Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care After the Second World War (Gender & American Culture.)

Rating:
Summary: A different time
Review: Stoltzfus studies the roughly twenty years after World War 2, and the social attitudes in the United States towards women, in that time. She found that picking the topic of whether a government (federal or state) should offer child care to women in the workforce was a good focal point. It let her study the women's efforts to get this maintained after the war years, when it was introduced as an emergency measure. Plus, the reactions of the lobbied politicians and bureaucrats were typical of the prevailing social attitudes towards working women.

It really has not been that many years ago. Yet the echoes from these pages makes it seem like another era. Probably it was. When any employer could fire a female employee soley because she got married, or pregnant, with any risk of opprobrium.

The book also goes into the intertwining of the child care issue with that of race. How, in this pre-civil rights time, many women who had to work were Negro. Which naturally made harder the lobbying of white legislators.