At that time the disciples came

to Jesus and asked, “Who is the

greatest in the kingdom of heav-
en?” He called a child, whom he
put among them, and said, “Tru-
ly I tell you, unless you change
and become like children, you
will never enter the kingdom of
heaven. Whoever becomes hum-
ble like this child is the greatest
in the kingdom of heaven.”

— Gospel of Matthew, 18:1–5

Citoyens

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Features ISSUE 30 SUMMER 2018

pg. 22 pg. 42

A BLUEPRINT EVERY CHILD

FOR UNIVERSAL NEEDS THE GOOD
CHILDHOOD ENOUGH STATE
MEGAN ERICKSON CATHERINE LIU

pg. 60 Insert

JAPAN’S MORE BATS

“WOMENOMICS” JACOB KRAMER
Illustration by MALINA OMUT
KRISTIN SURAK
Contributors
cover art by
Supermundane

Jenny Brown is a member of National Catherine Liu is is professor of film

Women’s Liberation and a former
editor at Labor Notes. She is a
coauthor of the Redstockings book
Women’s Liberation and National
Health Care: Confronting the Myth
of America.
Meagan Day is a staff writer
at Jacobin.
Megan Erickson is a Jacobin
editorial board member and the
author of Class War: The
Privatization of Childhood.
and media studies and visual studies
at uc Irvine. She is researching the
cultural and political attitudes of the
US professional managerial class.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin
staff writer. He lives in Auckland,
New Zealand.
Kristin Surak is a Fung Global
Fellow at Princeton University and
an associate professor of Japanese
politics at soas, University of
London.

Maria Hengeveld is a phd student Miya Tokumitsu is a contributing

at the University of Cambridge and a
contributing editor at Africa Is a
Country.
Eileen Jones is a film critic at
Jacobin and the author of Filmsuck,
USA. She teaches at the University of
California, Berkeley.
Conor Kilpatrick is on the editorial
board of Jacobin.
editor at Jacobin.
Alex S. Vitale is professor of
sociology, coordinator of the Policing
and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn
College, and author of The End of
Policing.
Jonah Walters is Jacobin’s
researcher.

Photo Attributions — Page 13–17 "Germany Has Europe's Lowest Birth Rate" — Sean Gallup/Getty Images. Page 67 "Extensive Ice Fractures in the Beaufort
Sea" — NASA. Page 68–69 "Around Marshall" — NASA. Page 70 "Dunes on Ice" — ­­ NASA/JPL/Arizona State University. Page 72 "SOVIET SPACEFLIGHT - MISC. -
JSC" — NASA. Page 74 "2011 MTV Video Music Awards - Arrivals" — ­ Jason Merritt/Getty Images, "Lenox Hill Hospital Where Natasha Richardson Is Being Treated"
— Neilson Barnard/Getty Images. Page 93 "11:00 A. M . Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter's Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location:
St. Louis, Missouri." ­— Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress. Page 94 "Strike Sympathizers" ­— Bain News Service/Library of Congress.
Departments
FRONT MATTERS MEANS OF DEDUCTION

8 11 13 34 36
party lines the soapbox struggle the vulgar transitions
session empiricist
Citizens of the Letters + Defunding the
Present The Internet Rational Don’t Leave Future
Speaks Actors the Kids Alone

18 40
friends & foes uneven and
combined
It’s Okay to
Have Children God Bless the
Child

READING MATERIEL CULTURAL CAPITAL

47 52 66 74 77
canon fodder canon fodder red channels bass & beyond
superstructure a boundary
The World's We Read Klass and Kids’
The Beyoncé The Spoils of
Toughest Job a Bunch of Films
Treatment War
Parenting
Books

54 55
glossary field notes
How Children Convention
Are Made on the Rights
of the Child

THE TUMBREL LEFTOVERS

81 86 88 92 95
girondins thermidor versailles the dustbin means & ends
Girls to the The Class Clowns The Newsies Jacobin Is for
Rescue Criminalization Were Real the Children
of Youth
Vol.
2 1
CATALYST-JOURNAL.COM №
 Front
Matters
NUTRITIOUS START
TO A HEALTHY MAGAZINE
 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES BY MEGAN ERICKSON
AND MIYA TOKUMITSU

Citizens
of the Present

Children occupy a paradoxical position within

capitalist societies — they are at once future
workers who will replenish the labor force, as well
as creatures who draw the adults caring for
them away from profit-generating work. “Our
most precious resource,” then, are problems
to be solved in even the most progressive capitalist
societies. Across the world, a range of solutions
exist. Scandinavian countries are renowned for
their lengthy parental leave, child allowances,
and government-subsidized childcare. Other soci-
eties, like the United States, have relied on
unwaged and low-cost labor from women in order
to keep the burdens of child-rearing private and
individual. Still, other countries funnel children
into the workforce at young ages, harvesting
what labor power they can from young people.
Whether we relate to them on an individual level
as parents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, or fellow
travelers enduring their wails on airplanes, as
socialists, we have a responsibility to take children
seriously. Children are among the most easily

10 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

oppressed members of our communities. The
contradictory nature of children as future
workers and impediments to immediate profit
accounts for the gulf between the rhetoric
used to discuss children and their actual treatment.
On the Left, we want people to thrive at every
stage of life, and this goal should be our guiding
principle in developing policies that enfran-
chise the youngest among us.
The iconic images of the child laborer, the child
soldier, the child refugee, and the child torn
from her mother at the border have provoked mass
protest, as they should. “How often, when you
think of war, do you picture a child brandishing
an ak-47 assault rifle?” asks one nonprofit
organization. It’s the job of ngos to dramatize the
exploitation of innocence while soliciting
donations for “needy kids,” but it’s the job of soci-
alists to insist that assault rifles don’t belong
in anyone’s hands; that humans, no matter who
they are, should not live in cages; that we all
have the right to freedom and care.
Throughout history, a sentimental childhood has
been one only afforded by the rich. In a world
organized around profit rather than well-being,
children are valued in poor regions not for joy,
meaning, or other emotional consolations, but for
their labor. Around the turn of the twentieth
century, a canner who stopped using child labor
in accordance with growing public sentiment
“was besieged by angry Italian women, one of whom
bit his finger ‘right through,’ ” and today,
campaigns to abolish child labor in the Global

CHILDHOOD 11
 PARTY LINES

South usually end up pressing children into more

dangerous, low-paid unregulated work.
Private efforts to shield children from an unjust
world invariably fail, or result in tragedy. Rather
than try to airlift children out of harm’s way and
into the arms of adoptive parents, why not end war
zones? Rather than take children out of class to
see the pro bono dentist at school, why not fund
medical care for all? Children don’t just need
our protection: they need a better world in which
to grow up.
While the United States is certainly among the most
egregious violators of the fundamental rights
of children in the world, it is hardly alone in seeing
children as the burden of individual families or
investments in the future, rather than citizens of
the present moment. The early childhood
educator Maria Montessori, who envisioned pre-
schools as the first step in a larger project to
liberate women and children by creating communal
spaces for care, insisted that adults are as
dependent on children as children are on adults.
“The small child walks to develop his powers,
he is building up his being,” she observes. “He goes
slowly. He has neither rhythmic step nor goal.
But things around him allure him and urge him
forward. If the adult would be of help, he must
renounce his own rhythm and his own aim.” It’s
that renunciation of a rhythm and an aim —
that need — that is so appalling to capitalism, and
yet such an essential part of what it means to
be human.  ■

