff centers highlights a crucial flaw in the vision for community-controlled child care — many community members and parents did not enjoy taking care of children for several hours of their day. Yet, the “only real solution” according to Chan proved difficult for low-income and middle class families who often lacked the resources to hire full-time babysitters or pay for their children to attend day care.^[140] The “Mother’s Manifesto” similarly reports that “even in co-op day care centers, where theoretically there exists an awareness of the need for child care to liberate women, membership have argued for the exclusion of families with diaper-aged children.”^[141] This reluctance to accept young children suggests that parents working at the centers were struggling to manage the day-to-day hassles of child care and did not want to complicate these challenges further by accepting younger children. In short, many community members seemed to have disliked spending time at child care centers. Thus, communities themselves did not always accept the responsibility of community-controlled child care that radical feminists expected them to take on.

Non-mothers in particular proved difficult to engage in the co-ops. The 1973 child care issue of Ain’t I a Woman? included heated opinion articles on the roles of mothers and non-mothers in child care co-ops in Iowa City, where the journal was published. One open letter to “women in the community who had not been doing childcare,” reprimanded non-mothers, arguing, “you have all the options — whether to take child care seriously or not. You get so pissed off when people don’t show up to work daycare and you’re ‘stuck there’. Yes, you should be pissed but many women with children in this town are ‘stuck there’ 24 hours a day, seven days a week and no one shows up to relieve her.”^[142] Not all the articles criticizing non-mothers took this angry tone, but several expressed the same frustrations. An article called “Think about what it would be like to live my life” asked non-mothers to “please do childcare for us and don’t ask us to shuffle for it, to always have to ask if you can take him that night or just go pick him up from day care and leave me a note on the blackboard. Show me I can depend on you.”^[143] A third article from the same issue described childlessness as a state of having more resources than mothers have. The article, written to childless women, states “do it [help out with child care] not because you want to for some reason but because you’re supposed to. You have no right to hoard extra resources.”^[144] These confrontations of childless women who did not work in community child care co-ops demonstrate how this radical feminist vision for child care could easily fall apart in practice.

Internal disagreements at the co-ops in Iowa City also occurred between lesbians and straight women more specifically. Dinner addresses this split, explaining that straight women “wanted to involve men in childcare centers as a way to challenge the sexual division of labor,” while some gay women “were committed to building lives separate from men and resented working in a heterosexual environment.”^[145] One lesbian expressed resentment at not only working with men but at working to support women in heterosexual relationships. She expands on this feeling, “I have qualms about doing childcare for women who relate to men exclusively because those relationships create more space for heterosexuality and do nothing to lessen my oppression as a gay women [sic].”^[146] Here, volunteering to take care of straight women’s children offered neither material nor liberatory benefits to lesbians in the community. A “gay working-class non-biological mother” further outlined the divisions within the child care center she participated in: “specifically, the splits were over feminism, separatism, and the gay socialization of children. The women of our group wanted two days a week of only women in the center, and commitment by all the women to struggle towards a radical feminist analysis dealing with class, race, and gayness.”^[147] These divisions reveal a key problem with community child-rearing: agreeing on a set of values with which to raise children. A set of values usually determined by a single family now required difficult-to-achieve community consensus within the co-ops. Another woman in Iowa City described her initial thoughts after her child care center closed:

In the end we discovered what we knew from the beginning: gay women are not allowed to do childcare in this society and mothers have all the power regarding their own children. The result of all this remains to be seen. The center closed because of county and state investigations and threat of custody suits, mothers are still over-burdened and do not trust childless women and childless women feel used.^[148]

This explanation of the center’s failure shows how the very principles that guided cooperative child care centers — involving all members of the community, giving up possessiveness over children, child-rearing with community values — led to their demise. The idea that cooperative child care would diminish parents’ possessiveness and become an alternative to child rearing through the nuclear family did not come to fruition here, as mothers still had “all their power regarding their own children.” Further, the childless community members received little in return for their labor and mothers seemed not to have trusted those community members who did volunteer their time.

