Book Review

While these two books touch on many of the same debates and turning points in public policy, happily they are complementary. Elizabeth Rose provides a clear, detailed, and fascinating account of the development of child care in Philadelphia over a period of seventy years, drawing copiously on case records. Sonya Michel's book is more ambitious. It covers a much longer time period and provides a nuanced picture of the national debates that is informed by an appreciation of the social science, as well as the historical, literature and by a knowledge of developments over time in other countries.

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The early provision of child care in the United States was undertaken mainly by voluntary organizations. Concern for the interests of children left alone to roam the streets was dominant, but from the first the providers were anxious to stress that they were only accommodating the children of women who had to work. Rose found that one day-care provider claimed in 1913 that over half of the mothers using the service had been deserted by their husbands, when her own figures showed that the percentage was closer to a quarter. In other words, from the outset there was an acute ambivalence on the part of voluntary sector providers about the degree to which they were helping mothers do something they ideally should not do: go out to work. Michel argues strongly that such a fundamental ambivalence on the part of those campaigning for day care was a major reason that they did not launch a claim for federal funding. Both books trace how, in the early twentieth century, mothers' pensions—a form of provision that allowed mothers to stay at home with their children—were adopted as the policy of choice, leaving day-care campaigners out in the cold. Day care and mothers' pensions were seen as exclusive directions for policy.

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