Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, it's Rebecca Greenfield, the co host of The Paycheck.
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell you about a show from a
Speaker 1: wonder media network you might really like. I'm not a
Speaker 1: parent myself, but I know a lot of parents, and
Speaker 1: I've read a lot about parenting during the pandemic. I
Speaker 1: know how difficult it's been, between the zoom homeschooling or
Speaker 1: the constant threat of closures because of COVID cases, not
Speaker 1: to mention fears about the virus itself. In season two
Speaker 1: of White Picket, Fence, Post and Single Mom, Julie Kohler
Speaker 1: asks why did it have to be this way? She
Speaker 1: talks to experts, activists, and parents as they unpack the
Speaker 1: caregiving crisis in America and reveal why the conditions were
Speaker 1: set long before COVID nineteen ever hit American shores. Julia
Speaker 1: explores the myths about race, gender, families, and the economy
Speaker 1: that have gotten us to a point where so many
Speaker 1: parents and especially mothers, are cracking. She also looks at
Speaker 1: how the pandemic could change things. It could be a
Speaker 1: tipping point. We could build an alternative economic approach, one
Speaker 1: that puts caregiving at the center of the economy. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned to hear the latest episode, and don't forget to
Speaker 1: subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you listen to
Speaker 1: this show, you probably already realized that I'm a bit
Speaker 1: of a political junkie. I spend a lot of my
Speaker 1: day thinking about, discussing, and writing about politics and policy,
Speaker 1: so it shouldn't come as a surprise to hear that
Speaker 1: I've been following the debate over President Biden's Build Back
Speaker 1: Better Act pretty closely. Several months ago, I noticed a
Speaker 1: lot of prominent conservatives leveling a coordinated attack against the
Speaker 1: acts childcare provisions. Specifically, they argued that investments in childcare
Speaker 1: would penalized families in which a parent stays home to
Speaker 1: raise children. It sounded kind of ludicrous. I mean, how
Speaker 1: is someone who doesn't need childcare penalized by its availability?
Speaker 1: The Build Back Better Act wouldn't require anyone to use childcare.
Speaker 1: Parents could choose to access child care for their children
Speaker 1: or not. They could choose to take advantage of free
Speaker 1: pre K or not. But then I realized that this
Speaker 1: argument was tapping into something more fundamental fear. We need
Speaker 1: to take this argument seriously because, as we'll talk about today,
Speaker 1: fear is what's been used to block investments in child
Speaker 1: care for decades, in any public benefit that would help families.
Speaker 1: This fear evokes the same nostalgic undertones for the traditional
Speaker 1: nuclear family that we talked about last week, and by
Speaker 1: framing child care is a preference of elite families, they're
Speaker 1: tapping into the anti feminism that was used the last
Speaker 1: time we had a political debate over child care fifty
Speaker 1: years ago. But if we're going to talk about fear
Speaker 1: and how it's been used to block investments in the
Speaker 1: common good, then we're also going to have to talk
Speaker 1: about something else, racism. I'm Julie Cohler, and this is
Speaker 1: White Picket Fence. This season, we're exploring our country's caregiving
Speaker 1: crisis and the ideologies about race, gender, families, the economy,
Speaker 1: and yes, white women that have blocked public investment in
Speaker 1: care and let us to a point where so many
Speaker 1: of us are cracking. As we've talked about a lot,
Speaker 1: the US does not have a national child care system,
Speaker 1: and our lack of investment has had devastating effects on women, children,
Speaker 1: and our economy. Right now, with the Build Back Better Act,
Speaker 1: the Biden administration might deliver a four hundred billion dollar
Speaker 1: investment in universal pre K and childcare. It would be
Speaker 1: a revolutionary step. Here's the thing, though, this is not
Speaker 1: our country's first rodeo with national childcare. The system once existed.
Speaker 1: During World War Two, our government spent seventy eight million
Speaker 1: dollars creating high quality child care centers. These centers helped
Speaker 1: Rosie the Riveter and thousands like her enter the workforce.
Speaker 1: Seven percent of Richmond ship builders were women. Feminine workers
Speaker 1: with small children inspired the founding of thirty five nursery
Speaker 1: school units and then extended daycare centers, which mothered over
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred youngsters at a time. But after the war
Speaker 1: funding evaporated, these centers disappeared and the number of women
Speaker 1: working plummeted. Then came the sixties, second wave feminism, civil rights,
Speaker 1: a dramatic rise in women's employment, and suddenly there was
Speaker 1: political interest in child care again. In fact, fifty years ago,
Speaker 1: the Comprehensive Child Development Act landed on President Nixon's desk.
