0:03

Hey, everyone, it's Rebecca Greenfield, the

0:05

co host of The Paycheck. I wanted

0:07

to tell you about a show from a wonder media

0:09

network you might really like. I'm

0:12

not a parent myself, but I

0:14

know a lot of parents, and I've read a lot

0:16

about parenting during the pandemic. I

0:19

know how difficult it's been, between

0:21

the zoom homeschooling or

0:24

the constant threat of closures

0:26

because of COVID cases, not to mention

0:28

fears about the virus itself. In

0:30

season two of White Picket, Fence, Post

0:33

and Single Mom, Julie Kohler asks why

0:35

did it have to be this way? She

0:38

talks to experts, activists, and parents

0:40

as they unpack the caregiving crisis in

0:42

America and reveal why the conditions

0:45

were set long before COVID nineteen

0:47

ever hit American shores. Julia

0:50

explores the myths about race, gender,

0:53

families, and the economy that have gotten

0:55

us to a point where so many parents and especially

0:58

mothers, are cracking. She

1:00

also looks at how the pandemic could change

1:03

things. It could be a tipping point.

1:05

We could build an alternative economic

1:08

approach, one that puts caregiving

1:10

at the center of the economy. Stay

1:13

tuned to hear the latest episode, and don't

1:15

forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

1:26

If you listen to this show, you probably

1:28

already realized that I'm a bit of a political

1:30

junkie. I spend a

1:32

lot of my day thinking about, discussing,

1:35

and writing about politics and policy,

1:38

so it shouldn't come as a surprise to hear that I've

1:41

been following the debate over President

1:43

Biden's Build Back Better Act pretty

1:45

closely. Several

1:47

months ago, I noticed a lot of prominent

1:50

conservatives leveling a coordinated

1:52

attack against the acts childcare provisions.

1:56

Specifically, they argued that investments

1:58

in childcare would penalized

2:00

families in which a parent stays home to

2:02

raise children. It sounded

2:05

kind of ludicrous. I mean,

2:07

how is someone who doesn't need childcare

2:10

penalized by its availability? The

2:12

Build Back Better Act wouldn't require anyone

2:15

to use childcare. Parents could

2:17

choose to access child care for their children or

2:19

not. They could choose to take advantage

2:21

of free pre K or not. But

2:24

then I realized that this argument was tapping into

2:26

something more fundamental fear.

2:30

We need to take this argument seriously because,

2:32

as we'll talk about today, fear is

2:35

what's been used to block investments in child care for

2:37

decades, in any public

2:39

benefit that would help families. This

2:42

fear evokes the same nostalgic undertones

2:45

for the traditional nuclear family that we talked

2:47

about last week, and by framing

2:49

child care is a preference of elite families,

2:52

they're tapping into the anti feminism

2:54

that was used the last time we had a political

2:57

debate over child care fifty

2:59

years ago. But if

3:01

we're going to talk about fear and how it's been

3:03

used to block investments in the common good, then

3:06

we're also going to have to talk about something else, racism.

3:12

I'm Julie Cohler, and this is White

3:14

Picket Fence. This season, we're

3:17

exploring our country's caregiving crisis

3:19

and the ideologies about race, gender,

3:23

families, the economy, and

3:25

yes, white women that

3:27

have blocked public investment in care and

3:30

let us to a point where so many of us are cracking.

3:36

As we've talked about a lot, the US

3:38

does not have a national child care system,

3:41

and our lack of investment has had devastating

3:43

effects on women, children,

3:46

and our economy. Right

3:48

now, with the Build Back Better Act, the

3:51

Biden administration might deliver a

3:53

four hundred billion dollar investment

3:56

in universal pre K and childcare. It

3:58

would be a revolutionary step. Here's

4:02

the thing, though, this is

4:04

not our country's first rodeo with national

4:06

childcare. The system once

4:08

existed. During

4:10

World War Two, our government

4:12

spent seventy eight million dollars

4:14

creating high quality child care centers.

