Geraldine Youcha > Quotes

“In a survey of mayors of major cities, 83 percent said there was not enough funding to meet the additional child care costs of work requirements. Places are limited and waiting lists are long. But a study published in 2004 found that when it was available, good quality, center-based care for the one- to two-year-old children of poor mothers who have to work had a positive effect on the children’s social and intellectual development. Most of them spent at least thirty-four hours a week in day care, and they did better than comparable children cared for at home.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“From Colonial times to the present, children have lived with a bewildering variety of caretaking systems. Some, in the bosom of their families, have been looked after by women other than their mothers. Some have been herded into institutions or sent away from home or exposed to substitute mothers in one arrangement or another. America’s historical amnesia has let the details of many of these arrangements slip into oblivion, forcing society to make a fresh start again and again.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“In 1944 sociologist Mirra Komarovsky called standards for women “a veritable crazy quilt of contradiction.” Half of the young college women questioned in her survey of their expectations for the future said they expected to stop work permanently when they married, and only 10 percent said they hoped to combine marriage and a career. (The war experience did not seem to have altered basic assumptions about women’s roles.) Dr. Komarovsky campaigned for greater freedom: “The girl who wishes to marry and have five children should be permitted to do so, and likewise it should be made possible for those who wish to combine marriage and careers to achieve this. At present, the latter path is fraught with difficulties and cruel dilemmas, but it needn’t be.” On the same page in The New York Times in which Komarovsky’s survey was reported, Senator Taft of Ohio was quoted as supporting reduced funds for Lanham Act Centers lest they be carried over, surreptitiously, for use after the war and encourage women to leave home.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“In Chicago a social worker discovered that at the same time budgets were cut for the provision of milk to children, large dogs at the animal shelter were allotted more money for meals than a man on relief.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“IN WHAT IS TODAY a nearly forgotten social experiment, the federal government subsidized nationwide child care for working mothers of young children during World War II. It was the first time in the nation’s history that day care for children who were not poor was supported by public funds.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“Between 1929 and 1930, one-third of the hard-pressed private agencies went under, unable to raise the money they needed. As Hastings Hart, a pioneering child-welfare leader, pointed out, it was time for government to step in with far more than it had ever done to deal with this unprecedented crisis. In September 1931, with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt leading the way, the New York State Legislature finally passed the first law giving relief to the unemployed. By the end of December 1933, what was called Home Relief had started all over New York City. This was the beginning of the change from the dominance of private philanthropy to the dominance of public welfare, and the recognition that citizens had a right to expect to be taken care of. But getting help wasn’t made easy or pleasant. William Matthews, head of the Emergency Work Bureau in New York City, protested, “The whole damn theory of the thing is to make relief giving so unpleasant, so disagreeable, in fact so insulting to decent people that they stay away from the places where it is given.” As William Bremer detailed in his book Depression Winters, recipients of private and public charity were subject to scrutiny, told what they could and could not buy, and even accompanied by “voluntary shoppers” who supervised their purchases. Buying cigarettes, beer, candy, pies, and cakes was forbidden. And no cash changed hands. Recipients were given bags of coal and clothing, food tickets, and rent vouchers, and storekeepers were forbidden to give them change in cash.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“Hoover’s secretary of the interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur, always the optimist, suggested that the Depression might be good for children because they would avoid “the neglect of prosperity” by being cared for by their parents rather than servants. His comments elicited a caustic reaction from Homer Folks, director of New York’s State Charities Aid Society. He said 10 to 20 percent of the nation’s children were suffering dreadfully, with more joining them every day. “These children have never known the neglect of prosperity. . . they are not now getting the care of adversity,” he said. “They are getting the neglects, hardships and hunger of adversity.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“American women have taken on nontraditional jobs in every war since they made musket balls in the Civil War, and after every war they have gone back home, but as a crane operator observed, “Women were different in World War II: They didn’t want to go back home and many of them didn’t. And if they did go back home, they never forgot, and they told their daughters, ‘You don’t have to be just a homemaker. You can be anything you want to be.”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present

“(The single-parent family, far from being a modern problem, existed at close to today’s level for much of this country’s history—because of accidents, illness, and high mortality rates, rather than divorce. In 1930, there were more than three million female-headed households.)”
― Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present