Introducing: White Picket Fence

This special episode of The Pay Check features "What Could Have Been", the latest episode of White Picket Fence from Wonder Media Network.

How did the U.S. become a society that treats caregiving as a private family responsibility rather than a public good? In this episode, Julie explores the longstanding and continued role racism has played in preventing investments in public goods that would benefit everyone, including caregiving. We’ll also do a deep dive into the 1970s when the U.S. nearly invested in universal childcare — and how fear was deployed to block it.

Check out all the episodes from the new season of White Picket Fence wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everyone, it's Rebecca Greenfield, the co host of The Paycheck.
I wanted to tell you about a show from a
wonder media network you might really like. I'm not a
parent myself, but I know a lot of parents, and
I've read a lot about parenting during the pandemic. I
know how difficult it's been, between the zoom homeschooling or

(00:24):
the constant threat of closures because of COVID cases, not
to mention fears about the virus itself. In season two
of White Picket, Fence, Post and Single Mom, Julie Kohler
asks why did it have to be this way? She
talks to experts, activists, and parents as they unpack the
caregiving crisis in America and reveal why the conditions were

(00:45):
set long before COVID nineteen ever hit American shores. Julia
explores the myths about race, gender, families, and the economy
that have gotten us to a point where so many
parents and especially mothers, are cracking. She also looks at
how the pandemic could change things. It could be a
tipping point. We could build an alternative economic approach, one

(01:09):
that puts caregiving at the center of the economy. Stay
tuned to hear the latest episode, and don't forget to
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you listen to
this show, you probably already realized that I'm a bit

(01:29):
of a political junkie. I spend a lot of my
day thinking about, discussing, and writing about politics and policy,
so it shouldn't come as a surprise to hear that
I've been following the debate over President Biden's Build Back
Better Act pretty closely. Several months ago, I noticed a
lot of prominent conservatives leveling a coordinated attack against the

(01:53):
acts childcare provisions. Specifically, they argued that investments in childcare
would penalized families in which a parent stays home to
raise children. It sounded kind of ludicrous. I mean, how
is someone who doesn't need childcare penalized by its availability?
The Build Back Better Act wouldn't require anyone to use childcare.

(02:16):
Parents could choose to access child care for their children
or not. They could choose to take advantage of free
pre K or not. But then I realized that this
argument was tapping into something more fundamental fear. We need
to take this argument seriously because, as we'll talk about today,
fear is what's been used to block investments in child

(02:36):
care for decades, in any public benefit that would help families.
This fear evokes the same nostalgic undertones for the traditional
nuclear family that we talked about last week, and by
framing child care is a preference of elite families, they're
tapping into the anti feminism that was used the last
time we had a political debate over child care fifty

(02:59):
years ago. But if we're going to talk about fear
and how it's been used to block investments in the
common good, then we're also going to have to talk
about something else, racism. I'm Julie Cohler, and this is
White Picket Fence. This season, we're exploring our country's caregiving
crisis and the ideologies about race, gender, families, the economy,

(03:25):
and yes, white women that have blocked public investment in
care and let us to a point where so many
of us are cracking. As we've talked about a lot,
the US does not have a national child care system,
and our lack of investment has had devastating effects on women, children,

(03:46):
and our economy. Right now, with the Build Back Better Act,
the Biden administration might deliver a four hundred billion dollar
investment in universal pre K and childcare. It would be
a revolutionary step. Here's the thing, though, this is not
our country's first rodeo with national childcare. The system once existed.

(04:10):
During World War Two, our government spent seventy eight million
dollars creating high quality child care centers. These centers helped
Rosie the Riveter and thousands like her enter the workforce.
Seven percent of Richmond ship builders were women. Feminine workers
with small children inspired the founding of thirty five nursery

(04:31):
school units and then extended daycare centers, which mothered over
fourteen hundred youngsters at a time. But after the war
funding evaporated, these centers disappeared and the number of women
working plummeted. Then came the sixties, second wave feminism, civil rights,

(04:54):
a dramatic rise in women's employment, and suddenly there was
political interest in child care again. In fact, fifty years ago,
the Comprehensive Child Development Act landed on President Nixon's desk.
It had passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support,
and Nixon vetoed it. He warned of a communal approach

(05:16):
to child wearing, and the bill's family weakening implications. Those
are direct quotes, says, the two billion dollars to have
been spent on the first year for childcare would be,
as he put it, a long leap into the dark.
The Build Back Better Act is facing familiar opposition from conservatives,
peddaling Nixon era rhetoric. Some have invoked fears of a

