Introduction
1 “A proper independent spirit”: The Vancouver City Crèche, 1909–20
2 “Self help is to be encouraged to the fullest extent”: Working Mothers and the State in the Interwar Years
3 “It takes real mothers and real homes to make real children”: Child Care Debates during and after the Second World War
4 “The working mother is here to stay”: The Making of Provincial Child Care Policy in the 1960s
5 “Talkin’ Day Care Blues”: Feminist Child Care Battles in the 1960s and 1970s
6 “The feeling lingers that day care just isn’t nice”: Provincial and National Child Care Politics since the Mid-1970s
Conclusion
Notes; Bibliography; Index
How have persistent notions of what motherhood should be obstructed the creation of progressive child care policy in British Columbia?
Lisa Pasolli is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. She researches the history of child care, social welfare, and women and gender in twentieth-century Canada. Her work has been published in BC Studies and Acadiensis.
Reading Pasolli’s extensively documented book is a sobering
exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century policies guided
by familiar rhetoric about why mothers partnered with male
breadwinners should not work and why mothers without breadwinners
should work (in low-wage jobs) to redeem themselves … In the end,
Pasolli’s history of childcare policy in British Columbia tells us
that out-of-home childcare is a radical claim that requires a
paradigmatic shift in thinking about working mothers and the
‘‘contested nature of social citizenship.’’
*Pacific Historical Review*
Much more than connecting the chronological dots (which is itself
an important achievement), Pasolli provides an analytical
explanation for the rather discouraging continuities that shaped
decades of public debate and marginalized the childcare and
employment needs of women and families … A smart book on an issue
we continue to wrestle with, and the sole monograph on the topic
from a historian’s perspective, it will find its way on to many
bookshelves.
*BC Studies*
To assemble this impeccable book, Lisa Pasolli has formulated
impressive questions … Readers … will be interested to discover how
contemporary debates over the importance of early education, and
over the educational disadvantages of parents and workers who bore
the consequences of the deficiencies of child care, became part and
parcel of The Child Care Dilemma.
*Historical Studies in Education*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |