Kamala Harris’ 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 awkward response: “Childcare is childcare” and then talking about tariffs — reflected how rarely men in the centers of power are asked to take care of this essential work that has historically been assigned to women. A few weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a plan to prevent families from overspending 7% of their income for childcare.

Hearing that child care is a key issue in a presidential election is not common politics. It is, in fact, the culmination of the work of generations of feminist activists.

When we think of feminism, valuing care work may not be the first thing that comes to mind. In U.S. schools, feminism is often taught as a fight for freedom from housework and housework, led by predominantly white, middle- and upper-class women like Betty Friedan. From this perspective, the success of feminism should be measured primarily by the number of women pursuing a career.

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

The solution, Ellickson wrote, was for the women’s movement to demand this of employers adjust “A man’s world for women.” From this perspective, 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. Not surprisingly, these ideas emerged from the labor movement—women who worked in mines and factories were less likely to equate their work with liberation.

Nor was work an attractive feminist vision for those whose work lay outside the home…in other people’s homes. Sometimes this work was not paid at all: the first domestic workers in this country were enslaved women. Even today, women of color are often the ones who are often underpaid, unprotected housework This remains when middle or upper class women go to the office. According to a 2022 report, more than half of domestic workers across the country are women of color, with Black and Latino women being overrepresented.

Dorothy Bolden, a black domestic worker in Atlanta and a contemporary of Friedan, began washing diapers for her mother’s employer at the age of 9. She fought against the invisibility of nursing work and nursing staff by organizing 10,000 Starting in the 1960s, domestic workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions. She told Georgia legislature that cleaning ladies and nannies also had families: “I have to dress my children.”

In the 1970s, welfare rights activists went further, arguing that mothers deserved government subsidies: if care work was real work, society must recognize its value through pay. Leaders at the National Welfare Rights Organization, including Johnnie Tillmon, noted that while our culture idealizes white housewives because they care for their children full-time, Leader denigrated Black mothers and portrayed them as welfare-dependent burdens on the system. As mainstream feminist organizations moved 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 “institutionalized, partially self-employed mothers.”

This combination of insights from Black women leaders—that family care work needs financial support and that professional care workers need fair working conditions—reflects a deep 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 been an advocate for family care grants and justice for caregivers. As a senator for California, she supported the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act in 2019, which would have guaranteed overtime pay, sick days, and meal and rest breaks, and initiated a study on how to make health, retirement and other benefits more accessible. Their recently proposed 7% cap on child care costs may fall short of the domestic worker pensions and guaranteed income for single mothers that previous radicals had envisioned, but their decision to put this issue front and center can move our national consciousness toward Direct progress.

Harris has supported care work without anchoring it in the “traditional” family, focusing on interventions that help a wide range of households, such as: paid family leaveaffordable Long-term care and an expanded one Child tax credit. This is in line with the National Welfare Rights Organization insistence that single parents deserve the same respect as other families and that the organization advocates for policies to support caregivers regardless of their family structure.

Both Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, have done so expressed Support for expansion Child tax credit. Still, Vance attacked Work and childless women, degraded Day care and suggested that involving Grandma or Grandpa was a solution to child care costs. Aside from targeting and shaming women, these statements make it hard to believe that a second Trump presidency would recognize that paid care work is an urgent need for many types of families and that caregivers deserve equal rights.

True equality for women – for all of us, regardless of race and class – depends on parental support and the fight for professional caregivers, mostly women who, in the words of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, “make all other work possible.” Maybe this kind of feminism has finally had its day.

Serene J. Khader, Professor of Philosophy at the TCUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College is the author of the forthcoming book, “Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop.”