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A People's History of Child Care in the United States The Roots Run Deep
Jaiya John writes: "Make your revolution about you, and you lose it. Make it about all living things, and it erupts into purposeful glory. Make your revolution a passion garden." We're building this movement together for everyone who comes after us. Why this zine? The child care system in this country didn't break on its own. It was built this way on purpose, by people with names, making choices that served them. This zine traces that history: from the women whose care work was stolen under slavery, to the lawmakers who wrote them out of labor protections on purpose, to the myths still used today to shame parents and underpay providers. The deep roots are still shaping the fight we're in right now. So here's the question this zine answers: Why does the child care system feel broken — and who built it that way? Turn the page. Let's get into it.
How it started and continued exploitation 1 6 0 0 s – 1 9 2 0 s Before there was a childcare system, there was a system of enslavement and forced labor. The first people in this country forced to care for other people's children were Black and Indigenous women. These women were stripped of their freedom, of choice, of any say over their own labor or their families. Care work didn't start as a job. Emancipation didn't end this. Black women continued to provide domestic labor and child care — often for the same white families, in the same homes. This is the foundation Unpaid child care — the assumption that someone, somewhere, should just absorb this labor for free — is a relic of slavery and indentured servitude. We still live it today, every time care work goes unpaid, underpaid, or unrecognized as real work. Photo of Black nanny with white baby from mid 1800s.
1 6 0 0 s – 1 9 2 0 s c o n t i n u e d T h e M y t h T h e y B u i l t When white Americans needed a way to make that exploitation feel comfortable, they invented one: the “Mammy” myth. Advertising and film built a caricature of a devoted, endlessly patient Black caregiver who wanted nothing more than to serve someone else's family. It was sold everywhere, from pancake boxes to the silver screen — a story built to justify paying Black women almost nothing for labor everyone depended on. Harriet Tubman is remembered for the Underground Railroad. Less often told: she also worked as a domestic worker, doing the same kind of care labor. Her fight for freedom and her labor were never separate things.
Written out of the law When the New Deal built the American safety net in the 1930s, it left domestic and child care workers out of it. Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage protections — all these laws excluded domestic and agricultural workers from the very protections everyone else was getting. Those job categories were disproportionately held by Black and brown workers. That was the price of getting Southern lawmakers to vote yes. 1 9 3 0 s – T o d a y W h a t t h e p o s t e r s p r o m i s e d : “More security for the American family.”Social Security ads in the 1930s pictured widows, workers, families — protected, provided for, secure. W h o w a s a c t u a l l y l e f t o u t : Domestic workers, child care workers, and agricultural workers.The people doing the caregiving and the labor that let other families function — excluded from the very system sold as security “for the American family.”
The gap became a pattern. 1930s New Deal (1930s): Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 established minimum wage; domestic workers excluded from labor protections; Lanham Act childcare funding (WWII) briefly created publicly funded childcare. 1980s Reagan-era cuts gut federal child care funding, shrinking support just as more families needed it. 1996Welfare reform imposes strict work requirements on parents, with no matching investment in the child care they'd need to actually go to work. NowChild care gets left out of federal reconciliation packages, again and again, including recent state-level failures in VA, GA, NJ, and IL to fund it. Every time this country builds a safety net, child care gets left behind. 1960s1965 Immigration Reform-1990s: Rise of immigrant nanny and childcare workforce, worker centers, and “global care chains”; domestic workers organize for labor rightsCOVID Era: Essential work recognition and continued structural exclusion amidst child care layoffs; CARES Act provides relief. 2019
Honor our heroes Domestic and child care workers have always been part of justice movements. The same workers whose labor this country tried to make invisible were organizing, leading, and building the base that powered the movement forward. They knew exclusion better than anyone, often living it every day in someone else's kitchen. That knowledge became organizing power. Immigrants are a critical part of the child care workforce, too. At least 1 in 5 workers and immigrant women have led this fight across borders and generations. Fannie Lou HamerSharecropper, SNCC organizer, and MFDP founderThrown off the plantation for trying to register to vote, she became one of the movement's most unignorable voices. She also brought Head Start programs for low-income children to the Delta — because she knew care and economic security were never separate from freedom. In 1917, the 17-year-old Mexican domestic worker refused the toxic gasoline “baths” forced on workers crossing into El Paso, TX. Her refusal sparked the Bath Riots, as thousands of women joined her.Domestic worker Carmelita Torres**Photo of Mexican nationals in early 1900s. Source: https://www.dwherstories.com/timeline/carmelita-torres-and-the-bath-riot-of-1917 *There are many Black, Indigenous child care and domestic workers who organized to build the movement we carry on today. Learn more about the history of domestic work check out The National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Josephine “Jo” HulettDomestic and child care worker and organizer She founded a domestic workers' rights group in Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1960s. Her strategy was storytelling: she spoke plainly about her own experience, and other workers recognized themselves in it. Guillermina Castellanos Domestic worker and organizer A Nicaraguan-born domestic worker, she co-founded La Colectiva de Mujeres in San Francisco and helped win California’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Storytelling built this movement, and we are building on the stories of a long lineage of organizers and advocates.
The cycle we’re still in 1Care workers get paid poverty wages, and families face sky-high costs — both at once, because the industry profits off underpaying Black and brown women for care work.↓ 2High costs force parents into an impossible choice: spend a huge share of income on care, or leave the workforce entirely — and too often it's women who are pushed out.↓ 3 Leaving the workforce costs parents wealth, wages, and time. Staying costs them nearly everything they earn.↓ 4Between working constantly and being priced out of care, parents and workers alike lose the time and power it takes to organize and fight for something better.↓ 5With less organizing power pushing for change, the system stays exactly as broken as it is. And the cycle repeats. This cycle is exactly why we don’t compromise.
What it takes to win We're sharing this story of the racist roots of child care to ground us in our reason for why we must keep fighting for a more just and equitable future for families across the country. We don’t water down our language. We call out racism. We acknowledge the stolen labor of Black and Indigenous women. We point directly to the systems that failed us. Neutral language might sound more polite in a legislative meeting, but euphemisms don't protect our communities — they protect the broken system. So we call it what it is, every time. We don’t allow child care to be a bargaining chip. We will not offer child care up to get something else passed. And we will not allow the workers providing this care to be left behind in order to keep the peace. It's nonnegotiable. We fight for bold, system-wide change because of where this started. A system built to extract free and underpaid labor from Black and Indigenous women isn't just a flawed system. It's working exactly as designed. You can't fix that with small tweaks or friendlier language. It has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” — O c t a v i a B u t l e r
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