It took a bloody war, and its production demands on the country's workforce, for the United States to make meaningful provisions for working parents. When the men came home, the programmes went away
The chairwoman of one of these actions told The Times that women wanted the centers so badly that “mothers able to do so, and some who really are not, have offered to raise to the limit of their ability the fees they have been paying.” The welfare commissioner, Edward Rhatigan, “deplored the ‘hysterical’ propaganda” about changes to the state’s plan and shared a sentiment that is perhaps at the heart of all the pervasive opposition to universal child care throughout American history: Many of the mothers, he said, worked only to “satisfy their desire for a career. They do not want relief checks but they will accept a public service at the taxpayers’ expense.”
Many women I know went back to work sooner than they wanted because the American workplace accepts nothing less than total capitulation to its schedule. Others yearned to go back, but simply could not swing the cost of child care. There’s resentment, and then there is tragedy. The news is full of working parents put in impossible situations. Just last July, a 3-year-old whose mother could not find child care drowned at her workplace in a terrible accident.
Almost a century ago hundreds of thousands of working women had access to affordable child care. It only took a war, an exodus of male workers and a dire threat to the economy to make it happen.
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