(05:39):
government takeover of daycare. Others have claimed that investments in
childcare would be unfair to so called traditional families, where
mothers stay at home with their kids. This plan is
meant to get as many parents, especially mothers, into the workforce.
I stopped and say, well, why do we want that.
Let me be clear, Radical Democrats are not the party

(06:01):
of parents, and they're certainly not the party for children.
Their interests in passing universal child care and universal pre
k is just to start indoctrinating our kids sooner. Children
are not entitled to government daycare. What children are entitled
to is love from their own parents. But this time

(06:22):
the rhetoric is falling short. It looks like the childcare
bill might pass. The Build Back Better Act would create
free universal pre K for three and four year olds.
It would limit childcare expenses to seven percent of family's income,
nine and ten American families with young children would gain
access to affordable childcare. It really makes you wonder why

(06:44):
it took fifty years to happen, to understand why we
need to first understand what went wrong back in Here's
Nancy Cohen, president of the Gender Equality Policy Institute. Let
me still art with setting the scene of the women's

(07:04):
movements and the feminist movements of the late sixties and
early seventies. It was really one of the only times
in American history that the women's movement, very broad based,
very diverse, was a mass movement by n had significantly

(07:26):
changed public opinion in favor of a lot of issues
that we would consider central to women's equality and gender equality.
At the same time, you have a reactionary President Mixon
in office. So in the middle of all of that
entered a Midwestern senator with a big idea. What you

(07:50):
have in setting the scene for this bill being introduced.
Senator Walter Mondale had always been a strong at the
kit for children, true progressive. Came from a poor family
himself and had a very precarious childhood, so his interest
in this came a little bit out of understanding what

(08:13):
it was like for children. Fans of the show will
remember this fun fact from last season's prologue, Walter Mondale,
former Minnesota Senator and vice president, winning the Democratic nomination
was the catalyst for my own passion for politics. He's
kind of my guy, so it's no surprise to me

(08:33):
that he championed this effort. And at the time, lots
of things, public opinions, social movements, political influence, we're coming
together just right in favor of positive change. There was
a convergence of civil rights movements, of women's movements, child
development experts who realized that the US had already reached

(08:58):
a crisis where with women in the workforce, and so
through a lot of maneuvering, this Comprehensive Child Development Act
came through and passed the Senate by more than a
two thirds majority on a bipartisan vote, had a little
bit more difficulty in the House, but still passed the House.

(09:20):
The US was still in the tail end of President
Johnson's War on poverty, so there was very much a
sense of this was an economic justice bill and a
racial justice bill. These same social and political movements also
contributed to Nixon's veto all of those factors coming together

(09:42):
set the scene for Nixon vetoing the bill with a
really unhinged Vito message, warning that it would sovietize America,
that it was basically a communist plot. On one hand,
he's reaching to anti communist rhetoric, but it really was

(10:06):
a dog whistle to patriarchy. It may not sound surprising
that a Republican president shot down a childcare bill today,
that's kind of a given, but at the time it
was shocking. Nixon's own administration had helped draft the bill,
and Nixon was conflicted. He even requested two speeches, one

(10:28):
for signing the bill and one for vetoing it. So
who tipped the scales a guy named Pat Buchanan Back
then he was nixon speechwriter. He convinced the president that
killing the bill would boost his standing with an emerging
base of conservative activists. The real reason for the veto,

(10:49):
based on my research, is that it was a play
to the right. This is December one. Within a few weeks,
Nixon is go going to be running in the New
Hampshire primary for re election, and he faced an opponent
on his right who was very much playing to the

(11:11):
anti communist wings of the party. So Nixon had his
finger in the wind about where Republican primary voters were going.
I just want to emphasize that at the time there
are lots of feminists within the Republican Party and they

(11:32):
actually held sway over the anti feminists in the party.
The family values rhetoric that Nixon used wasn't actually mainstream.
The idea of women working was just not that political.
But Nixon saw where the grassroots energy and the party
was going. His vtail was the beginning of the end

(11:52):
for universal childcare. In the years that followed, Walter Mondale
tried to revive the bill, scaling back at scope. A
revised version passed the Senate ine, but it died in
the House. Talk of childcare proposals started to resurface a
couple of years later, but this time white conservative women

(12:13):
mobilized a massive counterattack. Now it was still tiny numbers
compared to the support that feminism had, and particularly these
pretty mainstream feminist ideas of providing childcare and equal pay.
But basically these women um mostly in the South, some