12 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX LETTERS@JACOBINMAG.COM

Letters

Why Can’t All Our Letters Be Like This
The 1968 issue is the best one you have produced since
the one on the Civil War — which I regard as a classic.
Every article I have read has been excellent. I was
especially glad to see in the article on sds that quotes an
sdser from Texas on the experience of a generation of
members who hailed from hostile backgrounds. sds had
already flamed out before I began my journey to radical
politics with the October 1969 Mobilization against the
war in Vietnam. But I was a product of small town
Missouri, and the Texas sdser told the truth.
Red Diaper babies inherited their politics. But we
“freedom budget” and advancing the rights and prospects
had to fight for ours. A donation is on its way to your
foundation.
Rustin would not abandon that mission.
— Randy Cunningham, Cleveland, OH
In Defense of Bayard Rustin
Shawn Gude’s article “The Tragedy of Bayard Rustin”
is quite right to describe Rustin as “one of the most adept
tacticians of his generation, one of the most impressive
American socialists of the twentieth century.” But it is quite
wrong to charge him with acting “in service” of “a war
that ended only after more than a million perished.” Rustin
did not “support” the Vietnam War. He supported
immediate negotiations to end it. But he knew taking an
active stance opposing the war, especially as the antiwar
movement radicalized, would mean abandoning a lifelong
project: the transformation of America around a
of black and white workers throughout the country.
One may critique Rustin’s position and his statements on
the war from the vantage point of history. His position
did not achieve the victory of the Freedom Budget and it
hurt his standing in both the civil rights and antiwar
movements. But it is slander to say that Rustin’s actions
were “in service” of the Vietnam War.

— Eric Chenoweth, Washington, DC

CHILDHOOD 13
 THE SOAPBOX

The Internet
Speaks

Because
communication Obviously — It’s Called a “Strategic Corporate
Partnership”
is at the
“Roundup”? Great newsletter name folks. If you had any
heart of any staff members that have even the slightest interest in
good relationship. environmental issues you would know it shares a name
with an unpopular herbicide made by Monsanto.

— Colin Tosh, Newcastle, United Kingdom

Is AMLO Similar to Trump?

Anti-Lion King Republicanism
Mufasa subjected the hyenas to housing discrimination —
Scar attempted to liberate them. He got blamed for
a drought which was not his fault and coup’d out by reac-
tionary elements within the military. Also Timon and
Pumba are clearly an-caps.
— Benjamin Studebaker, Cambridge, United Kingdom
UPS Workers on Strike
They deserve whatever they demand. FedEx loses
packages.
— Brianna Noah, Kingston, NY
Eco-Socialism for the Twenty-First Century
Cannabis removes carbon from the environment AND
PRODUCES OXYGEN.
Both are carbon-based life forms with internal skeletons
that use tools and communicate in an Indo-European
language. Certainly anyone would see that they’re very
much alike?
— Titus Bluth, Madrid, Spain
Finish Him!
I was introduced to Joe Lieberman as a child reading
early-90s video game magazines and seeing him rail
against Mortal Kombat like it was the decline of
civilization.
— Jonathan Blake, Pittsburgh, PA
Issue 31 Preview
Jacobin | Cuba has a New Leader. Can Tropical Stalinism
Survive a Sanders Presidency? We asked Greek Trotsky-
ists in London.

— Diana Giaccardo, Audubon, NJ — @getfiscal, Toronto, Canada

14 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

FRONT MATTERS
STRUGGLE SESSION BY JENNY BROWN

Rational
Actors

In the United States, women face

the prospect of becoming
mothers without necessary social
protections. Many decide it’s
not worth the risk.

White, black, and Latina, immigrant and native born,

US women are having fewer children — by some
measures, the birth rate is the lowest it has ever been.
In the United States, the costs and work of
childbearing and child-rearing are pushed onto
parents, women in particular, while employers
increasingly avoid contributing anything to the raising
of their future workforce. Other countries have
responded to plunging birth rates by providing free
White, black, and Latina, immigrant
childcare, paid family leave for both parents,
and native born, US women are
and shorter work hours. But here in the United States,
having fewer children.
we face a cheaper, meaner strategy to prop up
the birth rate: make it harder to get abortions and
birth control. The result is that one in four of
our births is unintended, roughly twice the rate in
countries with robust reproductive rights.

CHILDHOOD 15
 STRUGGLE SESSION

Last December, when House Speaker
Paul Ryan instructed Americans to have
more babies for the good of the
economy, women responded with fury:
“I’ll tell Paul Ryan the same thing I tell
my parents and all their noisy friends: you
want me to have babies, create an
environment where having and raising
a child doesn’t cost an entire adult
person’s salary and I’ll think about it,”
wrote MazzieD on Jezebel. Her
response is not unusual. The latest reports
show that in 2017, women in the US
bore even fewer children than in 2016,
a thirty-year low despite the alleged
economic recovery. To explore the causes
and dimensions of this “birth strike,”
National Women’s Liberation has been
asking women their reasons for
having or not having children. The testi-
fiers here range in age from their
twenties to their sixties and two-thirds
are women of color. The names
have been changed. By some
measures, the
The responses show that women are
birth rate
feeling sharply the burdens that US
in the US is the
society puts on them. Those who don’t
lowest it has
want children give economic reasons
ever been.
as often as personal preference. Those
who want children are weighing their
desires against their lack of time, money,
sleep, affordable health care, and
the anticipated costs to their well-being.

GENERAL FERTILITY RATE (1950–2016)

BIRTHS PER 1,000 WOMEN AGES 15–44

130

120

110

100

90

80

70

60

50

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

16 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 Rational Actors

What are your reasons for wanting children?

For not wanting them? Has your thinking changed?
Are your parents’ lives a factor in your thinking?

Rana
Doctor, 40s

I always wanted a child, always wanted to be a mom, I was

a preschool teacher after college, dreamed of adopting
a houseful of children. I pursued a difficult professional
path that required a lot of hours, so I didn’t date. I didn’t
meet my husband until four or five years ago, after I was
established in a career, and in my late thirties I had my
daughter. I felt a sense of urgency, I knew I was getting
older, and I got pregnant almost right away, so we didn’t
get to be a couple much without a child. I regret that be-
cause I think it’s an important part of a relationship. But
my baby makes it all worthwhile. I come home completely
emotionally drained and she says, “Ta-da mommy, sup-
wise!” It’s work, but I can’t put it in to words how com-
pletely amazing and precious it is.
I always thought I wanted more than one child, but
I will be forty-two in June. Now, Aisha’s three, my hus-
band has had health problems, and I’ve struggled with my
own health problems. At work, going on maternity leave
would be supported, but I’m really, really tired. Working,
taking care of a child, dealing with my husband’s recent
illness, and there’s just so much to do all of the time that I
don’t know how I would do it with another baby — mate-
rially, logistically, how that would work.
I need to work fewer hours; I would like to have health
benefits whether I work or not; I wish I’d had more ma-
ternity leave, at least a year, then I wanted to go back half
time. I want there to be places where you can go where
people bring their children and their families and there’s
food — healthy free food — and the kids can play togeth-
er, and you can eat supper. I want that much societal help.
I want free day care, after-school care, health care. The
hardest part of my day isn’t taking care of a terminally
ill patient, it’s coming home and deciding what to make
for supper.
Georgia
Student and technical worker, 20s
My mom had three. In my teens I wanted kids. I was good
around kids and I liked being around kids. And I had this
vision — as a kid, I’d sort of been a fighter personality be-
cause I was the oldest in an immigrant family, my parents
had a lot of hard times navigating the system here, so I
was a little “child adult” for a long time. So, I just had this
vision that I would keep kicking ass until I had a kid, and
then the kid would be one 100 percent of my focus.… [My
thinking has] changed radically, I don’t want kids any-
more and it’s because in this trajectory of kicking ass, I
realize you don’t stop. If you’re going to college, and then
you have a job and you have your ambitions and you’re
feeling that more and more. I can’t turn that off anymore.
And also, as I grew up, I started making notes about what
I don’t want, [my parents’] absolutely horrid marriage,
and how most men in my family are terrible in terms of
sexism or not doing their share. So, there’s a deep-rooted
fear that I have, that I want to avoid that at all costs, and
if it means being alone then so be it. And currently I can’t
even keep a plant alive.