Speaker 1: It had passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support,
Speaker 1: and Nixon vetoed it. He warned of a communal approach
Speaker 1: to child wearing, and the bill's family weakening implications. Those
Speaker 1: are direct quotes, says, the two billion dollars to have
Speaker 1: been spent on the first year for childcare would be,
Speaker 1: as he put it, a long leap into the dark.
Speaker 1: The Build Back Better Act is facing familiar opposition from conservatives,
Speaker 1: peddaling Nixon era rhetoric. Some have invoked fears of a
Speaker 1: government takeover of daycare. Others have claimed that investments in
Speaker 1: childcare would be unfair to so called traditional families, where
Speaker 1: mothers stay at home with their kids. This plan is
Speaker 1: meant to get as many parents, especially mothers, into the workforce.
Speaker 1: I stopped and say, well, why do we want that.
Speaker 1: Let me be clear, Radical Democrats are not the party
Speaker 1: of parents, and they're certainly not the party for children.
Speaker 1: Their interests in passing universal child care and universal pre
Speaker 1: k is just to start indoctrinating our kids sooner. Children
Speaker 1: are not entitled to government daycare. What children are entitled
Speaker 1: to is love from their own parents. But this time
Speaker 1: the rhetoric is falling short. It looks like the childcare
Speaker 1: bill might pass. The Build Back Better Act would create
Speaker 1: free universal pre K for three and four year olds.
Speaker 1: It would limit childcare expenses to seven percent of family's income,
Speaker 1: nine and ten American families with young children would gain
Speaker 1: access to affordable childcare. It really makes you wonder why
Speaker 1: it took fifty years to happen, to understand why we
Speaker 1: need to first understand what went wrong back in Here's
Speaker 1: Nancy Cohen, president of the Gender Equality Policy Institute. Let
Speaker 1: me still art with setting the scene of the women's
Speaker 1: movements and the feminist movements of the late sixties and
Speaker 1: early seventies. It was really one of the only times
Speaker 1: in American history that the women's movement, very broad based,
Speaker 1: very diverse, was a mass movement by n had significantly
Speaker 1: changed public opinion in favor of a lot of issues
Speaker 1: that we would consider central to women's equality and gender equality.
Speaker 1: At the same time, you have a reactionary President Mixon
Speaker 1: in office. So in the middle of all of that
Speaker 1: entered a Midwestern senator with a big idea. What you
Speaker 1: have in setting the scene for this bill being introduced.
Speaker 1: Senator Walter Mondale had always been a strong at the
Speaker 1: kit for children, true progressive. Came from a poor family
Speaker 1: himself and had a very precarious childhood, so his interest
Speaker 1: in this came a little bit out of understanding what
Speaker 1: it was like for children. Fans of the show will
Speaker 1: remember this fun fact from last season's prologue, Walter Mondale,
Speaker 1: former Minnesota Senator and vice president, winning the Democratic nomination
Speaker 1: was the catalyst for my own passion for politics. He's
Speaker 1: kind of my guy, so it's no surprise to me
Speaker 1: that he championed this effort. And at the time, lots
Speaker 1: of things, public opinions, social movements, political influence, we're coming
Speaker 1: together just right in favor of positive change. There was
Speaker 1: a convergence of civil rights movements, of women's movements, child
Speaker 1: development experts who realized that the US had already reached
Speaker 1: a crisis where with women in the workforce, and so
Speaker 1: through a lot of maneuvering, this Comprehensive Child Development Act
Speaker 1: came through and passed the Senate by more than a
Speaker 1: two thirds majority on a bipartisan vote, had a little
Speaker 1: bit more difficulty in the House, but still passed the House.