This distrust of parents and community members running collective child care centers appeared in articles outside of Iowa City as well. An article on “a fully co-operative, parent-run day-care center” in the Washington D.C.-based paper Off Our Backs recounted the difficulty of organizing child care with a group of fifty adults, all with different opinions.^[149] The authors, who went by the names Marchia and Norma, explained, “we don’t yet know or trust each other and there hasn’t been much true struggle or true support for each other. We find it very difficult to talk about child rearing without getting defensive about our own children and practices.”^[150] In addition to defensiveness over parenting and a lack of trust amongst the center’s organizers, Marchia and Norma described the divergent expectations of parents. They wrote: “some people feel the house provides just a decent and convenient place to leave their kids. They are resistant to allowing the group to change their lives in important ways and hold the whole group back from becoming more than just a day care center.”^[151] In this way, the radical feminist vision of child care as a site of broader societal change — around the nuclear family, gender norms, and even the daily work schedule — clashed with the parents who simply wanted a “place to leave their kids.” Even the New York child care activist Rosalyn Baxandall found that cooperative child care became an impractical option for her. Baxandall explained in a Woman’s World article why her own child did not attend her co-op: “As a matter of fact, I took my child out of the ‘cooperative’ day care center I had worked so hard on setting up and put him in a city center because the city center would take him from 9 to 3 in the afternoon and the other women in my old nursery insisted on keeping the center open only half a day.”^[152] Here, the disagreement centered on hours of operation rather than the center’s potential for broader change, but the overarching issue of frustration and distrust between parents appeared again. Further, Swinth recounts how “when Rosalyn Baxandall’s son entered public school, she gratefully with-drew from vigorous daycare activism.”^[153] Baxandall’s removal of her son from her day care co-op and her eventual departure from daycare activism demonstrates how even those heavily involved in child care organizing did not find the community-control system sustainable and often did not want to keep working in the centers.

These accounts of child-care co-ops across the U.S. also show that despite efforts to relieve women of child care duties, men did not participate as much as feminists wanted. In the “Mother’s Manifesto,” the unnamed author recounted that, “volunteers, especially male volunteers, are hard to find and harder to keep. In families with two parents, women most often fill work requirements.”^[154] Even when women did the work of child care, fathers of children at these centers had “equal say” in the decision making.^[155] In a mother’s playgroup in Manhattan, a similar lack of father’s involvement occurred because of their work schedule. The young mother who started the group admitted, “I would like to be able to say that the fathers share equally in taking care of their children, but it just wouldn’t be true.”^[156] The inability to involve fathers or other childless men in the community posed a serious problem to the development of community-run child care centers.

No single issue accounts for the struggles of such child care co-ops or their eventual decline towards the end of the seventies. Setbacks ranged from disagreements between community members, arguments over the values of the centers, and frustrations with their day-to-day operations. These centers depended highly on the willingness of individuals to keep them running, and that willingness often became unreliable. This unreliability appears in Swinth’s summary of the demise of child care co-ops towards the end of the decade: “many of the cooperative storefront centers that radical feminists founded closed when parents’ energies went elsewhere; others never overcame licensing hurdles.”^[157] In some ways, the radical vision for child care proved wishful thinking — to succeed, childless community members and fathers who did not bear the brunt of childrearing would need to buy into a system that demanded their time and energy. In other ways, this vision was too radical, even for the radical feminists. Some feminist mothers were unwilling to give up their possessiveness or ownership over their children that the disintegration of the nuclear family called for. Further, these mothers did not always trust the very community members from whom they asked for help.

Swinth explains that as the seventies wore on, feminist grassroots organizing efforts around child care shifted to offering parents advice on how to find the best child care options for their circumstances.^[158] This shift reflected a larger rejection of community, state, and federal responsibility for child care: “collective campaigns…were increasingly eclipsed by placing responsibility squarely in the hands of individual households to find their own solution.”^[159] Despite the decline of child care co-ops towards the end of the seventies, during their period of popularity, co-ops still filled an important need in many communities. Swinth maintains that “grassroots efforts had produced sharp growth in daycare centers, an important achievement of the women’s movement in its own right.”^[160] Radical feminists not only increased child care options for parents in the seventies but also tested the limits of grassroots solutions for their lofty political goals. By experimenting with different forms of child care, radical feminists took on the critical task of imagining and trying out new structures of family, work, and community life.