(12:33):
in the West in anti feminist groups got wind of
the childcare bills coming forward and in really an explicit
defense of patriarchy and women's suppordination in the family mobilized
and flooded Congress with thousands of letters opposing these childcare bills,

(13:01):
and that was it. That was the end of it.
For quite some time, anti feminism and anti socialism have
always been at the heart of the opposition to child
care or any of the supports that would make raising
children easier. We've been hearing these ideas recycled in the
debate over the Build Back Better Act, but opposition is

(13:23):
intrinsically linked to something else too, racism. We've talked about
how women of color, especially black women, have long provided
the domestic labor that keeps more affluent families afloat, and
their labor helped create this vision of the traditional nuclear family.
Our government's continued refusal to invest in childcare keeps that

(13:45):
work undervalued and underpaid. Here story and Warren, co president
of Community Change and co founder of the Economic Security Project.
I think to understand the care economy, pol sees again,
we have to go back to the founding and think
about the nature of care work and how devalued it

(14:07):
has been from for centuries. And this is not just
in the US, this is across the world where care
work has been defined in very stark gendered terms as
women's work and therefore um not deserving of dignity, of
value and of renumeration for that labor. And then you

(14:29):
add in the American racial context of who is doing
the care work for the first couple of hundred years
of this country, well, it was black women in particular.
And so if you look at the composition of who
is doing the care work in terms of women of color,
black women, immigrant women, if you think about essential workers today,

(14:49):
it's no coincidence to me that the composition of who
performs that work and the devaluation of that work goes
hand in hand. So this has been a long, long
effort to try to do the political work and the
cultural work to value care work as work as labor.
The death of child care bill didn't just hurt middle

(15:12):
class women who wanted to work outside the home. It
was part of a long history of policies that kept
a certain kind of work and worker low paid at
the margins of our economy. I have to point out
just to say the rules of our economy also helped
solidify the evaluation of care work. So I'm thinking here

(15:34):
of how domestic workers in particular were excluded from New
Deal social policies. Um, if you think of the Wagner
Act and the right to organize into a union domestic
and agricultural workers, Nope. If you think of the Fair
Labor Standard deck which is our minimum wage, domestic workers
and agricultural workers excluded. So domestic workers in particular have

(15:55):
always always been seen as another as those who are
only supposed to perform certain duties for wealthy and elite
and privileged people. And I think because of the decades
of organizing, we're at a potentially different and maybe even
transformative moment when it comes to care work. Right now,

(16:16):
like Nancy said, Nixon was reading the tea leaves, he
could see that a conservative grassroots movement was coming. It
was anti feminist, sure, and strongly antisocialist, but there was
something more. Racist backlash was at the heart of the
modern day conservative movement. Over the next couple of decades,
childcare became central to how that backlash would manifest itself

(16:40):
in our politics, and no one embraced that strategy more
clearly than an actor with big political ambitions Ronald Reagan.
Understanding Reagan as part of he is the exemplification. He
is sort of the maturity of the backlash against the

(17:01):
civil rights and black freedom movement in the sixties. He
comes out of, you know, very Goldwater and the conservative
West Coast politicians who were searching for ways to resist
the efforts at racial justice and racial equity. From the start,
Reagan embraced the racist dog whistle. He launched his presidential

(17:22):
campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where civil rights activists
James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Scharner were murdered for
trying to register black voters in four I know they're
speaking to this brow speaking what it has to be
a dog night Democrat. I just bid fight party affiliation.

(17:52):
I didn't mean how you feel now. I was a
Democrat post of my life myself, and that is not
an accident. He knew exactly what he was doing. That
was political strategy, and it was an explicit anti black
political strategy to really signal to white voters, especially white
Southern voters, I'm one of you, and I will take

(18:14):
up the lost cause. And he didn't stop there. And
then on the campaign trail, he tells this story over
and over and over, and it always enrages me every
time I even think about it, because it's very personal
for me. Tells the story of a black woman from Chicago.
Chicago is my hometown, so it's very personal for me,
and it's the welfare queen story. And he's telling this

(18:35):
story over and over all there's this woman in Chicago
and she has Cadillac and for coats and buy stakes
with her food, sad and all this stuff that becomes
the dominant narrative around welfare. Reagan ran on a platform
that's now synonymous with the Republican Party, low taxes, small government.
His welfare queen story was meant to be a cautionary

(18:57):
tale of wasteful government spending. But it was no coincidence
that the woman at the center of that story was black.
So Reagan is telling the story about wealth, you know,
the welfare queen over and over the Republican Party and
conservatives are repeating the story, and then Democrats at the time,
let's talk about it. We're also quick to jump in