Speaker 1: The US was still in the tail end of President
Speaker 1: Johnson's War on poverty, so there was very much a
Speaker 1: sense of this was an economic justice bill and a
Speaker 1: racial justice bill. These same social and political movements also
Speaker 1: contributed to Nixon's veto all of those factors coming together
Speaker 1: set the scene for Nixon vetoing the bill with a
Speaker 1: really unhinged Vito message, warning that it would sovietize America,
Speaker 1: that it was basically a communist plot. On one hand,
Speaker 1: he's reaching to anti communist rhetoric, but it really was
Speaker 1: a dog whistle to patriarchy. It may not sound surprising
Speaker 1: that a Republican president shot down a childcare bill today,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a given, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was shocking. Nixon's own administration had helped draft the bill,
Speaker 1: and Nixon was conflicted. He even requested two speeches, one
Speaker 1: for signing the bill and one for vetoing it. So
Speaker 1: who tipped the scales a guy named Pat Buchanan Back
Speaker 1: then he was nixon speechwriter. He convinced the president that
Speaker 1: killing the bill would boost his standing with an emerging
Speaker 1: base of conservative activists. The real reason for the veto,
Speaker 1: based on my research, is that it was a play
Speaker 1: to the right. This is December one. Within a few weeks,
Speaker 1: Nixon is go going to be running in the New
Speaker 1: Hampshire primary for re election, and he faced an opponent
Speaker 1: on his right who was very much playing to the
Speaker 1: anti communist wings of the party. So Nixon had his
Speaker 1: finger in the wind about where Republican primary voters were going.
Speaker 1: I just want to emphasize that at the time there
Speaker 1: are lots of feminists within the Republican Party and they
Speaker 1: actually held sway over the anti feminists in the party.
Speaker 1: The family values rhetoric that Nixon used wasn't actually mainstream.
Speaker 1: The idea of women working was just not that political.
Speaker 1: But Nixon saw where the grassroots energy and the party
Speaker 1: was going. His vtail was the beginning of the end
Speaker 1: for universal childcare. In the years that followed, Walter Mondale
Speaker 1: tried to revive the bill, scaling back at scope. A
Speaker 1: revised version passed the Senate ine, but it died in
Speaker 1: the House. Talk of childcare proposals started to resurface a
Speaker 1: couple of years later, but this time white conservative women
Speaker 1: mobilized a massive counterattack. Now it was still tiny numbers
Speaker 1: compared to the support that feminism had, and particularly these
Speaker 1: pretty mainstream feminist ideas of providing childcare and equal pay.
Speaker 1: But basically these women um mostly in the South, some
Speaker 1: in the West in anti feminist groups got wind of
Speaker 1: the childcare bills coming forward and in really an explicit
Speaker 1: defense of patriarchy and women's suppordination in the family mobilized
Speaker 1: and flooded Congress with thousands of letters opposing these childcare bills,
Speaker 1: and that was it. That was the end of it.
Speaker 1: For quite some time, anti feminism and anti socialism have
Speaker 1: always been at the heart of the opposition to child
Speaker 1: care or any of the supports that would make raising
Speaker 1: children easier. We've been hearing these ideas recycled in the
Speaker 1: debate over the Build Back Better Act, but opposition is
Speaker 1: intrinsically linked to something else too, racism. We've talked about
Speaker 1: how women of color, especially black women, have long provided
Speaker 1: the domestic labor that keeps more affluent families afloat, and
Speaker 1: their labor helped create this vision of the traditional nuclear family.
Speaker 1: Our government's continued refusal to invest in childcare keeps that
Speaker 1: work undervalued and underpaid. Here story and Warren, co president
Speaker 1: of Community Change and co founder of the Economic Security Project.
Speaker 1: I think to understand the care economy, pol sees again,
Speaker 1: we have to go back to the founding and think
Speaker 1: about the nature of care work and how devalued it
Speaker 1: has been from for centuries. And this is not just
Speaker 1: in the US, this is across the world where care
Speaker 1: work has been defined in very stark gendered terms as
Speaker 1: women's work and therefore um not deserving of dignity, of
Speaker 1: value and of renumeration for that labor. And then you
Speaker 1: add in the American racial context of who is doing
Speaker 1: the care work for the first couple of hundred years
Speaker 1: of this country, well, it was black women in particular.
Speaker 1: And so if you look at the composition of who
Speaker 1: is doing the care work in terms of women of color,
Speaker 1: black women, immigrant women, if you think about essential workers today,
Speaker 1: it's no coincidence to me that the composition of who
Speaker 1: performs that work and the devaluation of that work goes
Speaker 1: hand in hand. So this has been a long, long
Speaker 1: effort to try to do the political work and the
Speaker 1: cultural work to value care work as work as labor.
