Daughters, Sons, or Pupils: Representations of Children in the Labor Activism of Child Care Workers

In the late twentieth century United States, as women's participation in the waged workforce expanded dramatically across race and class, the child care workforce expanded in tandem. Overwhelmingly women and grossly underpaid, child care workers fought an unfinished, multi-decade campaign to educate the public about the social and economic value of their labor. The goal of the campaign was to convince policymakers to devote more funds to child care, both to expand child care access and sustain the profession through improved compensation.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, but focusing on the 1990s, this paper explores the ways that child care compensation activists deployed images, songs, artistic depictions, and other cultural representations of children to convince the public of the need for improved child care worker compensation. By placing children at the center of their labor activism, child care workers publicly depicted the link between worker compensation and quality of care. Workers in Washington state, for example, crafted life-size models of children and carried them to the state capitol as reminders that not just workers would benefit from wage improvements, children would as well. At rallies, they distributed buttons emblazoned with the phrase, "I'm not a babysitter, I haven't sat on a baby yet!". Exploring the folk expressions of child care labor activists, this paper examines questions of how child care workers understood the labor of waged care vis à vis motherhood and unwaged care. I argue that centering representations of children was more than a political strategy, it also expressed workers' concerns about their labor futures. Examining these images alongside each other also reveals tensions between different articulations of skill in care work, between those that linked child care with the informal realm of mothering and those that linked child care with the formal realm of education.