Conclusion

In this paper, I look at how feminists tried to achieve their goal of twenty-four-hour child care — one of the movement’s three major priorities as outlined at the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970.^[161] I analyze feminists’ efforts to create child care systems both through the federal legislature and through community organizing. By putting the provisions of the CCDA and the Abzug-Chisholm bill in conversation with the voices of radical feminists in The Abzug-Chisholm Bill and the CCDA section, I demonstrate how these two bills, as first introduced to Congress, responded to some radical feminists’ child care needs. The CCDA would have made child care free for low-income families and would have created comprehensive, not just custodial child care. Yet, it did not meet feminist demands for twenty-four-hour care, focus on women’s needs, or work towards affordability for all families.^[162] The Abzug-Chisholm bill included these women-focused provisions in addition to a prohibition on sex-discrimination in the centers, increased funding, child development councils with two-thirds parent representation, and sponsorship limited to non-profit organizations only.^[163] Still, most radical feminists wanted complete parental control over child care centers, a level of involvement that a federally managed system like the CCDA or Abzug-Chisholm bill could not deliver.

In the Radical Visions of Child Care section, I review the ranging forms of radical feminist proposals for child care — centers controlled by parents but funded by city governments, employer-funded day care, university-sponsored day care, play groups, and completely independent child care co-ops. Further, I consider the goals and values of radical feminist child care collectives. Radicals hoped that parent-controlled child care co-ops could provide an early education for children, free of conceptions of child care as drudgery that only mothers performed. This model of group care also pushed back against parental possession over children and challenged the role of the nuclear family as the sole site of childrearing. Rather than placing the burden of child care on the nuclear family, and thus most often on women, collective child care placed responsibility for children on the broader community. These co-ops further produced a critique of the standard work routine, as radicals argued for more flexible hours and paid time off from work to participate in child care.

In the final section of the paper, I review the challenges that radical feminists faced in the implementation of collective child care. Although radicals thought of child care co-ops as centers that could involve and support all community members, they often remained inaccessible to low-income and minority families. Collective child care centers also faced a major challenge in maintaining consistent community volunteers. Mothers and non-mothers alike recounted their reluctance to take part in child care. Further, some co-ops such as those in Iowa City erupted into fierce conflict over the values of the centers and the differing levels of involvement of lesbians, mothers, and non-mothers. In most cases, fathers and childless men did not work equally in collective child care. Even radical feminists could not always commit to the principles at the center of their co-ops: relinquishing possessiveness over children, shared community childrearing, decreased work hours, trust of fellow parent volunteers. In these ways, the radical feminist child care co-ops fostered great debate and frustration, even as they called for the assembly of the community.

Since this paper relies primarily on the radical feminist dialogues on child care in the early seventies, it complements the picture of liberal feminist approaches to child care drawn by scholars such as Zigler, Morgan, and Halperin. Instead of ignoring the radical side of the women’s movement, this paper puts the words and the experiences of radicals into conversation with proposed legislation to consider where their political goals diverged. In this way, I build upon historians Dinner and Swinth to create a more holistic view of feminists’ complex proposals for child care. Importantly, I consider the precise child care goals of different radical feminists in their own language. The Radical Visions of Child Care section shows what the broader trends outlined by Dinner and Swinth — collective child care’s challenge to the nuclear family, new forms of community, and a “more balanced world of work and family” — looked like on the ground.^[164] I discuss both the values held by radicals and the details of how they tried to live out these values: through parents’ control of the day-to-day logistics of centers to involving fathers in child rearing and demanding employers provide more flexible work hours. Further, the Problems with Child Care Collectives section expands upon Dinner’s assertion that collectives were impractical for working-class parents and Swinth’s argument that such collectives closed “when parents’ energies went elsewhere.”^[165] This last section demonstrates that feminists ultimately had varying levels of commitment to their more radical goals, and disagreements over these goals and their implementation caused fractures within collectives. Non-parent community members and fathers also tended to reject radicals’ demand that they volunteer in centers, thus undermining the vision of collective responsibility for children. Dinner argues that “feminists who differed in their political, racial, and class backgrounds all identified childcare as an issue at the heart of their fraught relationships to the family as a social institution, paid employment, and the state.”^[166] This paper shows that while all feminists could agree with the goal of universal child care, the attempted implementation of that goal through community-based efforts produced conflict between feminists upon lines of class, race, sexuality, and parenthood. The idea of universal child care, while unifying in the abstract, frequently proved divisive when implemented on the community level.

