Earlier this month, former President Trump was asked an open-ended question at the Economic Club of New York: What are you going to do about child care?
Trump’s bumbling response – saying “childcare is childcare“and then talk about rates – reflected how rarely people in the halls of power are asked to address this important work that has historically been assigned to women. A couple of weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a plan to prevent families from spending more than 7% from income in child care.
Hearing about child care as a front-and-center issue in a presidential election isn’t politics as usual. It was, in fact, the culmination of work by a generation of feminist activists.
Understanding care work may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of feminism. US schools often teach feminism as a fight for freedom from housework and caregiving, led by white, middle-class and upper-class women such as Betty Friedan. Through this lens, the success of feminism should be measured primarily by the number of women pursuing careers.
But there are other types of feminism before, after and alongside the focus on paid work. In 1942, union organizer Kitty Ellickson write an influence essay on term for the fact that women are still alive, “double day” – do the majority of care work while also working for pay doing two jobs for one price.
The solution, Ellickson wrote, was for the women’s movement to sue employers adaptation “A man’s world for a woman.” In this view, real gender equality means the question of whether “men’s work” outside the home is more important than the labor performed at home. It also means shorter work days and access to affordable childcare. It is not surprising that the idea grew out of the labor movement – women who worked in mines and factories tended not to be equal to those who worked independently.
Work is also not a happy feminist vision for those who work outside the home i.e. … in other people’s homes. Sometimes the work was unpaid: The country’s first domestic workforce consisted of enslaved women. Even today, women of color are often the ones receiving the lowest wages, unprotected domestic work which remains when middle or upper class women go to work. More than half of domestic workers nationwide are women of color, according to the 2022 report, with Black and Latina women overrepresented.
Dorothy Bolden, black domestic worker in Atlanta and Friedan’s contemporary, began washing diapers for his mother’s employer at the age of 9. 10,000 Domestic workers since the 1960s for higher wages and better working conditions. He told me Member of Parliament of Georgia the house cleaner and nanny also have a family: “I have to clothe my children.”
Through the 1970s, welfare rights activists went further and argued that mothers deserve government subsidies: If care work is real work, society should recognize its value by paying for it. Leaders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, including Johnnie Tillmon, noted that our culture expects white housewives to fully care for their children, boss vilified Black mothers and is described as a well-being-dependent channel in the system. While mainstream feminist organizations came to advocate for universal day care centers, welfare rights organizers demanded justice for the people who would staff the centers, be careful against creating an army of “institutionalized, partially independent mammies.”
This combination of insights from Black women leaders – that family care work needs financial support, and that professional care workers need fair working conditions – speaks for a deep vision of racial, gender and economic equality that has often been lacking in feminism ideas.
Harris, although sometimes criticized for changing the issue, has long supported family care subsidies as well as fairness for care workers. As a senator representing California, in 2019 he sponsored the Domestic Workers’ Rights Act, which would guarantee overtime pay, sick days, and meal and rest breaks, as well as start studying how to create health care, pensions and other benefits. more accessible. The new proposed 7% cap on child care costs may be less than the pension for domestic workers and guaranteed income for single mothers envisioned by previous radicals, but their choice to focus on this issue can turn our national consciousness towards progress.
Harris has advocated care work without listing the “traditional” family, focusing on policies that would help a variety of households such as paid family leaveaffordable long term treatment and expanded child tax credit. This is consistent with the National Welfare Rights Organization coerce that single-parent households deserve the same respect as other families and advocacy organizations for policies for caregivers regardless of family structure.
Both Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have voice support to develop the child tax credit. But Vance had struck to work and childless women, despised day care and suggest bringing Grandma or Grandpa as a solution to childcare costs. In addition to targeting and shaming women, these statements make it hard to believe that a second Trump presidency will acknowledge that paid care work is a vital need for many types of families and that care workers should have equal rights.
Real equality for women – all of us, regardless of race and class – depends on supporting parents and fighting for professional care workers, mostly women, who, in the words of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, “make all other work possible.” Perhaps this kind of feminism has finally had its day.
Serene J. Khader, professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, is the author of “Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop.”