CHILDHOOD 17
 STRUGGLE SESSION

Beatriz Those who want children are

weighing their desires against
Arts worker, 30s
their lack of time, money, sleep,
affordable health care, and
I don’t have any [reasons] right now but I used to [assume] it would the anticipated costs to their
occur or transpire at some point in my twenties or thirties. For not well-being.
wanting them, let me count the ways.… Understanding that there
is no support in place for women who have children, that alone is
enough for me to be like, “fuck that.” But seeing my friends who
are in their early to mid-thirties now go through being pregnant,
childbirth, and how that’s affected their careers and their relation-
ships with their partners and their friends. I see them getting joy
out of having children, but I see so many other parts of their lives
crumbling, at least in my view, and that compromise doesn’t seem
appealing to me whatsoever. I think that it would great to have
a child with a partner that you love because it seems like a lovely
thing, but I have also had the experience of starting a business with
a partner and seeing how much of the slack I was constantly pick-
ing up. There’s no convincing me that the majority of the burden of
child-rearing won’t fall to me regardless of who my partner is.

Nona
Retired clerical worker, 60s

I didn’t have children, though I expected to. When I was very young,
my mother’s friend got me a job in a newborn nursery, trying to in-
terest me in nursing, and I observed a couple of births. In the 1960s
there was the episiotomy, it horrified me. Basically, I wasn’t interest-
ed until about age thirty-six, but then I didn’t have a partner. By the
time I did have a partner, we still lived kind of low-[rent], but I guess
there have been choices that I made, not just that I couldn’t afford it.
When I got together with Nadine — this would have been at the very
end of the possibility of getting pregnant — we could either afford
to buy a house, or we could afford to have a child, and I picked the
house. Also, my best friend from college — she’s heterosexual, same
age as me — had saved money, went for those fertility treatments,
and when it didn’t work, she decided to adopt. Her children, while
lovable, are so difficult that this woman, who I have tried to figure
out life with since age eighteen, stopped reading. I was horrified by
that and still am.… I’m sorry that I didn’t have a child, but a child
under supportive circumstances, which at present do not exist in
this country. When I think of what work would be required and what
I would have had to give up. I am sorry that I didn’t give my parents
grandchildren. I was an only child and they were very disappointed.

18 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 Rational Actors

Rose
Teacher, 30s

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it takes to raise a decent

human being. Not all of it falls onto parents, but a good deal of it
does. I feel actual joy when I’m with my nephews and other babies.
I don’t feel joy with them all the time, but I feel it enough that I un-
derstand the reasons people have children. I can get joy from other
things, but I enjoy getting that from children. Community is very
important to me and this is one way, not the only way, to build com-
munity. Having children forces you outside of your world because
those children have friends who have parents. They go to school.
So, there are all these ways that community would expand for me
if I had kids. [But] the conditions of [paid] work, the dynamics of
a relationship with a male partner, make me think that I will have
to sacrifice — or at least compromise a lot — my interests, desires,
and dreams, to be a parent. As someone who has been taking care
of others since I was nine years old, I am at a stage of my life where
I want to put my self-care first for as long as I can. Children are also
expensive, and I have chosen a career that isn’t lucrative and have
accumulated a significant amount of school debt. I don’t physically
care for my father, but I contribute money toward his care, and I will
have to fund or do the work of caring for my mother when that time
comes. I also organize my great uncle’s care.

Bettina
Doctor, 40s

When I was younger, I didn’t like children. [At work I] dealt with
babies and children every day. I had no interest in them. I wanted
independence and children just seemed like a drag. Then when I got
Those who don’t want children
older, I did start to want to have a kid, but I put it off, because I wor-
give economic reasons as often
ried about money, not being able to afford health care, not having
as personal preference.
paid leave, and the cost of childcare. I also worried about whether
my husband was really going to put in the work. And I was at a point
in my life where my younger brother was having a lot of problems …
and saw the difficulty that my parents were going through with that.
I had Luca, despite the worries, about two and a half years ago.
I would say I have zero desire for a second kid right now. I thought
I wanted to have two kids in the abstract, but while I’m kind of do-
ing ok, and Nathan and I are kind of doing ok, it’s like the water
is up to your neck. The thought of another kid is just being swal-
lowed up and going under, like a vortex. I just think it would be too
hard — even the thought of it makes me feel nauseous. If there were
no abortion available, I can imagine myself looking into getting a
back-alley abortion if I got pregnant right now.  ■

CHILDHOOD 19
 FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS & FOES BY CONNOR KILPATRICK

ILLUSTRATION BY
CHRISTOPH KLEINSTÜCK

Itʼs Okay
to Have Children

Instead of challenging the pressures

that capitalism puts on child-
rearing, liberals surrender to it.

Having kids is bad for the four, five, more.… It feels greedy, Moran says the planet doesn’t need
environment. overbearing, rude.” your babies.”

Or is it the deficit? Or wait, no, it’s
selfish because the world has gone to
hell. Whichever one you choose, the
important thing to remember is that,
according to a growing number of
liberals, reproducing the species is the
equivalent of buying a McMansion
and running the a/c with all the
windows open.
Or maybe having babies is more
like, say, pouring the concrete on an
illegal Israeli settlement? “The
egoism of child-bearing is like the
egoism of colonizing a country,”
says the narrator of Sheila Heti’s criti-
cally acclaimed novel Motherhood.
“How assaulted I feel when I hear that
a person has had three children,
In the Guardian alone, the past two
years have seen headlines such as
“Would you give up having children
to save the planet? Meet the
couples who have”; “Want to fight
climate change? Have fewer
children”; “‘It’s the breaking of a
taboo’: the parents who regret
having children,” “Want to save your
marriage? Don’t have kids.” In
the New York Times, “No Children
Because of Climate Change?
Some People Are Considering It.” At
Business Insider, “7 reasons people
shouldn’t have children, according to
science.” And this new logic
is quickly making its way through
liberal culture writ large:
“Feminist funnywoman Caitlin
It’s hard not to get the message. Yet
it seems to be falling on deaf ears.
According to a recent cdc study,
the gap between the number of
children American women want to
have and the number they’re
likely to have “has risen to the highest
level in 40 years.” The number of
women who want a child in the future
has only increased since 2002.
And the only age group that’s seen a
slight uptick in fertility rates are
women between forty and forty-four.
“Americans are improving their
ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies
far faster than they are improving
the ability to achieve desired
pregnancy,” as the New York Times

