Sonya Michel, Children's Interest/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)

IN CHILDREN'S INTEREST/Mothers' Rights, Sonya Michel documents the "long, sad history of child care" in America. (280) In doing so, she covers a lot of territory: from America's earliest "dame schools," begun as early as 1673, and fairly numerous by the late 17th century, (15) through to the Reagan administration and the rise of corporate child care, (255-74) with the most detail devoted to the years bracketed by the late 19th century and the Korean war. America's lack of a comprehensive, state-sponsored system of child care, Michel concludes, is due to a history of "rights withheld." (3)

In foregrounding rights, Michel signals a distinctly feminist analysis that addresses child care as a matter of social citizenship for women. Given the distribution of domestic and reproductive labour, out-of-home child care functions as a substitute for mother-care. Michel argues that both child care historiography (a small field), as well as child care advocates and policy makers regularly avoid this ineluctably gendered reality.

Historical writings on child care, she points out, are characterized by curious disjunctures. Most women's labour historians address female employment without asking how mothers dealt with their children while they were on the job. Historians of children and families "detach child care from maternal employment." (7) Child care is generally invisible in histories of education, and seldom appears in the history of social welfare and welfare state development. In sum, the "artificial division between social welfare history and women's history has prevented scholars from drawing connections between child care provision and mothers' economic and social status." (8) These gaps are successfully bridged in Children's Interest/Mothers' Rights.

The book is rich and valuable, furthermore, on at least three additional counts. First, it provides a compelling story of how child care services developed, drawing on sources from individual nursery case files through to federal policy, with attention to policy-makers, the emerging field of social welfare experts, and the social movement that fought for services. Michel handles a broad array of evidence to establish the complex forces that shaped American child care policy. She deftly documents the interplay between structural conditions (mainly the rising labour force participation of women) and the active agency of service providers and inter- and extra-state players as diverse as the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Society, the President's Commission on the Status of Women, and the Inter-City Council for the Day Care of Children.

The book's second accomplishment is equally strong. In a significant contribution to intellectual and political history, Michel demonstrates how hegemonic assumptions about women, mothers, children, and families have shifted. Here, she is especially attentive to the transformation of early maternalist ideology, benevolence, and charity into the meager gendered, raced, and classed provisions that count as America's social services. These ideological and cultural shifts are linked to social and political forces, as the book addresses how organizational, political, and party forces intersect with state politics, from the local to the national; all within a political economy context. Over the 297 pages of Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights, Michel shows how American child care policy is premised on a residual or "crisis-oriented" (294) rationale, as opposed to an understanding of child care as a normal, universal, and non-pathological service. As a stunted conceptualization, this notion of child care as a servi ce of last resort reserved for the "deserving" family authorizes minimal public spending, stigmatizing means-testing, and lack of social approval.

Thus, Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights is a theoretically dynamic work. In it, Michel is particularly sensitive to the class and race dynamics that underwrite child care in both the voluntary and public sectors. Like other institutions, child care was often characterized by blatantly racist policies and practice. "Starch and scripture" motivated leading philanthropic women, such as the WCTU's Frances Willard, to establish child care services in the 19th century. Willard once called the kindergarten movement "the greatest theme, next to salvation by faith, that can engage a woman's heart and brain" -- yet most white-run nurseries, in both the North and South, were segregated. (39) Race differences characterized service delivery in other ways. For example, black women's groups regularly established universal child care, unlike white women's organizations which were conflicted about maternal employment and preferred targeted services. Class and party differences also shaped the child care movement. Like Afri can American women, some labour- and Communist-influenced groups also demanded services for all children, not just the "needy." In the words of AFL-CIO spokesperson Esther Peterson in 1960 at the White House Conference on Children and Youth, "Daycare should be available without regard to the motives of the consumer. Persons in the lower income brackets should not be subjected to any more scrutiny ... than those with higher incomes." (223)

In exploring this political and ideological landscape, Michel argues that the failure of child care to become an entitlement in America mitigates against women's and children's full social citizenship. Moreover, the persistent denial of public responsibility for child care in America is a constitutive element of America's welfare state regime. The US, like Canada and Australia, emphasizes free competition, an unfettered market, and a reluctance to commit public resources to social goals. Michel develops these observations as she situates American child care policy in the "Epilogue," which provides thumbnail sketches of child care mobilization and policy in Sweden, France, Japan, Australia, and Canada. The "Epilogue" appears grafted on: the surveys are too brief at a page or two per country. The "Epilogue's" comparative impulse is commendable, but in such an under-developed form, it sounds the only jarring note in an otherwise marvelous work.

Finally, the historical threads combine -- highly appropriately -- into a contemporary political commentary. Michel's long and comparative view leads her to conclude that child care is further than ever from universal provision. At a time when poor and low-income women are being offered only minimal services, she acknowledges that "it might appear unseemly to even raise the issue of universal entitlement. Yet, it is precisely because the discourses surrounding child care have become so fractured by race and class that this deeply flawed policy has been allowed to develop in the first place." (280) Her recommendation for strategic intervention is that America needs a unified constituency for child care, in whose collective organizing lies the possibility to change the terms of provision.

In America, it seems, neither the state nor social activists know what to do about working mothers. In the New Deal days, child care became "the road not taken," as mother's pensions triumphed as the solution preferred by politicians and social policy experts. The legacy of this choice, and the history that preceded it, endures: child care is conceived of as a pathological and residual service restricted to the needy, and maternal employment still confounds the country. Compounding this problem, child care advocates are weak champions for their cause, not only because they face formidable opposition but also because of their organizational ambivalence. A key thread running throughout Michel's book is that child care must be conceived of as a mother's right as much as a child's need. Yet, contemporary advocates emphasize the links between child care and children's interests, while avoiding any association with women's rights out of fear that it will harm their cause. (7) Sadly, into the breach created by the l ack of an effective social movement of child care users and their supporters, conservatives have exploited child care as a means of ending welfare "dependency" and mandating employment for the poor. Michel is thunderous in her condemnation of the result. It is, she blasts, "a perverse and tragic misuse of a form of social provision that in other countries is regarded as a boon to both children and mothers." (297) Children's needs and mothers' rights indeed.