Speaker 1: The death of child care bill didn't just hurt middle
Speaker 1: class women who wanted to work outside the home. It
Speaker 1: was part of a long history of policies that kept
Speaker 1: a certain kind of work and worker low paid at
Speaker 1: the margins of our economy. I have to point out
Speaker 1: just to say the rules of our economy also helped
Speaker 1: solidify the evaluation of care work. So I'm thinking here
Speaker 1: of how domestic workers in particular were excluded from New
Speaker 1: Deal social policies. Um, if you think of the Wagner
Speaker 1: Act and the right to organize into a union domestic
Speaker 1: and agricultural workers, Nope. If you think of the Fair
Speaker 1: Labor Standard deck which is our minimum wage, domestic workers
Speaker 1: and agricultural workers excluded. So domestic workers in particular have
Speaker 1: always always been seen as another as those who are
Speaker 1: only supposed to perform certain duties for wealthy and elite
Speaker 1: and privileged people. And I think because of the decades
Speaker 1: of organizing, we're at a potentially different and maybe even
Speaker 1: transformative moment when it comes to care work. Right now,
Speaker 1: like Nancy said, Nixon was reading the tea leaves, he
Speaker 1: could see that a conservative grassroots movement was coming. It
Speaker 1: was anti feminist, sure, and strongly antisocialist, but there was
Speaker 1: something more. Racist backlash was at the heart of the
Speaker 1: modern day conservative movement. Over the next couple of decades,
Speaker 1: childcare became central to how that backlash would manifest itself
Speaker 1: in our politics, and no one embraced that strategy more
Speaker 1: clearly than an actor with big political ambitions Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: Understanding Reagan as part of he is the exemplification. He
Speaker 1: is sort of the maturity of the backlash against the
Speaker 1: civil rights and black freedom movement in the sixties. He
Speaker 1: comes out of, you know, very Goldwater and the conservative
Speaker 1: West Coast politicians who were searching for ways to resist
Speaker 1: the efforts at racial justice and racial equity. From the start,
Speaker 1: Reagan embraced the racist dog whistle. He launched his presidential
Speaker 1: campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where civil rights activists
Speaker 1: James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Scharner were murdered for
Speaker 1: trying to register black voters in four I know they're
Speaker 1: speaking to this brow speaking what it has to be
Speaker 1: a dog night Democrat. I just bid fight party affiliation.
Speaker 1: I didn't mean how you feel now. I was a
Speaker 1: Democrat post of my life myself, and that is not
Speaker 1: an accident. He knew exactly what he was doing. That
Speaker 1: was political strategy, and it was an explicit anti black
Speaker 1: political strategy to really signal to white voters, especially white
Speaker 1: Southern voters, I'm one of you, and I will take
Speaker 1: up the lost cause. And he didn't stop there. And
Speaker 1: then on the campaign trail, he tells this story over
Speaker 1: and over and over, and it always enrages me every
Speaker 1: time I even think about it, because it's very personal
Speaker 1: for me. Tells the story of a black woman from Chicago.
Speaker 1: Chicago is my hometown, so it's very personal for me,
Speaker 1: and it's the welfare queen story. And he's telling this
Speaker 1: story over and over all there's this woman in Chicago
Speaker 1: and she has Cadillac and for coats and buy stakes
Speaker 1: with her food, sad and all this stuff that becomes
Speaker 1: the dominant narrative around welfare. Reagan ran on a platform
Speaker 1: that's now synonymous with the Republican Party, low taxes, small government.
Speaker 1: His welfare queen story was meant to be a cautionary
Speaker 1: tale of wasteful government spending. But it was no coincidence
Speaker 1: that the woman at the center of that story was black.
Speaker 1: So Reagan is telling the story about wealth, you know,
Speaker 1: the welfare queen over and over the Republican Party and
Speaker 1: conservatives are repeating the story, and then Democrats at the time,
Speaker 1: let's talk about it. We're also quick to jump in
Speaker 1: on the story on the broader narrative around who is
Speaker 1: deserving and who is not deserving. And we know what
Speaker 1: both parties meant by that white people are deserving non
Speaker 1: white people not deserving. We've been living with that legacy
Speaker 1: for forty years. By stoking fear of so called undeserving
Speaker 1: black single mothers, Reagan transformed our national conversation about public benefits,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't alone. In the nine nineties, President Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton reformed welfare. What was previously a program of cash
Speaker 1: assistance for poor women and children became temporary system with
Speaker 1: work requirements. President George W. Bush took welfare reform to
Speaker 1: the next level. He dumped millions of dollars into marriage
Speaker 1: promotion programs, literally government programs that encouraged poor women to
Speaker 1: get married. These programs did nothing to reduce poverty or
Speaker 1: increase marriage, but they further the belief that being poor
Speaker 1: was the result of bad personal decision making. Common sense
Speaker 1: policies like child care Bill became politically toxic. Any government
Speaker 1: benefit evoked that welfare queen image. A lot of beliefs
Speaker 1: about gender and race have made the U S an
Speaker 1: inhospitable place for families, especially mothers and other caregivers. But
Speaker 1: at the root of all of this is a fear
Speaker 1: that helping the vulnerable will somehow hurt the rest of us.