20 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

put it. With the most expensive
health care in the world (and tens of
millions still uninsured), decades
of stagnant wages, and skyrocketing
education and housing costs,
having kids has never been so expen-
sive. The Department of Agriculture
estimates that it’ll cost an average of
$233,000 to raise a child born in
2015 through her seventeenth birth-
day — and that doesn’t even include
college tuition, another uniquely Ame-
rican exorbitance. More and more,
bringing a child into the world is a
dream many simply can’t afford.
It’s here in this misanthropic anti-
natalism that liberalism finds an ally
in conservatism. The Brookings
Institute put deferring parenthood
as one of their “Three Simple
Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to
Join the Middle Class.” It’s a line no
different than what we’ve heard
from conservatives like George Will
for decades now: you’re poor
because of the immoral choices
you’ve made.
It recalls the unabashedly racist
mid-1990s campaign when both
Republicans and the Clinton
administration joined together to
denounce the scourge of “unwed
teen mothers” as a mortal threat to
children’s health and family
values — “a bedrock issue of charac-
ter and personal responsibility,”
as Clinton’s own 1994 proposal put
it. At the time, another set of
Democrats went even further and
attempted to include a provision
that denied all food stamp benefits
and Aid to Families with Depen-
CHILDHOOD
dent Children to unwed mothers
(and their children) under age
twenty-one.
Despite the fearmongering over these
supposedly shameful and selfish
young mothers, these women were
in fact making the best decisions
for their families. Dr Arline T. Gero-
nimus has argued that, contra both
conservative and liberal shaming of
“poor teen moms,” the choice of
low-income women to have children
at a young age represents a
logical decision when faced with the
constraints of being poor in
America:
If she finds employment, the
wages and benefits she can
command may not offset the
costs of being a working
21
 FRIENDS & FOES
Asking women to wait to have kids
until they have launched a career and saved up
enough money is just the obverse
of commanding women to stay at home and
make babies for their husbands.
mother. She cannot expect
maternity leave; nor is accessible
or affordable day care available
that would free her from reliance
on kin for childcare once
she does return to work … her
greatest chance of long-term
labor force attachment will be if
her children’s pre-school years
coincide with her years of peak
access to social and practical
support provided by relatively
healthy kin.
With this enormous gap between
the desires of women and the grueling
realities of being a working-class
mother in America, what could
possibly explain so many liberals’
strange new anti-natalism?
Even in France, long known for their
generous natalist welfare state,
their new thirty-five-year-old Minister
for Gender Equality is signaling a
willingness to rewrite commitments
to mothers down to threadbare
American levels. “I always notice the
energy and the volunteerism that
exist in America,” France’s Marlène
Schiappa recently told the New
Yorker. “Regarding the place of
women, the reflex in France is to say,
‘What’s the state going to do for
me?’” Quelle horreur!
22
Diminished horizons, lowered
expectations, and doing more with
less — this is the twenty-first-
century liberal program for the toiling
masses. In other words, it’s a conti-
nuation of liberalism’s forty-year
program of austerity, a result of its
total abandonment of the trade
union movement. A decent living, a
home of your own, and a comfy
retirement — a meager share in our
society’s immense collective
wealth — are all long abandoned
promises. Now, apparently, so
is having kids.
More and more, liberalism finds
itself unable to imagine any way out
of the hell of life on the margins
in 2018. Instead, they’ve begun to see
their role as something like moral
sentinels: piously observing and mana-
ging the collapse. It’s a liberal-left
that no longer believes it can change
the world and instead, in the words
of Adolph Reed, finds its most impor-
tant mission in simply “bearing
witness to suffering.” They either
believe a mass political challenge to
capital and climate collapse is
impossible, or simply undesirable.
Either way, their answer is the
same — not a revived labor movement
but a new moralism of austerity
and self-sacrifice.
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
That inevitably means asking women
to adapt to the logic of raising
children under the dictates of the
market instead of challenging
those strictures. “Lean In” and call
it victory.
It’s an attitude that would have
bewildered men and women alike in
East Germany. Women in the
German Democratic Republic (GDR)
had both a robust welfare state to
help them raise children — free day-
care started just weeks after a
child’s birth and included breakfast
and lunch — as well as a much
higher workforce participation rate.
Abortion was legalized in 1972,
years before West Germany. For
women in the East, divorce too
was quick, easy, and cost nothing.
They were also more likely to
feel confident in their physical appe-
arance and reported higher
rates of sexual satisfaction than their
cousins in the West. For all its
political authoritarianism, the ability
to raise kids in the GDR didn’t
hinge on the ability to keep a nuclear
family together.
Now, in a unified Germany, day-care
openings are expensive and
competitive, with a national shortage
of 120,000 nursery workers — all

low-paid work, of course. In the East,
birth rates plunged immediately
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet
today, women in the eastern half
of the country still have children signi-
ficantly younger than their western
sisters and boast a smaller pay gap
between men — in the western
half of the country, that gap is compa-
rable to ours in the US.
Today, the only nations that come
close to East Germany’s commit-
ment to providing women this kind
of freedom are the countries where
the organized working classes have
made successful incursions
against capitalism’s imperatives.
Dutch women — not “Lean In”
American women — are, according
to studies, the happiest in the
world. And hardly any of them work
full time. Thanks to trade union
mobilization, their working class won
the ability to prioritize their
freedom over any “duty” to the job
market or husbands.
Here, then, we have the root of
liberalism’s newfound anti-
natalism — the very logic of capital.
Capitalism needs new workers
and consumers; it just doesn’t want
to pay for their upbringing.
Those costs, in the logic of capital,
should be passed off onto the
individual and the household. Which
is why today in the United States,
the fbi and ice are called in to prevent
baby formula theft — locking it
behind glass cases in the grocery store
is preferable to simply socializing
it and distributing it for free. Instead
of the state providing collectively
for the upbringing of children, our
police literally chase down biological
fathers to collect child support.
In this view, it’s better to coerce a
nuclear family into staying together
than for the state to collectively
provide childcare, education, and
health care services to parents
and their children. It’s shotgun
marriage as public policy.
We’ve gone from the conservative
postwar view of women as dutiful
baby-factories, to telling them that
they should delay pregnancy as long
as it takes for them to get a career off
the ground and build their brand —
possibly forever. While reproductive
medicine is currently making
enormous strides, in vitro fertiliza-
tion (ivf), ovulation-enhancing
medicines, egg storage, and artificial
insemination are prohibitively
expensive. Without a truly universal
health care system, these scientific
advances will always be reserved for
the affluent.
Asking women to wait to have kids
until they have launched a career
and saved up enough money is just the
obverse of commanding women
to stay at home and make babies for
their husbands. Both ask women
to defer not to their desires, but to an
all-powerful abstraction: the
market, the environment, patriarchy,
or even a twisted faux feminism.
It’s important for those of us in the
professional classes to remember
that, for the vast majority of working
people, the labor market is not a
potential site of self-realization and
never will be. Instead, it’s a brutal
arena where you’re forced to trade a
third of your life in order to survive.
In 2018, a “do what you love” career
is far out of reach for all but the
affluent. What the professional classes
will never understand — both
conservatives who shame young single
mothers or liberals who demand
that women defer parenthood until
CHILDHOOD
It’s Okay to Have Children
they can afford Baby Bjorn — is
just how rewarding child-rearing is
for those who are under no delusions
that capitalism will ever provide
validation.
How can we ever win a program that
socializes the costs of bringing
children into the world if so many
liberals still see the desire to have
kids as something like a timeshare in
Vegas — a costly, foolish, and tacky
investment mostly for the rubes?
Instead of parroting this gross and
misanthropic politics, we should
demand that capital stop shirking off
the costs of childhood onto workers
and instead socialize them — free
Finnish baby boxes and a Medicare-for-
All program that covers not only all
prenatal and pediatric care, but that
makes ivf a right and not a luxury.
A program that hires and trains
hundreds of thousands to work in high-
quality state day cares. The only
way we’re going to get any of this is
through a revived labor movement —
not creepy (and inevitably racist) “popu-
lation control” thinkpieces.
Why shouldn’t a twenty-something
be able to have a kid and still have
the freedom to embark on a career?
Why shouldn’t a young single
mother be able to go to college while
leaving her child safely in the care
of the state? And why should she need
to find or “keep” a relationship
with a man just to be able to provide
for her kids? 
A true freedom for women would
mean the ability to walk away from
the false choice of “babies, educa-
tion, or career?” altogether. Right now,
however, only the affluent can truly
have it all.
That’s anything but just.  ■
23
 A Blueprint
for Universal
Childhood
BY MEGAN ERICKSON

Children deserve to spend their

days in the company of peers,
having fun, and discovering the
world with the help of loving, well-
compensated adults.