4:17

These centers helped Rosie the Riveter and

4:20

thousands like her enter the workforce.

4:23

Seven percent of Richmond ship builders

4:25

were women. Feminine workers

4:27

with small children inspired the founding

4:30

of thirty five nursery school units

4:32

and then extended daycare centers,

4:35

which mothered over fourteen hundred youngsters

4:37

at a time. But

4:40

after the war funding evaporated,

4:43

these centers disappeared and

4:45

the number of women working plummeted.

4:49

Then came the sixties, second wave

4:52

feminism, civil rights, a

4:54

dramatic rise in women's employment, and

4:57

suddenly there was political interest

4:59

in child care again. In

5:02

fact, fifty years ago, the Comprehensive

5:04

Child Development Act landed on President

5:07

Nixon's desk. It had passed

5:09

both houses of Congress with bipartisan

5:11

support, and Nixon vetoed

5:14

it. He warned of a communal

5:16

approach to child wearing, and the bill's

5:18

family weakening implications. Those

5:21

are direct quotes, says, the

5:23

two billion dollars to have been spent on the first

5:25

year for childcare would be, as he

5:27

put it, a long leap into the dark.

5:31

The Build Back Better Act is facing familiar

5:33

opposition from conservatives, peddaling

5:36

Nixon era rhetoric. Some

5:38

have invoked fears of a government takeover

5:40

of daycare. Others have claimed

5:43

that investments in childcare would be unfair

5:45

to so called traditional families, where

5:47

mothers stay at home with their kids. This

5:50

plan is meant to get as many parents, especially

5:53

mothers, into the workforce. I stopped

5:55

and say, well, why do we want that.

5:58

Let me be clear, Radical Democrats

6:00

are not the party of parents, and

6:02

they're certainly not the party for children.

6:05

Their interests in passing universal child

6:07

care and universal pre k is just

6:09

to start indoctrinating our kids sooner.

6:12

Children are not entitled to government daycare.

6:15

What children are entitled to is

6:17

love from their own parents. But

6:21

this time the rhetoric is falling short.

6:24

It looks like the childcare bill might pass. The

6:27

Build Back Better Act would create free

6:29

universal pre K for three and four year

6:31

olds. It would limit childcare

6:33

expenses to seven percent of family's

6:35

income, nine and ten American

6:38

families with young children would gain access

6:40

to affordable childcare. It

6:43

really makes you wonder why it took fifty years

6:45

to happen, to understand

6:47

why we need to first understand

6:49

what went wrong back in Here's

6:55

Nancy Cohen, president of the Gender

6:57

Equality Policy Institute. Let me

6:59

still art with setting the scene

7:02

of the women's movements

7:05

and the feminist movements of the late

7:07

sixties and early seventies. It

7:10

was really one

7:12

of the only times in American history

7:15

that the women's movement, very

7:18

broad based, very diverse, was

7:21

a mass movement by

7:23

n had significantly

7:26

changed public opinion in favor

7:28

of a lot of issues that

7:31

we would consider central to women's

7:33

equality and gender equality.

7:36

At the same time, you have

7:39

a reactionary President

7:42

Mixon in office. So

7:44

in the middle of all of that entered a Midwestern

7:46

senator with a big idea.

7:50

What you have in setting

7:52

the scene for this bill

7:54

being introduced. Senator

7:56

Walter Mondale had always

7:58

been a strong at the kit for children,

8:01

true progressive. Came from a poor

8:03

family himself and had a very

8:06

precarious childhood, so

8:09

his interest in this came a

8:11

little bit out of understanding

8:13

what it was like for children. Fans

8:16

of the show will remember this fun fact from last

8:18

season's prologue, Walter Mondale,

8:21

former Minnesota Senator and vice president,

8:24

winning the Democratic nomination was

8:27

the catalyst for my own passion for politics.

