.png)
"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women." When sociologist Jessica Calarco said that in an interview for Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study newsletter in November of 2020, it struck a nerve in a country still staggering under the weight of COVID.
In that 2020 interview, Calarco recalled how legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills “described using a ‘sociological imagination’ as seeing how individual human lives are shaped both by ‘history and biography,’” in contrast to the way our individualistic society "promotes individual solutions to deeply structural problems." In her book, Calarco exemplifies what Mills meant, both in the ways she tells individual stories drawn from hundreds of women and how she weaves them into the larger story of American history from the New Deal to the present, occasionally drawing contrasts with European countries that have more robust safety nets.
The child care crisis — the current lack of affordable child care for families — illustrates how we rely on mothers to fill in gaps in our economy and our social safety net. So looking back in time and finding a moment when we did create a child care system on a national level is a way to show that this is possible in the U.S., but that we also have a long track record of pushing this work onto women instead.
During World War II, we needed as many women in the workforce as possible, and that included mothers of young children. But not only did many states have legal policies in place that prevented women with children from working, or made it impossible for them to access all but the most menial jobs, there also wasn't a child care system to rely on.
So Congress, after some pressure, decided to use funds from the Lanham Act [which authorized defense-related infrastructure projects] to build child care centers in many parts of the U.S. Those offered high-quality, low-cost care for both young children and also school-age children after school and in the summer. The employment rate among mothers with young children went from one in 30 to one in six.
At the end of the war, almost all of these women wanted to stay in their jobs. But instead we decided to shutter those child care centers and force them back home, in many cases putting back in place those employment bans and using the kinds of cultural attitudes that permeated the 1950s to persuade women their natural place was in the home.
This laid the groundwork for the kind of policy decisions that we've made subsequently, treating women as this our reserve force of labor, as we saw during COVID. When we need women in the economy, we do things to pull them back in, and when we don't need them in the economy, we're very happy to push them back out again. We treat their labor as something we can toggle up and down depending on the needs and whims of the economy, as opposed to something that we should be investing in and supporting overall.
Other countries have invested in social safety nets to help manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, to give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities and also to help ensure that people have the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care, to take care of their homes and their children and even themselves. In the U.S. we try to DIY society: We cut taxes, we slash huge holes in the meager safety net that we do have and we tell people that if they just make good choices, they won't need government support to take care of their families or themselves.
Love this!