Who cares? : constructing the child care workforce, 1970-2000
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines how Americans constructed a waged child care workforce to replace the traditionally unwaged labor of maternal care. Covering the years between 1970 and 2000, as maternal labor force participation grew dramatically across race and class, the dissertation explores both grassroots action and governmental policy to expand the child care workforce and assign value to the labor of child care. Focusing geographically on metropolitan centers on both coasts, this study relies on government documents, the press, oral histories, and the institutional records of various labor unions and advocacy groups. Part One focuses on workers in group child care (day care centers and family child care homes), who began mobilizing to address child care labor issues in the 1970s and early 1980s. This section explores how both grassroots collectives and national unions fought for better wages and increased worker power in the child care industry's nascency. Part Two shifts toward child care in private households to examine how immigration reform and neoliberalization in the 1980s and early 1990s ushered in two efforts to expand the availability of in-home providers: the establishment of the U.S. Au Pair Program and a profusion of nanny training academies. Both of these approaches represented racialized and class-inflected efforts to shape the child care workforce in an image that many white, middle-class American families desired. Part Three returns to group-based child care to show how, by the 1990s, day care workers and family care providers expanded child care labor activism into a national movement that struggled for traction in a decentralized industry and in the context of state retrenchment from social welfare. Considering these case studies in tandem, several findings emerge about the labor history of child care. First, the close association of waged child care with the unwaged labor of mothering, combined with the perception of motherhood as oppositional to exchange, resulted in an uneven incorporation of child care into the market. Second, debates over skill -- whether child care was best taught through certification and training or intergenerational transfers of caring knowledge -- divided generations of child care labor activists who sought better wages and working conditions. Third, the deep personal relationships between child care workers and those they cared for both strengthened and hampered efforts to improve the wages and status of the labor. Finally, child care labor activists never accepted the unresponsiveness of government actors to growing child care demand. Working with parents, they contested retrenchment at every turn. Policymakers' neglect of child care, however, is also somewhat mythic. Rather than abstaining from involvement in child care, federal actors intervened in support of solutions that drew new workers into the American labor force as marginal, quasi-market laborers.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Modica, Justine Victoria |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Campbell, James T |
| Degree supervisor | Freedman, Estelle B, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Campbell, James T |
| Thesis advisor | Freedman, Estelle B, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Orleck, Annelise |
| Degree committee member | Orleck, Annelise |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Justine Modica. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/pb496vw5377 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Justine Victoria Modica
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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