8:30

He's kind of my guy, so

8:32

it's no surprise to me that he championed this

8:34

effort. And at the time,

8:36

lots of things, public opinions,

8:38

social movements, political influence, we're

8:41

coming together just right in favor

8:43

of positive change. There was a

8:46

convergence of civil rights

8:48

movements, of women's movements,

8:51

child development experts who

8:54

realized that the US had

8:57

already reached a crisis where

9:00

with women in the workforce, and

9:03

so through a lot of maneuvering,

9:05

this Comprehensive Child Development Act

9:07

came through and passed the

9:10

Senate by more than

9:12

a two thirds majority on a bipartisan

9:14

vote, had a little bit more difficulty

9:17

in the House, but still passed the

9:19

House. The US was still in the

9:22

tail end of President

9:24

Johnson's War on poverty,

9:26

so there was very much a sense

9:29

of this was an economic justice

9:32

bill and a racial justice bill. These

9:35

same social and political movements also

9:37

contributed to Nixon's veto all

9:40

of those factors coming together set

9:43

the scene for Nixon

9:46

vetoing the bill with

9:48

a really unhinged Vito

9:50

message, warning that it would sovietize

9:55

America, that it was

9:57

basically a communist plot. On

10:00

one hand, he's reaching to anti

10:02

communist rhetoric, but

10:05

it really was a dog

10:07

whistle to patriarchy. It may

10:09

not sound surprising that a Republican

10:11

president shot down a childcare bill today,

10:14

that's kind of a given, but at

10:16

the time it was shocking. Nixon's

10:19

own administration had helped draft the

10:21

bill, and Nixon was

10:23

conflicted. He even requested

10:26

two speeches, one for signing

10:28

the bill and one for vetoing it. So

10:31

who tipped the scales a

10:33

guy named Pat Buchanan Back

10:36

then he was nixon speechwriter. He

10:39

convinced the president that killing the bill would

10:41

boost his standing with an emerging

10:43

base of conservative activists. The

10:46

real reason for the veto,

10:49

based on my research, is that

10:52

it was a play to the

10:54

right. This is December one.

10:57

Within a few weeks, Nixon is go

11:00

going to be running

11:02

in the New Hampshire primary for

11:04

re election, and he faced

11:07

an opponent on his right who

11:09

was very much playing to the anti communist

11:12

wings of the party. So Nixon

11:15

had his finger in the wind

11:17

about where Republican

11:20

primary voters were going. I

11:22

just want to emphasize that at

11:24

the time there are lots

11:27

of feminists within

11:30

the Republican Party and they actually

11:32

held sway over the anti

11:35

feminists in the party.

11:37

The family values rhetoric that Nixon used

11:39

wasn't actually mainstream.

11:42

The idea of women working was just

11:44

not that political. But Nixon

11:46

saw where the grassroots energy and the party was

11:48

going. His vtail

11:51

was the beginning of the end for universal childcare.

11:54

In the years that followed, Walter Mondale tried

11:57

to revive the bill, scaling back at

11:59

scope. A revised

12:01

version passed the Senate ine,

12:04

but it died in the House. Talk

12:06

of childcare proposals started to resurface

12:09

a couple of years later, but this

12:11

time white conservative

12:13

women mobilized a massive counterattack.

12:16

Now it was still tiny numbers compared

12:18

to the support that

12:22

feminism had, and particularly these

12:24

pretty mainstream feminist ideas

12:27

of providing childcare and equal pay.

12:30

But basically these women um

12:32

mostly in the South, some in the West

12:34

in anti feminist groups got

12:37

wind of the childcare

12:39

bills coming forward

12:42

and in

12:45

really an explicit defense of patriarchy

12:49

and women's suppordination in

12:51

the family mobilized and

12:53

flooded Congress with

12:55

thousands of letters opposing

12:59

these childcare bills, and

13:01

that was it. That was the end of it. For

13:03

quite some time, anti

13:07

feminism and anti socialism

13:09

have always been at the heart of the opposition

13:11

to child care or any

13:13

of the supports that would make raising children

13:15

easier. We've been

13:17

hearing these ideas recycled in the debate

13:20

over the Build Back Better Act, but

13:22

opposition is intrinsically linked to something

13:25

else too, racism.

