As Black History Month comes to a close, I want to shine a light on the long history of Black women feminists’ work on child care.
Shirley Chisolm worked in child care centers in New York as a teacher and director and served as an education consultant for New York City’s daycare division before becoming a member of Congress and running for President.
Dorothy Pitman Hughes founded the West 80th St. Day Care Center in Manhattan in 1966. Hughes’ biographer, Laura Lovett, writes, “Domestic violence, the welfare system, and childcare – issues that profoundly affected the working-class Black and Latina women who visited her West 80th St. Day Care Center and turned to the West Side Community Alliance for help – became the defining issues of Dorothy’s feminism.”
The National Black Women’s Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective included the need for affordable child care in their platform.
The National Women’s Conference on 1978 included child care as one of its central planks. “The Federal Government should assume a major role in providing …. child care. Federally funded child care should be accessible to all regardless of income.”
The Conference’s Black Women’s Action Plan echoed this call. “Recognition be given to the problems and possible solutions to the plight of black female heads of households with respect to educational goals, and funding be allocated for training and education opportunities, financial aid, career counseling, and child care.”
MLICCI’s fight for full-time affordable child care and our work through the Employment Equity for Single Moms project to couple child care with higher wages for single moms fits perfectly into this long history of work. We believe that no mom should have to choose between the child she loves and the job she needs. That is why we continue to center the needs of low-income single moms for affordable full-time child care.
Our work carries on the legacy of these incredible Black women and national organizations, and it lives in the women and children we work with every day.