{"id":1367,"date":"2015-01-25T19:52:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T19:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/?p=220"},"modified":"2015-01-25T19:52:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T19:52:48","slug":"will-obamas-vision-of-child-care-overcome-nixons-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2015\/01\/25\/will-obamas-vision-of-child-care-overcome-nixons-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Obama’s Vision of Child Care Overcome Nixon’s Legacy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

President Obama\u2019s forceful comments on the need for federal support of child-care programs were one of the most notable aspects of his recent State of the Union address<\/a>. As he said, \u201cIt\u2019s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women\u2019s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us \u2026. In today\u2019s economy, when having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, we need affordable, high-quality child care more than ever \u2026 [It is] a \u2018must-have,\u2019 and not a \u2018nice-to-have.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As a longtime advocate for quality, accessible child care, I was heartened to hear these words at\u00a0such a high-profile time. It occurred to me that it had been more than 40 years since a U.S. president had so visibly addressed the child-care issue\u2014and on that occasion, the message had been very different.<\/p>\n

In December 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1971,<\/a> primarily because the measure would have allocated some $2 billion for a Comprehensive Child Care Development Bill, which Congress had recently passed to pay for an extensive network of child-care facilities across the country. Nixon\u2019s veto message remains, in my view<\/a>, one of the most striking documents in the history of American family policy.<\/p>\n

Denouncing the bill for its \u201cfamily-weakening implications,\u201d Nixon went on to say that the appropriate response to the challenge of implementing child-centered policy \u201cmust be one consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.\u201d\u00a0Nixon continued:<\/p>\n

Other factors being equal, good public policy requires that we enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children \u2026 for the Federal government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The back story of the passage of the Comprehensive Child Care Bill, the controversy it created, and the pressure on Nixon to veto it are all topics very pertinent to the divisions over gender politics that still are such a factor in our society today. Seen as the first legislative victory of the recently reemerged women\u2019s movement, the bill\u2019s passage was a collaborative effort involving union women, feminist activists, children\u2019s advocates such as Marian Wright Edelman, and sympathetic (mostly male) elected officials, led by Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Rep. John Brademas (D-IN).<\/p>\n

Although many Republicans had voted for the bill, it still sparked a furor among many conservatives still reeling from the rapid cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s\u2014particularly the rise of feminism. Conservative journalists denounced the bill; Nixon\u2019s most hard-right staff members, including Pat Buchanan, urged him to oppose the bill on ideological grounds as well as fiscal ones. This was because Nixon had recently announced his intention to travel to \u201cRed\u201d China and normalize relations\u2014a move that enraged many conservatives of that period. It was therefore no accident that the language of the veto contained a negative comment about \u201ccommunal approaches to child-rearing.\u201d (Buchanan had also reportedly wanted to include the phrase \u201cthe Sovietization of American children<\/a>,\u201d but that phrase did not make the final cut.)<\/p>\n

After Nixon\u2019s veto, a later attempt in 1975 by Mondale and Brademas to offer a scaled-down version of their original ambitious bill never even made it out of Congress. This time around, their\u00a0efforts were met by an incredibly well-organized campaign by operatives in the just-emerging New Right, known today as the Christian\u00a0right. In this pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era, these conservative groups subjected thousands of mothers of young children to a massive misinformation blitz about the bill, instructing them to write letters to their representatives. As journalist Gail Collins remarked<\/a>, \u201cThe writers [of these letters] appeared to believe that [the bill] would allow children to organize labor unions, to sue their parents for making them do household chores and make it illegal for a parent to require their offspring to go to church.\u201d<\/p>\n

In retrospect, the virulent backlash\u2014from President Nixon, from housewives writing letters in church basements\u2014against these attempts at expanding federal involvement in child-care programs can be understood as the beginning of the culture wars in America. Indeed, as Onalee McGraw, a leading conservative spokeswoman of that era, put it<\/a>, the anti-child care campaign was \u201cthe opening shot in the battle over the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, the child-care issue did not last long as a mobilizing issue for social conservatives\u2014too many women, including conservative ones, were going to work. And in the years following the Roe v. Wade<\/i><\/a> decision of 1973, the New Right found a much more fruitful issue on which to focus.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the hopefulness expressed in the early 1970s by those who supported a national child-care program, which would have targeted all children with parents paying on a sliding income scale, today child care is like virtually all other social programs in the United States\u2014that is, deeply stratified by class. Wealthy parents typically have live-in nannies and send their children to extremely expensive preschools; middle-class parents, often with great difficulty, send their children to the best programs they can afford and are lucky enough to find a place in; and poor parents, if they are not fortunate enough to have reliable relatives living nearby, are subject to programs of varying, often dismal, quality<\/a>. What is clear is that parents are on their own, needing to devise private solutions to what Nixon himself framed as a private problem.<\/p>\n

It is too soon to say whether President Obama\u2019s positive vision for child care as a governmental responsibility will overcome the negative one of Richard Nixon and the culture warriors who advised him. In some respects, the situation of the two presidents, with respect to child care, are mirror images of each other. In the 1970s, there was a Congress who wanted a national child-care policy and a president who opposed it; with Obama, the opposite, sadly, seems true. But if nothing else, Obama\u2019s speech reaffirmed for a broader audience what those in the reproductive justice movement<\/a> already know\u2014that is, how crucial quality, affordable child care is for families in order to adequately care for the children they wish to have.<\/p>\n

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.\u00a0 On twitter: @carolejoffe.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

*This was originally posted at rhrealitycheck.org. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Obama\u2019s forceful comments on the need for federal support of child-care programs were one of the most notable aspects of his recent State of the Union address. As he said, \u201cIt\u2019s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women\u2019s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13676,8959,29822,30841],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childcare","tag-families","tag-family-policy","tag-policy-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}