13:28

We've talked about how women of color, especially

13:30

black women, have long provided the

13:32

domestic labor that keeps more affluent

13:35

families afloat, and

13:37

their labor helped create this vision of the

13:39

traditional nuclear family. Our

13:42

government's continued refusal to invest

13:44

in childcare keeps that work

13:46

undervalued and underpaid. Here

13:49

story and Warren, co president of Community

13:52

Change and co founder of the Economic

13:54

Security Project. I

13:56

think to understand the

13:59

care economy, pol sees again, we

14:01

have to go back to the founding and think

14:03

about the nature of care

14:05

work and how devalued it

14:07

has been from for centuries.

14:10

And this is not just in the US, this is across

14:12

the world where care

14:14

work has been defined in very stark

14:16

gendered terms as women's

14:19

work and therefore um

14:21

not deserving of dignity,

14:24

of value and of renumeration

14:27

for that labor. And then

14:29

you add in the American racial context

14:32

of who is doing the care work for

14:34

the first couple of hundred years of this country,

14:36

well, it was black women in particular. And

14:39

so if you look at the composition of

14:41

who is doing the care work

14:44

in terms of women of color, black women,

14:46

immigrant women, if you think about essential

14:48

workers today, it's no coincidence

14:50

to me that the composition

14:53

of who performs that work and the devaluation

14:55

of that work goes hand in hand. So

14:57

this has been a long, long effort

15:00

to try to do the political work

15:02

and the cultural work to value

15:05

care work as work as labor.

15:08

The death of child care

15:10

bill didn't just hurt middle class

15:12

women who wanted to work outside the home. It

15:15

was part of a long history of policies that

15:18

kept a certain kind of work and worker

15:21

low paid at the margins

15:23

of our economy. I have to point

15:25

out just to say the

15:28

rules of our economy also

15:31

helped solidify the evaluation of care

15:33

work. So I'm thinking here of how domestic

15:35

workers in particular were excluded

15:38

from New Deal social policies. Um,

15:41

if you think of the Wagner Act and the right to organize

15:43

into a union domestic and agricultural

15:45

workers, Nope. If you think of the Fair Labor Standard

15:48

deck which is our minimum wage, domestic

15:50

workers and agricultural workers excluded.