I in september 2017, feeling

the first twinges of labor,
I walked beyond the ten-
block radius my ob-gyn had
prescribed me, defying her
bed-rest orders for one reason:
to tour day-care centers and
get my unborn kid on as many
wait lists as possible.

ILLUSTRATION BY PENCIL & HELP 25

Megan Erickson
I knew I had to take the risk only because I’d worked for
three years on youth and family programs at a high-quality
New York nonprofit.
When I’d started in 2012, our preschool had a two-
year wait list. By the time I left, the wait list had swelled
to almost four years, which meant that most children who
had been added to the list never got into the program. We
had at least twenty applications for children in utero, and
two for children who hadn’t yet been conceived. Sometimes
mothers mentioned to me that they’d miscarried, but would
like to keep their application open, and did in fact conceive
again before receiving an offer of admission. One baby died
while on the list.
My program was unusual in that it featured a first-
come/first-serve “need blind” admissions process and
substantial tuition assistance to families who could prove
that they needed it — but its $37,000 a year price tag was
all too typical for American childcare.
For the Church, life begins at the moment of concep-
tion. For an American baby, life starts much sooner — the
moment a parent (almost always a mother) begins to think
about how and when she can afford to have a child, and who
will care for the child when she returns to work, as the vast
majority of parents must do. If she has been in the same job
for a year and worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer
who also happens to employ at least fifty people within a
seventy-five-mile radius of her workplace, then she will be
eligible for twelve weeks of unpaid time off and continua-
tion of health benefits under the Family Medical Leave Act
(fmla). She may be able to extend that slightly further with
unused sick time — assuming she has any.
fmla is an accommodating piece of legislation passed
during the labor-punishing Clinton era, which applies to a
little over half of US workers. It was the Democrats’ polite
throat-clearing sigh, a gentle nudge in the general direction
of our bosses, asking “Please sir, can I have my job back
after taking care of my dying daughter?” when working
families needed a paid family leave program comparable
to the rest of the world’s, and a universal, federally funded
childcare program. Since 1985, the majority of mothers of
preschool children have participated in the workforce, and
in the thirty years since, unprecedented growth in wealth
inequality has transformed an urgent need into a moral and
economic crisis. Now, as Baby Boomers age and a smaller
percentage of the population has young children, there are
fewer adult advocates for their needs.
26 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
There is no reason we can’t have nationally subsidized,
paid parental leave and childcare today. At present, public
spending on early childhood education and care in the
United States represents less than 0.5 percent of gdp, less
than any oecd country besides Croatia, Latvia, and Turkey.
At the time of its bipartisan passage in 1993, the
Chamber of Commerce warned that fmla set a “dangerous
precedent,” and John Boehner muttered something about
“the light of freedom growing dimmer,” but twenty-five
years later, a vast majority of employers report that com-
plying with fmla is easy and has had a positive or neutral
effect on their workplaces. It is the sole non-means-tested
federal provision for American families in the first few weeks
of their children’s lives. Still, the burden is on parents to
obtain doctor’s notes and coordinate it — and even it can
hardly be called universal.
Employers approve, but how has it turned out for fam-
ilies? Many of those who are eligible can’t actually afford to
take it. A full quarter of American mothers return to work
less than two weeks after giving birth. Marissa Mayer aside,
those who return soonest are most likely to be working
class. Mothers who do not have housekeepers or nannies are
constrained in their parenting choices, such as whether and
how to breastfeed, and are more susceptible to depression.
One factory worker described breaking down in tears
of exhaustion while pumping in a parking lot after a twelve-
hour shift. The cheerful slogan “breast is best” is more likely
to produce heart pangs than an eye-roll in the 88 percent
of women who have no paid time off.
Nurri Latef, an early childhood teacher who I spoke to
about her experience returning to school when her son was
two months old, says, “I hated it. I felt like I was leaving my
child at such a critical bonding time for the two of us, and
he was premature. He spent a month in the hospital, so …
I was only at home for one month with Nasir before I had
to jump back into toddler-teacher mode so I could keep a
roof over our heads.” No parent in any job should have to
feel this way, but there’s a unique cruelty to forcing women
to leave their own children before they feel ready to take
care of other people’s children.
Meanwhile, Apple and Google employees get eighteen
weeks of paid leave and backup or on-site day care. Googlers
are awarded $500 cash referred to as “Baby Bonding Bucks.”
Of course, not every worker shares in the benefits even at
these seemingly enlightened firms: tech companies often
outsource security, food service, and janitorial work by

