Introducing: White Picket Fence

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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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, 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,

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. 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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