Broadly, this paper explores the problems that arise when social movements attempt to implement their values on the ground. It also shows the importance of emphasizing the voices of those involved at the grassroots level of political movements. Radical feminist child care co-ops experimented with collective, grassroots solutions to a problem that legislative-focused, liberal feminists such as those in NOW failed to resolve. The first-hand accounts of their co-ops illustrate the messy process of rejecting the burden of child care as a solely female responsibility and attempting to place that responsibility on the broader community. Even if they eventually fell apart due to internal conflict and unsustainability, these co-ops tested the limits of how radical feminist ideas might materialize in practice.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Professor Canaday for her support in writing this JP, her helpful advice throughout the research process, and her thoughtful feedback on my drafts. I’d also like to thank David Hollander for teaching me how to navigate databases of Congressional records and Steve Knowlton for pointing me to a variety of useful primary materials. Thank you to Sara Howard as well for her generous help in navigating Firestone Library’s feminist resources and the UNOW archive. Lastly, thank you to Alex Gjaja, Emilio Cano Renteria, Rachel Sturley, Ellen Battaglia, Alice McGuinness, Ava Vilensky, and Julie Wilson for their moral support.

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“Nixon May Veto Child Development Legislation.” The Spokeswoman. November 1971. JSTOR.

“Notes on Becoming ‘Mother.’” Ain’t I a Woman? February 1, 1973. JSTOR.

“’Nother one Dialogue.” Ain’t I a Woman? February 1, 1973. JSTOR.

O’Brien, Marnette, Mav Pardee, Marie Schacter, Sheli Wortis. “Collective Child Care.” Women: A Journal of Liberation. July 1, 1972.

O'Brien, Marnette. “On the Road to Child Care for All.” The Second Wave. September 1, 1971. JSTOR.

Phillips, Lynn. “How to Build a People’s Health System.” Everywoman. February 5, 1971. JSTOR.

Stillman, Phyllis “Child Care Action Center.” her-self. November 1, 1972. JSTOR.

“Think about what it would be like to live my life.” Ain’t I a Woman? February 1, 1973, JSTOR.

“Tot Lot.” Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. August 8, 1971. JSTOR.

Unnamed gay working-class non-biological mother. “Et cum spiritu tuo.” Ain’t I a Woman? February 1, 1973. JSTOR.

W. L. Childcare Collective. “Launch Childcare Not Helicopters.” It Ain’t Me Babe. December 2, 1970. JSTOR.

“Women Caucus At White House Conference On Children.” The Spokeswoman. February 1, 1971. JSTOR.

Zirker, Priscilla. “The Politics of Day Care.” Off Our Backs. July 31, 1970. JSTOR.

“$23-Billion For Child Care.” The Spokeswoman. July 1, 1971. JSTOR.

Books and Articles

Dinner, Deborah. “The Universal Childcare Debate: Rights Mobilization, Social Policy, and the Dynamics of Feminist Activist, 1966-1974.” Law and History Review 28, no. 3 (August 2010).

Halperin, Anna Klein Danziger. “Unrequited Labor of Love: Child Care and Feminism.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no.4 (2020).

Karch, Andrew. Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982.

Michel, Sonya. Children’s Interests/Mother’s Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Morgan, Kimberly. “A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care.” The Journal of Policy History 13, no. 2 (2000).

Hartmann, Susan. From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985.

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.

Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: The Free Press, 2001.

Swinth, Kirsten. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. London: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Winslow, Barbara. Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change. Boulder: Westview Press, 2014.

Zarnow, Leandra Ruth. Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Zigler, Edward, Katherine Marsland, and Heather Lord. The Tragedy of Child Care in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Websites

“Early History.” National Women’s Political Caucus. Accessed April 1, 2022.

Michals, Debra. “Shirley Chisholm,” National Women’s History Museum. Accessed April 1, 2022.