hiring private contractors, who are not eligible. Overall,
about a third of American workers in management and
other professional jobs have paid parental leave, while just
over 5 percent in service occupations do.
Here’s how Julia Roitfeld, the daughter of the editor of
French Vogue, describes impending motherhood: “It was
like a detox — I ate healthy, I slept a lot, and I didn’t drink.
All of my hormones were at the perfect levels. I was super-
happy, and I really didn’t give a shit about work. Usually I’m
so on top of work, but I was in a little cloud. But in August I
thought, ‘Okay, I need to go back to work and start making
a living again.’”
How long can a parent stay in that “little cloud” and
“not give a shit” about the cost of diapers, formula, and rent?
That depends both on one’s class and nationality. Brazilian
mothers get seventeen weeks of leave to take care of their
little ones at their full salary; Canadian parental leave was
recently extended from one year to eighteen months at
about 55 percent pay; Russia offers mothers twenty-four
weeks paid. I could go on. The United States, Papua New
Guinea, and Lesotho are the only countries in the world
that don’t guarantee all workers paid time off to care for
a new child — here, parental leave is a luxury reserved
for the rich.
At the same time we thrust new parents back into the
labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for
childcare in a country with no national standards for quality,
accessibility or safety. Nearly 11 million children, including
over half of children below the age of one, spend an average
of twenty-seven hours a week in some kind of childcare set-
ting, yet the burden is on individual parents to assess the
risks and benefits of a confusing, unaccountable, generally
private system pieced together state by state for the care of
“At
  the same time we thrust new
parents back into the labor
market, we also insist that they
comparison shop for childcare
in a country with no national
standards for quality, accessibility,
or safety.”
CHILDHOOD
A BLUEPRINT FOR UNIVERSAL CHILDHOOD
our littlest and most vulnerable children. In essence, giving
birth or adopting a child in America means you also take
on the job of government regulator. It’s an impossible task,
with occasionally tragic consequences.
In 2013, a day-care worker in Mississippi handed a
ten-week-old baby boy over to his father at pickup time
without noticing that the child’s skin was blue and he was
unresponsive. The father directed the staff to call 911 while
he performed cpr — none of the staff knew how — and his
son was finally rushed to the emergency room, where he
died. After an investigation, the state concluded that the
childcare center met all legal requirements for operation.
It remains open.
In 2014, Kellie Rynn Martin suffocated at the age of
three months in a day-care center run out of a middle-class
suburban home in South Carolina, where her mother sus-
pects she was put to sleep in a bassinet with a blanket or
even another infant. When forensics searched the house,
they found fourteen children playing “the quiet game” in
the eighty-five-degree basement under the supervision of
the owner’s daughter. In an interview, Martin’s mother
stressed that the day-care owner’s home had appeared clean
and the owner appeared competent when she toured the
program only a few weeks earlier.
On March 22, 2016, three infants died in three different
unlicensed and illegally operating day-care programs in
Connecticut, one from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
(sids), another from an overdose of Benadryl, and the third
from a blunt injury to the head. One of the providers had had
her license revoked by the state the previous year for failure
to comply with safety regulations — and yet continued to
operate her center. The Connecticut assistant child advo-
cate Faith Vos Winkel blamed parents, telling the Hartford
Courant that they have ample opportunities to find licensed
providers through the Office of Early Childhood’s website
and the 211 Infoline.
The death rate of children enrolled in home-based day
care — which is far more likely to be unlicensed than a cen-
ter-based program — is twelve times that of center-based
care. But home-based and unlicensed childcare is simply
more plentiful and affordable. Licensed childcare centers
are either geographically or financially out of reach for the
majority of families.
Nearly half of American children under five live in areas
where the demand for openings in childcare centers surpasses
availability. (Spots for infants and toddlers in childcare
27
Megan Erickson
centers are even more limited than those for three-to-four
year olds, since the low teacher-to-child ratio necessary
to ensure safety also make them difficult to profit from.)
Where licensed, high-quality care is available, individual
families shoulder most of the cost — and it is often prohib-
itively expensive.
Nationally, the average cost of tuition at a childcare
center is over $10,000 per year — nearly 20 percent of the
median household income. In the majority of states, child-
care costs more than college tuition. Because it is largely
private, our system is deeply inefficient, placing parents in
competition against each other for coveted spots, instead
of allowing them to negotiate prices collectively. Families
in the United States spend 25.6 percent of their income
on childcare, compared to an oecd average of 13 percent,
while getting significantly lower quality care.
Further, the grossly inadequate twelve weeks of job
protection offered by fmla means that many American
children start day care at the exact time that the risk of dying
from sids is highest: two to three months of age. Experts
theorize that the reason why day-care deaths often happen
in the first week or so that a child attends a new program is
because children whose parents practice safe sleep practices
at home are especially susceptible to sids when they are
moved to unsafe sleep environments.
Derek Dodd relied on the recommendation of a friend
when looking for childcare for his eleven-week-old son. But
despite having been cited by the Department of Health just
ten days earlier for unsafe sleep practices, the home-based
provider “put our child in an unbuckled car seat on the floor,
swaddled, where he wiggled down until he lost his airway
and suffocated to death.” The baby was left unmonitored for
two hours behind a closet door before the provider checked
on him and found him blue.
Amber Scorah, whose son died on his first day in an
unlicensed program in New York City, writes, “It’s possible
that even in a different system, Karl still might not have lived
a day longer; but had he been with me, where I wanted him,
I wouldn’t be sitting here, living with the nearly incapaci-
tating anguish of a question that has no answer.” Neither
family wanted their child to be in day care so young — both
were refused additional unpaid leave by their employers,
and could not afford to quit.
Simply put, the deaths of these children must be
counted as casualties of capitalism, an economic system
which prioritizes profit over human life, especially those
28 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
who do not yet add tangible value to the societies in which
they live.
It’s easy to imagine negligent and abusive providers
as monsters, but childcare is an exceptionally difficult job,
demanding patience, creativity, compassion, self-control,
and sometimes, selflessness. To consistently provide safe,
quality care requires serious social investment in the well-
being of children. For the most part, childcare workers
and day-care directors devote an extraordinary amount of
time and energy to filling in the immense gaps left by lack
of federal guidance, funding, and support. The first year I
worked as a teacher, I subsisted entirely on Red Bull and
smoked-turkey slices I kept in my purse, so I could use the
twenty-five minutes students were given for lunch to talk
to them about things other than “content.” I do not know a
single teacher who hasn’t routinely given up lunch breaks or
taken work home to do into the wee hours of the morning,
after putting their own kids to bed.
It’s a hell of a lot to demand of people making $20,320 a
year, the national median wage for early childhood teachers,
which is below the poverty threshold for a family of four.
These working-class women and men are increasingly being
required to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets
for college classes and state exams, while receiving wages
far lower than the value they are providing — and lower
than those of teachers who work with older kids. In essence,
we are subsidizing our current system of early childhood
education on their backs. It’s unfair, and it leads to high
turnover — which can be dangerous. It’s also inefficient:
there is a strong and well-documented relationship between
higher teacher salaries and higher childcare program quality.
Yet all human beings are fallible, which is why we need
consistent federal regulations in place for the protection of
both children and the day-care workers who care for them.
Systems like those used effectively in the community-based
early childcare center I ran are critical to ensure that no child
experiences the tragic negligence endured by Dodd’s son.
Our infant/toddler classroom consisted of ten children
cared for by four teachers, who supported each other and
kept each other responsible with extraordinary grace and
effort in a demanding job. Every single teacher was trained
annually in cpr and safe sleep practices, even though it
meant closing the school for a couple days a year. We
hired two substitute teachers who showed up every day
to enable us to meet the child/teacher ratios suggested by
experts, even when teachers were out sick. The presence

of a program director and assistant director — as well as
regular unannounced visits from the state — ensured that
teachers followed guidelines at all times. Infant/toddler
teachers kept a log (as required by New York state law) in
which teachers initialed that they had checked on a baby
in its sleep every fifteen minutes. The inspectors always
examined the logs when they came to visit.
Unfortunately — and contrary to the suggestion of
Connecticut’s assistant child advocate — even regulated
childcare in America is not uniformly high quality. In a
recent report on childcare quality and oversight of regulated
centers compiled by the advocacy organization Child Care
Aware of America, not one state earned an “A.” The only
program to earn a “B” was the Department of Defense’s,
which is run by the federal government. Ten, including
New York, earned a “C,” twenty-one states earned a “D,”
and nineteen failed.
It was a simple survey: the organization used fifteen
basic benchmarks representing research-backed criteria. It
revealed that only thirty-one states plus the dod require a
fingerprint check for childcare center staff, and just twen-
ty-three require a check of the sex-offender registry. Thirty
states plus the dod inspect centers two or more times per
year, but nine states do not require any type of annual
inspection. Only sixteen states addressed each of ten basic
health and safety requirements recommended by pediatric
experts in their licensing requirements. Just thirty-nine
states in the wealthiest country in the world even have a
program that rates the quality of day-care centers.
CHILDHOOD
Privatized Care
N
no wonder day care has a bad name
in this country. But why do we fault the
idea itself, rather than the well-docu-
mented failures in executing it?
When a National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (nichd) study found a link between long
hours in day care and behavioral problems, some head-
lines crowed with perverse joy, “Sorry Working Moms,
Daycare is Bad For Your Kid.” The New York Times took
a more concerned tone (“Poor Behavior is Linked to Time
in Daycare”), and then there was the gleeful, literary, “A
generation of ‘little savages’ raised in nurseries as daycare
is linked to aggression in toddlers.”
What few reporters stopped to mention was that the
quality of childcare is an essential piece of the puzzle. It was
children in low-quality care who experienced behavioral
problems later in life — and even those problems seemed to
disappear over time. In fact, by middle school, researchers
were able to detect little difference between kids who went
to day care and those who didn’t. Not a single one wrote
about the fact that the percentage of childcare-center classes
observed by the nichd meeting guidelines for adult-to-
child ratio was 36 percent for children aged six months,
20 percent for children aged 1.5 years, and 26 percent for
children aged 2 years.
More significantly, and equally underreported: family
characteristics such as income and access to “emotionally
29
Megan Erickson
supportive and cognitively rich” environments where
“mothers experienced little psychological distress” — in
other words, social class — were far more predictive of
developmental outcomes than who cared for a child and
for how long. And of course, no one questioned the long
hours parents put in at work, which necessitated those long
hours logged by kids at day-care centers in the first place.
Well, not exactly no one. The Norwegians were on it.
In a study of 75,000 children, researchers from the United
States and Norway not only found zero link between
childcare and behavioral problems, but noticed that when
they examined their sample using the same methods as
the nichd researchers, their own results were skewed as
well. “Norway takes a very different approach to childcare
than we do in the United States and that may play a role in
our findings,” one of the report’s authors delicately noted.
Children are legally entitled to early childhood care in
Norway, like most advanced capitalist countries. Where
childcare programs are seen as a universal right, austerity
measures cannot erode them into oblivion as has happened
with the means-tested Head Start program in the United
States.
Congress doesn’t hesitate to use the full power of the
state to force fathers to pay child support. Child protective
services commonly takes unsupervised children into custody
and deems them “abandoned” — which happened recently
to a South Carolina mother who could not afford the cost of
summer camp and left her nine-year-old daughter to play
in a park while she worked at a local McDonald’s. (The
mother was jailed.) Already this year, a Chicago mother
has been arrested for allowing her children to walk to the
Dollar Store alone while she was at work — as well as for
allowing her family to live in “deplorable conditions.” In
other words, for being poor.
Meanwhile, the federal government owes practically
nothing to children younger than five or any child outside
of the school year. The result of this system is clear: young
children in America are more likely to live in poverty than
any other age group.
In contrast to Europe, where unions agitated for and
won comprehensive, federally subsidized social programs,
the weakness of unions in the United States meant that
the only social programs on offer here were those offered
by bourgeois nongovernmental institutions. Instead of
solidarity, the poor got sympathy; progressives were more
concerned about vagrants running wild in the streets than
30 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
they were about the suffering kids experienced as laborers
in factories.
The plight of mothers whose children were taken from
them in Chicago and South Carolina is an echo from a time
when “child savers” rounded up children off the streets
and forcibly sent them away to labor on western farms on
“orphan trains,” whether or not they already had homes. In
the nineteenth century, poverty was viewed as a contagious
disease, and being poor was justification for having your
children taken from you.
This viewpoint began to shift in the 1970s when Congress
passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which
would have provided federally funded, universal childcare
and education. But conservatives echoed Progressive-
era private charitable organizations in their objections:
Nixon vetoed the bill, coming down on the side of “the
family-centered approach” rather than committing “the
vast moral authority of the National Government to the
side of communal approaches.” Nixon continued the con-
servative viewpoint of earlier reformers like Lydia Maria
Child, sentimentalizing mothers, while denying them eco-
nomic support.
In the famous “kitchen table” debate, in which he
debated Khrushchev while they toured a model American
suburban home, Nixon points to a dishwasher, “built in
thousands of units” because, “In America, we like to make
life easier for women.” Khrushchev shuts down this line of
thinking with a simple, “Your capitalistic attitude toward
women does not occur under communism.… We build
firmly, we build for our children and grandchildren.” Actu-
ally, that’s the point, Nixon responds: consumption drives
the economy. But, says Khrushchev, “In Russia, all you
have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union.
You are entitled to housing. In America, if you don’t have
a dollar, you have a right to choose between sleeping in a
house or on the pavement.”
Most women took on work outside the home in the
1970s not because their values had changed, but because it
became economically necessary to do so. But mainstream
feminists did little to challenge the idea that having children
is an individual choice, which must be paid for individually.
In contrast to Europe, where women’s emancipation was
spearheaded by workers, many liberal American second-
wavers ignored or were openly hostile to mothers. Little
urban zines called them “oppressors”; others viewed them as
retrograde traditionalists or bad role models for their kids.
 A BLUEPRINT FOR UNIVERSAL CHILDHOOD