(19:21):
on the story on the broader narrative around who is
deserving and who is not deserving. And we know what
both parties meant by that white people are deserving non
white people not deserving. We've been living with that legacy
for forty years. By stoking fear of so called undeserving

(19:42):
black single mothers, Reagan transformed our national conversation about public benefits,
and he wasn't alone. In the nine nineties, President Bill
Clinton reformed welfare. What was previously a program of cash
assistance for poor women and children became temporary system with
work requirements. President George W. Bush took welfare reform to

(20:05):
the next level. He dumped millions of dollars into marriage
promotion programs, literally government programs that encouraged poor women to
get married. These programs did nothing to reduce poverty or
increase marriage, but they further the belief that being poor
was the result of bad personal decision making. Common sense

(20:26):
policies like child care Bill became politically toxic. Any government
benefit evoked that welfare queen image. A lot of beliefs
about gender and race have made the U S an
inhospitable place for families, especially mothers and other caregivers. But
at the root of all of this is a fear

(20:48):
that helping the vulnerable will somehow hurt the rest of us.
It's what some call is zero sum scarcity framework. This
fear is what kept the US from creating a child
system back in. It's what prompted politicians from both parties
to get our social safety net in the following decades,
and it's what conservatives trotted out again in the debate

(21:11):
over the Built Back Better Act. Its origins run deep well.
I think the origins of our zero some scarcity framework
essentially come from the origins of this country, and so
um due respect to Nicolahannah Jones, the sixteen nineteen project,
I think we can start there in the structuring of

(21:32):
a country. First of taking of land from indigenous inhabitants
who already were on that land. That's already the beginning
of a zero sum framework. And notion that somehow the
folks who were already here did not deserve the land
of this country like these white settlers, and so that's

(21:55):
the beginning of zero some. And then you add in
and servants, and then of course those who were enslave,
particularly from the continent of Africa, and the notion that, um,
it was divinely ordained that some people did not deserve
the same freedoms as others, and particularly not only deserved
the same freedoms were meant to be exploited for others wealth.

(22:20):
So I tend to think of American history and in
three numbers and five, and those represent decades. So the
first twenty five decades system of chattel slavery and human bondage.
Then we had a civil war and a little period
called reconstruction, which was the idea was to reconstruct our

(22:40):
democracy and economy. And then that short period ended, it
was fought against, and we had another ten decades of
Jim Crow, what some scholars called slavery by another name.
So that's twenty five decades of slavery, then ten decades
or a hundred years of Jim Kroll, and then the

(23:01):
last number is five. The last five decades or fifty
years or so, we have seen the opening up in
many ways of this country in terms of full citizenship,
particularly for black people. But that's a recent amount. That's
a small amount of time in the great sweep of history.
And so if you think of the first twenty five

(23:22):
decades and then the second ten decades, zero sum thinking
pervaded our country throughout that entire time. And so it's
not an accident that here we are. You know, five
decades after the civil rights movement and the women's movement,
and the gay liberation movement and others, that we're still

(23:42):
dealing with this fundamental framework that has to find the
country from the founding. One piece of legislation can't undo
this foundational framework, but I believe that it can be
an important first step. As author and activist Heather McGee
writes in her book The Some of Us, there's a
way to defeat the zero sum thinking. It's by cultivating

(24:04):
what she calls the solidarity dividend, the idea that by
coming together across race, we can accomplish what we can't
do on our own. McGee says that the quickest way
to get there is to refill the pool on public
goods for everyone. Child Care is one of those critical
public goods. But to get there, we need not only

(24:26):
to overcome the nostalgic ideology of family life that continues
to be evoked today, and not only the racial fear
and stratification that's been with us since our nation's founding.
We will need to overcome a theory about the economy
that has become something close to religious doctrine for much
of the last half Century next week on White Picket Fence.

(24:49):
You know, it's kind of like the fish in the
bowl of water doesn't know that it's in the bowl
of water until it suddenly finds itself outside the bowl
of water, gasping for air. White pick of Fence is
a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddie Foley,
Eadie Allard, and Taylor Williamson. Executive producer is Jenny Kaplan.

(25:12):
Special thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
Share Descent Fund for their generous support for this season.
We want to hear about your caregiving experiences, especially during
the pandemic. Just called to one to six five zero
four eight and leave us a voicemail with your story.

(25:33):
We might just play it on the show. That's two
one to six five zero four eight.