Speaker 1: It's what some call is zero sum scarcity framework. This
Speaker 1: fear is what kept the US from creating a child
Speaker 1: system back in. It's what prompted politicians from both parties
Speaker 1: to get our social safety net in the following decades,
Speaker 1: and it's what conservatives trotted out again in the debate
Speaker 1: over the Built Back Better Act. Its origins run deep well.
Speaker 1: I think the origins of our zero some scarcity framework
Speaker 1: essentially come from the origins of this country, and so
Speaker 1: um due respect to Nicolahannah Jones, the sixteen nineteen project,
Speaker 1: I think we can start there in the structuring of
Speaker 1: a country. First of taking of land from indigenous inhabitants
Speaker 1: who already were on that land. That's already the beginning
Speaker 1: of a zero sum framework. And notion that somehow the
Speaker 1: folks who were already here did not deserve the land
Speaker 1: of this country like these white settlers, and so that's
Speaker 1: the beginning of zero some. And then you add in
Speaker 1: and servants, and then of course those who were enslave,
Speaker 1: particularly from the continent of Africa, and the notion that, um,
Speaker 1: it was divinely ordained that some people did not deserve
Speaker 1: the same freedoms as others, and particularly not only deserved
Speaker 1: the same freedoms were meant to be exploited for others wealth.
Speaker 1: So I tend to think of American history and in
Speaker 1: three numbers and five, and those represent decades. So the
Speaker 1: first twenty five decades system of chattel slavery and human bondage.
Speaker 1: Then we had a civil war and a little period
Speaker 1: called reconstruction, which was the idea was to reconstruct our
Speaker 1: democracy and economy. And then that short period ended, it
Speaker 1: was fought against, and we had another ten decades of
Speaker 1: Jim Crow, what some scholars called slavery by another name.
Speaker 1: So that's twenty five decades of slavery, then ten decades
Speaker 1: or a hundred years of Jim Kroll, and then the
Speaker 1: last number is five. The last five decades or fifty
Speaker 1: years or so, we have seen the opening up in
Speaker 1: many ways of this country in terms of full citizenship,
Speaker 1: particularly for black people. But that's a recent amount. That's
Speaker 1: a small amount of time in the great sweep of history.
Speaker 1: And so if you think of the first twenty five
Speaker 1: decades and then the second ten decades, zero sum thinking
Speaker 1: pervaded our country throughout that entire time. And so it's
Speaker 1: not an accident that here we are. You know, five
Speaker 1: decades after the civil rights movement and the women's movement,
Speaker 1: and the gay liberation movement and others, that we're still
Speaker 1: dealing with this fundamental framework that has to find the
Speaker 1: country from the founding. One piece of legislation can't undo
Speaker 1: this foundational framework, but I believe that it can be
Speaker 1: an important first step. As author and activist Heather McGee
Speaker 1: writes in her book The Some of Us, there's a
Speaker 1: way to defeat the zero sum thinking. It's by cultivating
Speaker 1: what she calls the solidarity dividend, the idea that by
Speaker 1: coming together across race, we can accomplish what we can't
Speaker 1: do on our own. McGee says that the quickest way
Speaker 1: to get there is to refill the pool on public
Speaker 1: goods for everyone. Child Care is one of those critical
Speaker 1: public goods. But to get there, we need not only
Speaker 1: to overcome the nostalgic ideology of family life that continues
Speaker 1: to be evoked today, and not only the racial fear
Speaker 1: and stratification that's been with us since our nation's founding.
Speaker 1: We will need to overcome a theory about the economy
Speaker 1: that has become something close to religious doctrine for much
Speaker 1: of the last half Century next week on White Picket Fence.
Speaker 1: You know, it's kind of like the fish in the
Speaker 1: bowl of water doesn't know that it's in the bowl
Speaker 1: of water until it suddenly finds itself outside the bowl
Speaker 1: of water, gasping for air. White pick of Fence is
Speaker 1: a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddie Foley,
Speaker 1: Eadie Allard, and Taylor Williamson. Executive producer is Jenny Kaplan.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
Speaker 1: Share Descent Fund for their generous support for this season.
Speaker 1: We want to hear about your caregiving experiences, especially during
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Just called to one to six five zero
Speaker 1: four eight and leave us a voicemail with your story.
Speaker 1: We might just play it on the show. That's two
Speaker 1: one to six five zero four eight.