Kamala Harris’s focus on child care builds on generations of feminism

Earlier this month, former President Trump was asked a revealing question at the Economic Club of New York: What would he do about child care?

Trump’s clumsy response: “childcare is childcare‘ and then talking about tariffs – reflected how rarely men in the centers of power are asked to handle this essential labor historically assigned to women. A few weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a plan to prevent families from overspending 7% of their income on childcare.

Hearing about child care as a central issue in the presidential election is not politics as usual. It is, in fact, the culmination of the work of generations of feminist activists.

Valuing care work may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of feminism. American schools often teach feminism as a struggle for freedom from domestic work and caregiving responsibilities, led by largely white, middle- and upper-class women like Betty Friedan. From this lens, the success of feminism should be measured primarily by the number of women pursuing careers.

But there were other forms of feminism before, after and alongside this focus on paid work. In 1942, union organizer Kitty Ellickson wrote an influential essay about it a term for the reality women still live in, the ‘double day’ – doing the bulk of care work while also working for pay means doing two jobs for the price of one.

The solution, Ellickson wrote, was for the women’s movement to demand it of employers to adjust “the man’s world for women.” In this view, true gender equality meant challenging the idea that “men’s work” outside the home was more important than the work done at home. It also meant shorter workdays and access to affordable childcare. It is not surprising that these ideas emerged from the labor movement; women who worked in mines and factories were less likely to equate their jobs with liberation.

Work was also not an attractive feminist vision for those whose work outside the home was… in other people’s homes. Sometimes that work was not paid at all: the first domestic workforce in this country was enslaved women. Even today, it is often women of color who are the often underpaid, unprotected housework that persists as middle- or upper-class women leave for the office. According to a 2022 report, women of color make up more than half of domestic workers nationwide, with Black and Latina women overrepresented.

Dorothy Bolden, a black housekeeper in Atlanta and a contemporary of Friedan, started washing diapers for her mother’s employer at the age of nine. She fought against the invisibility of healthcare work and healthcare workers by organizing 10,000 domestic workers from the 1960s onwards for higher wages and better working conditions. She told me Georgia lawmakers that cleaners and nannies also had families: ‘I have to clothe my children.’

In the 1970s, welfare activists went further, arguing that mothers deserved government subsidies: if care work was real work, society should recognize its value with reward. Leaders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, including Johnnie Tillmon, noted that while our culture idealized white housewives as caring for their children full-time, leaders slandered Black mothers and portrayed them as welfare-dependent drains on the system. When mainstream feminist organizations came to advocate for universal daycare, welfare rights organizers demanded justice for those who would staff the centers. warning against the creation of an army of ‘institutionalised, partly independent mothers’.

This combination of insights from Black women leaders—that family care needs financial support, and that professional caregivers need fair working conditions—speaks to a profound vision of racial, gender, and economic equality that is often missing from mainstream feminism.

Although Harris is sometimes criticized for shifting issues, he has long advocated for family care subsidies and justice for health care workers. As a senator representing California, she sponsored the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act in 2019, which would guarantee overtime, sick days, meal and rest breaks, and initiated a study on how to improve health care, pensions and other benefits. more accessible. Her recent proposed 7% cap on childcare spending may be lower than the pensions for domestic workers and guaranteed incomes for single mothers that earlier radicals envisioned, but her choice to center this issue could shift our national consciousness toward shift progress.

Harris has supported care work without entrenching the ‘traditional’ family, focusing on policies that will help a wide range of households, such as paid family leaveaffordable long-term care and an extended one child tax credit. This is consistent with that of the National Welfare Rights Organization insist that single-parent families deserve the same respect as other families and the organization’s advocacy for policies to help caregivers regardless of their family structure.

Both Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, have done so expressed support for the expansion of the child tax credit. Still, Vance attacked work and childless women, discredited daycare and suggested that involving grandma or grandpa is a solution to childcare costs. In addition to criticizing and shaming women, these statements make it difficult to believe that a second Trump presidency would recognize that paid care work is a pressing need for many types of families and that caregivers deserve equal rights.

True equality for women – all of us, regardless of race and class – depends on supporting parents and fighting for the healthcare professionals, mostly women, who, in the words of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, “make all other work possible.” Maybe this kind of feminism is finally having its time.

Serene J. Khader, professor of philosophy at TThe CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College is the author of the forthcoming “Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop.”