Earlier this month, former President Trump was asked a revealing question at the Economic Club of New York: What would he do about child care?
Trump’s bumbling response — saying “child care is child care” and then talking about tariffs — reflected how rarely men in the halls of power are asked to address this essential labor that has historically been assigned to women. A couple of weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a plan to prevent families from spending more than 7% of their income on child care.
Hearing about child care as a front-and-center issue in a presidential election is not politics as usual. It is, in fact, the culmination of the work by generations of feminist activists.
Valuing care work may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of feminism. U.S. schools often teach feminism as a fight for freedom from housework and caretaking, spearheaded by largely white, middle- and upper-class women such as Betty Friedan. Through this lens, feminism’s success should be measured predominantly by the number of women pursuing careers.
But there were other kinds of feminism before, after and alongside this focus on paid work. In 1942, union organizer Kitty Ellickson wrote an influential essay on a term for a reality women are still living, the “double day” — doing the majority of care work while also working for pay is doing two jobs for the price of one.
The solution, Ellickson wrote, was for the women’s movement to demand that employers adapt “the man’s world to women.” In this view, real gender equality meant questioning the idea that “men’s work” outside the home was more important than the labor done at home. It also meant shorter working days and access to affordable child care. It’s not surprising these ideas grew out of the labor movement — women who worked in mines and factories were less likely to equate their jobs with liberation.
Work was also not an appealing feminist vision for those whose jobs outside the home were … in other people’s homes. Sometimes that work hadn’t been paid at all: The first domestic workforce in this country was made up of enslaved women. Even today, women of color are often the ones who pick up the frequently underpaid, unprotected domestic work that remains when middle- or upper-class women leave for the office. More than half of domestic workers nationwide are women of color, according to one 2022 report, with Black and Latina women overrepresented.
Dorothy Bolden, a Black domestic worker in Atlanta and a contemporary of Friedan’s, began washing diapers for her mother’s employer at the age of 9. She fought the invisibility of care work, and of care workers, by organizing 10,000 domestic workers starting in the 1960s for higher wages and better working conditions. She told Georgia lawmakers that house cleaners and nannies had families, too: “I have to clothe my children.”
Through the 1970s, welfare rights activists went further and argued that moms deserved government subsidies: If care work was real work, society needed to recognize its value with pay. Leaders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, including Johnnie Tillmon, noted that while our culture idealized white housewives for caring for their children full time, leaders vilified Black mothers and portrayed them as welfare-dependent drains on the system. When mainstream feminist organizations came around to advocating for universal day-care centers, welfare rights organizers demanded justice for those who would staff the centers, cautioning against creating an army of “institutionalized, partly self-employed mammies.”
This combination of insights from Black women leaders — that familial care work needs financial support, and that professional care workers need fair labor conditions — speaks to a deep vision of racial, gender and economic equality that has often been lacking in mainstream feminism.
Harris, though sometimes criticized for shifting on issues, has long advocated for family care subsidies as well as justice for care workers. As a senator representing California, in 2019 she sponsored the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, which would have guaranteed overtime pay, sick days, and meal and rest breaks, as well as initiated a study on how to make healthcare, retirement and other benefits more accessible. Her recent proposed 7% cap on child care expenses may fall short of the pensions for domestic workers and guaranteed incomes for single moms that earlier radicals imagined, but her choice to center this issue can shift our national consciousness toward progress.
Harris has supported care work without enshrining the “traditional” family, focusing on policies that will help a wide range of households such as paid family leave, affordable long-term care and an expanded child tax credit. This is consistent with the National Welfare Rights Organization’s insistence that single-parent households deserve the same respect as other families and the organization’s advocacy for policies to help caregivers regardless of their family structure.
Both Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have voiced support for expanding the child tax credit. Yet Vance has attacked working and childless women, disparaged day care and suggested that bringing in Grandma or Grandpa is a solution to child care costs. In addition to targeting and shaming women, these statements make it hard to believe that a second Trump presidency would acknowledge that paid care work is an urgent need for many types of families and that care workers deserve equal rights.
Real equality for women — all of us, regardless of race and class — depends on supporting parents and fighting for the professional care workers, mostly women, who, in the words of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, “make all other work possible.” Perhaps this kind of feminism is finally having its day.
Serene J. Khader, a professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, is the author of the forthcoming “Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop.”