Wages for Housework, an international campaign which

was far more grounded in economic demands and chal-
lenging the family wage than say, Ms. magazine, brought
visibility to cooking, cleaning, and caring for children
as labor and sparked debate. But it failed to successfully
transform itself into a broad working-class movement.
Mainstream Americans were never forced to reckon with
the fundamental reason women are devalued and discrimi-
nated against in the public workplace, or stuck at home: we
are the presumed primary caregivers of children. Whether
we plan on having children or not, until we live in a country
with adequate social provisions, we will walk into any job
interview with the weight of the expectation that we will
one day become less productive workers or leave the work-
force altogether.
Some American feminists even shared Nixon’s pre-
dilection for constructing private solutions to collective
problems. They may not have been moving to suburban
houses and stroking their dishwashers fondly while
thanking the free market, but they did retreat into pri-
vate enclaves, founding parent cooperatives on college
campuses with volunteer schedules that were doable for
artists and the self-employed, but not for the vast majority
of parents with full-time work schedules. While these
programs may have been personally necessary, they were
certainly not political — and access to them was limited by
race and class.
Historian Christine Stansell quotes one woman whose
son was enrolled in a feminist center: “one Black mother
did join the group,” but left “because she didn’t feel at
ease with the other mothers who seemed like hippies
to her.” If, as Stansell writes, hostility towards mother-
hood was “a white woman’s sentiment,” obliviousness
to the pressing need for subsidized day care was a rich
woman’s privilege.
Recollecting that heady time, Ellen Willis writes in
an essay about finding a nanny for her daughter, “as femi-
nist activists we, along with the thousands of other young,
childless women who dominated the movement, had of
course understood that sexual equality required a new
system of child-rearing, but the issue remained abstract,
unconnected with our most urgent needs; as mothers in
the political vacuum of the eighties, along with millions of
working parents, we pursue our individual solutions as best
we can. The political has devolved into the personal with
a vengeance.”

CHILDHOOD 31
Megan Erickson
How to Build a Public
Day-Care System
today, Americans are finally begin-
T
ning to understand that our seemingly
personal struggles in finding child-
care are actually a political problem.
Universal childcare is wildly popular
among the entire electorate, regardless
of political affiliation, and people are willing to pay for it. At
least 70 percent of Americans favor using federal money to
make sure high-quality preschool education programs are
available for every child in America. Eighty-two percent
say mothers and 69 percent say fathers should receive paid
family leave upon the birth of a child.
It’s certainly feasible. We’ve done it before when it
became necessary to prevent working-class revolt or to
go to war. The Works Progress Administration (wpa)
opened “emergency” nurseries in 1933 under the control
of local and state agencies (and sometimes, the public school
system) through the Federal Emergency Relief Agency.
Their explicit function was to serve first as a jobs program
for teachers, nutritionists, janitors, and nurses, and second,
to educate children. The women who became teachers
observed profound improvements in those they taught, such
as the disappearance of a stutter in one child, as well as their
own lives (“I never knew before that it was fun to work,” his-
torian Barbara Beatty quotes one staff member exclaiming).
Enrollment by race reflected the general population at the
time, but because it was primarily working-class families
who used them, the stigma of the schools as anti-poverty
measures meant that most of them did not endure beyond
the Depression, despite the best efforts of many.
When women flocked to factory jobs during World War
II, the federal government approved funding for 3,102 child-
care centers under the Lanham Act. These programs were
even better than the centers, with teachers trying out various
responsive pedagogical approaches, and administrators
ensuring that teachers and families worked together to
ensure the happiness and success of the children enrolled.
They hoped the schools would serve as models for a free,
public, universal early childhood education program that
could continue after the war, but the government shut-
tered it when men returned from overseas and took back
32 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
their jobs. Beatty records one government official justifying
the closures: “To some it connotes an inability to care for
one’s own; to some it has a vague incompatibility with the
traditional idea of the American home; to others it has a
taint of socialism.”
More recently, we have the example of the military’s
childcare centers — consistently the highest-rated program
in the United States — and the only non-means-tested
program that is federally subsidized and regulated. In the
1980s, when a report found that Department of Defense
centers were failing to meet safety codes, Congress took
action, passing the Military Child Care Act, which raised
teacher salaries and provided funding for increased training,
subsidized tuition, and rigorous and quarterly inspections —
assessing teacher qualifications and pedagogical approaches
as well as health and safety.
A parent I spoke to with two children in a dod childcare
center told me that she initially chose the program based on
its cost. Her family falls into the highest bracket of its sliding
tuition scale and pays $600 per month per child, below the
national average and far below the average for the area where
she lives. She was also drawn to its reliable coverage: the
program operates year-round, Monday-Friday, from 6 am
to 6 pm, and is only closed on federal holidays — unheard of
in the world of early childhood care. But above and beyond
these practical benefits, she’s come to appreciate the expe-
rience, skill, and communicativeness of the teachers. They
keep portfolios of her children’s work, and discuss develop-
mental milestones they’ve reached in regular conferences.
One teacher is so beloved by the children that they “erupt
into joyful shouting” when she arrives to the classroom.
Teachers provide daily reports of children’s activities,
which are developmentally appropriate and play-based, and
“But
  having a child is not
just a personal choice.
It is not an act of selfishness
that one should pay for,
but an act of optimism and
investment in society.”