15:52

So domestic workers in particular have

15:55

always always been seen

15:57

as another as

16:00

those who are only supposed to perform

16:02

certain duties for wealthy and

16:04

elite and privileged people. And

16:06

I think because of the decades of organizing,

16:09

we're at a potentially different

16:12

and maybe even transformative moment when it comes

16:14

to care work. Right now, like

16:16

Nancy said, Nixon was reading the tea

16:19

leaves, he could see that a conservative

16:21

grassroots movement was coming. It

16:23

was anti feminist, sure, and

16:25

strongly antisocialist, but there

16:27

was something more. Racist

16:30

backlash was at the heart of the modern

16:32

day conservative movement. Over

16:34

the next couple of decades, childcare

16:37

became central to how that backlash

16:39

would manifest itself in our politics,

16:42

and no one embraced that strategy more

16:44

clearly than an actor with big

16:46

political ambitions Ronald

16:49

Reagan. Understanding Reagan

16:53

as part of he is the

16:56

exemplification. He is sort

16:58

of the maturity of the backlash

17:00

against the civil rights and black freedom movement

17:03

in the sixties. He comes out of, you

17:05

know, very Goldwater and the

17:07

conservative West Coast politicians

17:10

who were searching for ways to

17:13

resist the efforts at racial

17:15

justice and racial equity. From

17:17

the start, Reagan embraced the racist

17:19

dog whistle. He launched his presidential

17:22

campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi,

17:25

the site where civil rights activists James

17:27

Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and

17:30

Mickey Scharner were murdered for trying

17:32

to register black voters in four

17:35

I know they're speaking to this brow

17:39

speaking what it has to be a dog

17:41

night Democrat. I

17:50

just bid fight party affiliation. I didn't

17:52

mean how you feel now. I

17:55

was a Democrat post of my life myself,

18:01

and that is not an accident. He knew

18:03

exactly what he was doing. That was political strategy,

18:06

and it was an explicit anti black political

18:08

strategy to really signal to white

18:10

voters, especially white Southern voters, I'm one

18:13

of you, and I will take up the lost

18:15

cause. And he didn't stop there.

18:17

And then on the campaign trail, he tells

18:20

this story over and over and over,

18:22

and it always enrages

18:24

me every time I even think about it, because it's very

18:27

personal for me. Tells the story of a black woman from Chicago.

18:30

Chicago is my hometown, so it's very personal for me,

18:32

and it's the welfare queen story. And

18:34

he's telling this story over and over all there's

18:37

this woman in Chicago and she has Cadillac

18:39

and for coats and buy stakes with her food,

18:41

sad and all this stuff that

18:43

becomes the dominant narrative around

18:46

welfare. Reagan ran

18:48

on a platform that's now synonymous

18:50

with the Republican Party, low taxes,

18:52

small government. His welfare

18:55

queen story was meant to be a cautionary

18:57

tale of wasteful government spending. But

19:00

it was no coincidence that the woman at

19:02

the center of that story was black. So

19:05

Reagan is telling the story about wealth, you

19:07

know, the welfare queen over and over the

19:09

Republican Party and conservatives are

19:12

repeating the story, and then

19:15

Democrats at the time, let's talk

19:18

about it. We're also quick

19:21

to jump in on the story on the broader

19:23

narrative around who is deserving

19:25

and who is not deserving. And we know

19:28

what both parties meant by that

19:31

white people are deserving non

19:33

white people not deserving. We've

19:36

been living with that legacy for forty years.

19:39

By stoking fear of so called

19:41

undeserving black single mothers, Reagan

19:44

transformed our national conversation about

19:46

public benefits, and he wasn't

19:49

alone. In the nine nineties,

19:51

President Bill Clinton reformed welfare. What

19:54

was previously a program of cash assistance

19:56

for poor women and children became

19:58

temporary system with work requirements.

20:02

President George W. Bush took welfare

20:05

reform to the next level. He

20:07

dumped millions of dollars into marriage

20:09

promotion programs, literally

20:11

government programs that encouraged poor women

20:13

to get married. These programs

20:16

did nothing to reduce poverty or increase

20:18

marriage, but they further the

20:20

belief that being poor was the result

20:22

of bad personal decision making. Common

20:26

sense policies like child

20:28

care Bill became politically toxic.

20:32

Any government benefit evoked

20:34

that welfare queen image. A

20:37

lot of beliefs about gender and race have

20:39

made the U S an inhospitable place for families,

20:42

especially mothers and other caregivers. But

20:46

at the root of all of this is a fear

20:48

that helping the vulnerable will somehow

20:51

hurt the rest of us. It's

20:53

what some call is zero sum scarcity

20:55

framework. This

20:57

fear is what kept the US from creating a child

21:00

system back in. It's

21:03

what prompted politicians from both parties to get

21:05

our social safety net in the following decades,

21:08

and it's what conservatives trotted out again

21:11

in the debate over the Built Back Better Act. Its

21:14

origins run deep well.

21:16

I think the origins of our zero

21:19

some scarcity framework essentially

21:21

come from the origins of this country, and so

21:23

um due respect to Nicolahannah

21:26

Jones, the sixteen nineteen project,

21:29

I think we can start there in the

21:31

structuring of a country.

