Looking Backward, Moving Forward.
Introduction From the Anthology by Susan Prentice, page 2
History and Politics of Child Care Advocacy
Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman have argued there is a great deal of promise in rethinking history to understand the participation and significance of groups and areas previously slighted. This is especially true for those who seek to understand child care. Historical work can reassign value, identifying the impact of the welfare state on women, making women visible in welfare state analysis and detailing the role of women as political activists in welfare state development.
In recent years, historians and other researchers have shown how social services vary from country to country. Some countries (such as France and Sweden, for example) have well-developed and generous provisions for children; others (such as Canada and the United States), delegate care arrangements to the market and the family. Within a given country there may also be marked differences: Quebec, for example, has its renowned five-dollar-a-day, publicly funded child care system, while the rest of the country organizes child care largely as a private matter for the free market. Without a sophisticated understanding of how and why such different political choices are made, it can simply appear "natural" that Canadian parents should take care of their own children and equally "normal" that public policy fails to provide child care services just as it provides education, pensions or health care.
The confidence that such political arrangements are "natural" or "normal" has been seriously shaken by recent historical scholarship. New research and new perspectives have enabled historians and activists to look at their national and local arrangements with fresh eyes. Researchers, for example, may now explain how and why Sweden's welfare state differs from that of Canada, why Canada is again different from the United States and how variations within countries develop. In these analyses, scholars examine how political power is created outside the state in social movements-women's groups, environmental groups, advocacy organizations, trade unions and other community associations. Activists, we are learning, intervene in political development-even though, in a strictly formal sense, they are not a part of the policy process. These insights are animating both historical and contemporary studies.
Further, social movement theory posits that conventional understanding of how policy is made and implemented has historically been too narrowly conceived. Social movement theory attends to both how and whymovements form and act. Some social movement analysts focus on resource mobilization, past and present. Resource mobilization is the process through which resources-human and material-are deployed, through collective control, to meet shared goals. This mobilization requires planning and coordination, drawing on social networks of supporters with shared consciousness, alongside human and material resources. Out of such activity, social movement organizations grow, often becoming institutionalized into more formal structures. Their repertoire of action grows. As increasingly structured groups, activist organizations are better able to create and respond to opportunities for action and mobilization. Thus, in lieu of a static focus on structure, social movement analysis introduces a language of agency and strategy. This language of agency and strategy is key to understanding social change.
Although conventional political science assumes that internal institutional arrangements are the decisive factor in welfare state formation, new evidence conclusively demonstrates that factors outside the formal political and bureaucratic system have an important role to play. Social movements are one such group: although their focus is often extra-parliamentary-aiming, for example, to change public consciousness or social attitudes rather than governments)-activists regularly make the state a key target. Well-known historian Charles Tilly, in fact, describes social movements as "a sustained challenge to state authorities in the name of a population that has little formal power with respect to the state." Building on this insight, one wing of social movement researchers has shown how mobilization outside the state influences what happens inside the state, thus revealing how nonstate actors shape public policy and public process. In this literature, class-based identities and trade union organizing often play a starring role. However, social movements are bigger than labour alone, and they include constituencies mobilized on the basis of gender and other affiliations. The women's movement, in fact, is one of the more strikingly effective new social movements, and both its praxis and research branches have been exceptionally active.
The theoretical insights of new social movement analysis have combined with, and been influenced by, feminism. Feminists with both contemporary and historical concerns have sought to connect how women have been, and are, active agents for social change. Their lens has turned to a range of topics that have been traditionally neglected. One topic which has been central to feminists is uncovering the political and public dimensions of "private" life. Tracking this line of inquiry, they have illuminated many aspects of domestic life which were previously ignored. In doing so, they have shown the history of social construction behind gender relations.
The field of feminist scholarship is enormous and growing exponentially. For the purpose of this review, it is particularly interesting to focus on work that examines gender at the intersection of history and social organizing, and to consider what this might have to say about child care. Feminist historians have developed a new and critical understanding of families, work and social welfare, generating a "voluminous literature" that addresses how the welfare state is gendered. Much of this work has focused on women and maternalism. Some feminist historians have shown how the welfare state can foster women's political activism; others have documented how the state undermines women's participation. One of the remarkable findings about the welfare state is how much it has been shaped by women's political activism-especially by elite women, but also by working-class and minority women.
Nevertheless, as Sonya Michel notes in her extraordinary history of child care in America, there is a "curious disjuncture" in historiographic writing that somehow filters out welfare state histories, mother's work and children's lives, with child care seldom appearing or relegated to a minor theme. Her observation applies equally well to Canada, where the grassroots child care movements and the place of child care in welfare state formation have received little scholarly attention. The relationship between the women's movement and the child care movement (in Canada and elsewhere) is complex and contradictory, in part because feminists are still struggling with the vexing meaning and politics of motherhood. Nevertheless, it is clear that child care is a crucial element of a "woman friendly" welfare state-a society where injustice on the basis of gender is eliminated.
This anthology is the first book to focus on the historical relationship between child care mobilization and government policy in Canada. It provides, as a first step, select pieces of a large puzzle. As contributors, we are well aware that for all our work there remains a vast balance of stories to tell. Chapters in this book focus on Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, with little mention of Atlantic Canada. Some chapters provide national overviews or reviews of Canadian campaigns, but they too are not a complete telling. For example, there is still much work to be done to understand the meaning and practice of child care and advocacy for racialized communities, as well as for First Nations people, with their unique political relationship to the federal government. Metropolitan areas make up the main focus of this anthology, leaving work to be done on rural, northern and nonurban areas of Canada. Most of the historical focus of this anthology is on centre-based groupcare, leaving many opportunities for analyses of in-home or family home daycare services. There is a history of school-age care that goes untold in this anthology, just as there are unnarrated tales of caregivers and child care workers. There is more to learn about the role of the second wave women's movement in child care advocacy and also of the work of other social justice organizations (such as trade unions) in child care campaigns. This anthology, moreover, is country specific, and comparative analyses of child care movements awaits. We hope this anthology spurs more historical work on the complex, multifaceted experiences of child care advocacy and policy-and we believe this collection helps quilt together some pieces of that wider history.
Looking backward, moving forward
Introduction from the anthology by Susan Prentice
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