21:33

First of taking

21:35

of land from indigenous inhabitants

21:38

who already were on that

21:40

land. That's already the beginning of

21:42

a zero sum framework. And

21:45

notion that somehow the

21:47

folks who were already here did not deserve

21:51

the land of this country like these

21:53

white settlers, and so that's

21:55

the beginning of zero some. And then you add in and servants,

21:58

and then of course those who were enslave,

22:00

particularly from the continent of Africa, and

22:03

the notion that, um, it was

22:06

divinely ordained that

22:09

some people did not deserve the

22:11

same freedoms as others, and particularly

22:13

not only deserved the same freedoms were meant to

22:16

be exploited for others

22:18

wealth. So I

22:21

tend to think of American history and in three numbers

22:24

and five, and those represent decades.

22:27

So the first twenty five decades system

22:30

of chattel slavery and human bondage.

22:33

Then we had a civil war and a

22:35

little period called reconstruction, which

22:38

was the idea was to reconstruct our democracy

22:40

and economy. And then that short

22:43

period ended, it was fought against, and

22:46

we had another ten decades

22:48

of Jim Crow, what some scholars called

22:51

slavery by another name. So that's

22:53

twenty five decades of slavery,

22:56

then ten decades or a hundred years

22:58

of Jim Kroll, and then the

23:01

last number is five.

23:03

The last five decades or fifty years or

23:05

so, we have seen the opening

23:07

up in many ways of

23:10

this country in terms of full citizenship, particularly

23:12

for black people. But that's a recent

23:16

amount. That's a small amount of time

23:18

in the great sweep of history. And so if

23:20

you think of the first twenty five decades

23:23

and then the second ten decades, zero

23:25

sum thinking pervaded our

23:27

country throughout that entire time.

23:29

And so it's not an accident

23:32

that here we are. You know, five

23:34

decades after the civil rights movement and

23:37

the women's movement, and the

23:39

gay liberation movement and others,

23:42

that we're still dealing with this fundamental

23:44

framework that has to find the country from the founding.

23:48

One piece of legislation can't undo this

23:50

foundational framework, but

23:52

I believe that it can be an important first step.

23:55

As author and activist Heather McGee writes

23:58

in her book The Some of Us, there's a way

24:00

to defeat the zero sum thinking. It's

24:03

by cultivating what she calls the solidarity

24:06

dividend, the idea that

24:08

by coming together across race, we

24:10

can accomplish what we can't do on our own.

24:13

McGee says that the quickest way to get there

24:16

is to refill the pool on public goods

24:19

for everyone. Child

24:21

Care is one of those critical public goods. But

24:24

to get there, we need not only to overcome

24:27

the nostalgic ideology of family life

24:30

that continues to be evoked today,

24:32

and not only the racial fear and stratification

24:35

that's been with us since our nation's founding.

24:38

We will need to overcome a theory about the

24:40

economy that has become something

24:42

close to religious doctrine for much of the

24:44

last half Century next

24:47

week on White Picket Fence. You

24:49

know, it's kind of like the fish

24:52

in the bowl of water doesn't

24:54

know that it's in the bowl of water until it suddenly

24:57

finds itself outside the bowl of water, gasping

24:59

for air. White

25:02

pick of Fence is a Wonder Media Network production.

25:05

Our producers are Maddie Foley, Eadie

25:07

Allard, and Taylor Williamson. Executive

25:10

producer is Jenny Kaplan. Special

25:13

thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and

25:15

the Share Descent Fund for their generous

25:17

support for this season. We

25:20

want to hear about your caregiving experiences,

25:23

especially during the pandemic. Just

25:26

called to one to six five

25:29

zero four eight and leave us a voicemail

25:31

with your story. We might just play

25:33

it on the show. That's two

25:36

one to six five

25:39

zero four eight.