the school has a nutritionist who coordinates meals with
whole grains, vegetables, and healthy snacks like hummus.
If we can offer this high-quality, affordable program
to military families, why can’t we offer it to all families?
Aside from the benefits to her children’s well-being and
her family’s finances, the parent notes:
It has drastically improved my mental health and mar-
ital health, which I didn’t foresee. I am no longer losing
sleep or spending the same mental energy coordinating
not just my own work schedule but my children’s care
schedule also. I’m not constantly wondering whether I
need to choose between my job and my family.
She also adds, if paid parental leave and universal childcare
were available nationally, “I’d probably be pregnant with
a third child.”
New York provides an interesting case study of what can
happen to teachers’ working conditions — and children’s
learning conditions — when early childhood programs
are integrated into the public education system. Recently,
the state-subsidized, free, universal pre-k system went
from serving a tiny number of families, to being open to all
families in New York. In the next few years, coverage will
expand to include all of the city’s three year olds, rich or
poor. Now, certified early childhood educators can share in
the higher wages, benefits, and collective bargaining powers
of unionized k-12 educators, which has led to an exodus
from lower-paying private or nonprofit community centers
to the public system. Program directors at lower-paying
private schools have accused the Department of Education
of “poaching” employees.
What if this happened on a national level? I asked Nurri
if and how America’s early childcare could improve. “It
will take some backbone,” she said. “We need to ask more
questions and not be afraid to defend ourselves respectfully
and professionally without fear of losing our jobs. The more
educators become aware of how powerful we are, the more
we can band together and fight for fair and equal wages,
emergent curriculums, and make access to receiving cer-
tifications and degrees more accessible to employees. We
need to feel like our work matters to people and makes a
difference.”
Banding together is key. Recently, when parents at one
nyc childcare center advocated for an increase in wages
for their children’s teachers, the center warned them
that tuition would rise — an obvious attempt to divide
CHILDHOOD
A BLUEPRINT FOR UNIVERSAL CHILDHOOD
the interests of the parents and teachers once they united
against management.
History reveals that paid parental leave and universal
childcare will not be won on the basis of liberal appeals to
fairness, equal opportunity for women, or demands for a
more diverse elite — and that Sheryl Sandberg’s benefits
do not trickle down to factory workers, garbage collectors,
and the nannies and early childhood workers whose under-
paid labor keeps our society running. Corporations may
offer these benefits to attract highly educated and skilled
workers, but they will not provide them for all workers at
the expense of their bottom line. By definition, capitalism
seeks to maximize profit, not the quality of life of workers.
But having a child is not just a personal choice — it’s a
matter of reproducing the species. It is not an act of self-
ishness that one should pay for, but an act of optimism and
investment in society. Until the United States can do what
the rest of the world has done and commit its vast resources
to child welfare, the ties that bind families together will be
as tenuous as their employment status.
It doesn’t matter whether early childhood education
would make the American economy stronger. What mat-
ters is that we need it. Parents need to know that their
children are safe and happy while they’re at work, without
spending a fortune. They deserve to enjoy their children,
not lie awake at night worrying about how to afford them.
And children deserve to spend their days in the company of
peers, having fun, and discovering the world with the help
of loving, well-compensated adults.
Some liberals try to justify the expense of childcare
as a social program that will save us money down the line.
Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania notes on his website
that early childhood education is “critical to our nation’s
economic strength.” Invest in children today, exploit them as
toothless workers with no collective bargaining tomorrow.
This is a mistake. Evidence abounds that redistribu-
tion is a far more effective way of reducing poverty and
improving academic outcomes for children from low-in-
come families than childhood education.
And when education is seen as compensatory — when it
is directed at poor children and intended to make up for the
inadequacies of a child’s background — it becomes a thing
that we do to children, which must be quantified, rather than
a lifelong process that they get to be part of. These types
of programs teach children that they are beneficiaries, not
citizens, and they have no place in a democracy.  ■
33
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 Means
of Deduction
MATH CAN BE FUN TOO
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Don’t Leave Higher social spending leads to

better lives for children. The United
the Kids Alone States has a long way to go.

3%
Child Poverty Rate

17%
Denmark

Child Poverty Rate

Canada

4
4
3
4 3
3 3
3 8
3 3
3 3
5 5
4 2
2 4 3 3
2 4
4 4
5 4 4
2
3 2 4
3
3 3
3.7% 3.6%
3.2% 3.3%
2.7% 2.8% 2.9% 3.0%
2.6%
2.2% 2.0% 2.1% 2.0%
1.2% 1.4% 1.3% 1.4% 1.3%
Australia

Austria

Belgium

Canada

Chile

Czech Republic

Denmark

Estonia

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

Iceland

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Republic of Korea

Rate of Social Spending Under 1 mortality rate Under 5 mortality rate

(2013) per 1000 (2016) per 1000 (2016)

36 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 13% 20%
Child Poverty Rate
Child Poverty Rate
United States
Poland

13

11% 11

Child Poverty Rate

United Kingdom

15

6
13
5
5

4 4 4
4

2
3 3
2 6
2 5 4 7
3
3
5 5 3 5
2
2 4
4 4
3
2 3.8%
3.6% 3.7%
3.0%
2.8%
2.1% 2.0%
1.6%
1.1% 1.2% 1.3% 1.2% 1.2% 1.3%
0.7%
0.4% 0.4%
Latvia

Lithuania

Luxemborg

Mexico

Netherlands

New Zealand

Norway

Poland

Portugal

Slovakia

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Turkey

UK

USA

CHILDHOOD 37
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
TRANSITIONS

President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signs the
Social Security Act, establishing the
Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC), the first federal
assistance program for children in
the United States.

The Special Milk

Program, a federal
reimbursement program, is
established to provide milk to needy
children in schools.

The US Department of Health and Human Services establishes the Head Start
program as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Initially, the
program only includes one eight-week summer session; by 1966, it has expanded to provide
year-round programming.

Medicaid is established, The Child Nutrition Act expands the

providing health care Special Milk Program to establish
benefits for low-income and the School Breakfast Program, offering meals to
disabled children. children whose families’ incomes fall below
federal poverty benchmarks. It also establishes
the Special Supplemental Food Program for
Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

Defunding the Future

38 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
 New amendments to the Social The Child Abuse Prevention
Security Act establish the and Treatment Act
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program to establishes, for the first time, a federal
provide welfare benefits to the elderly and minimum definition of child abuse and
disabled, including children. neglect.

43.6%

Total Poor
Children

Poor Children
under 6

0%

1960 1965 1970 1975

About one fifth of American children live in poverty.

Their government’s negligence is to blame.

CHILDHOOD 39
 TRANSITIONS

The Adoption Assistance and Child The Head Start Act

Welfare Act establishes the foster
care system and expands some means-tested
welfare programs for children. It also establishes
federal grants to match states’ expenditures for
day care and early childhood programs.
revitalizes the Head Start
program, which had dropped
dramatically in participation — from
700,000 children served in the
1960s to only 400,000 by the end
of the 1970s.

The Child Abuse Prevention and Temporary Assistance

Treatment Act is expanded to
enhance funding for prosecuting crimes against
children and conducting child welfare research
through the newly created Office on Child Abuse
and Neglect.
for Needy Families
(TANF) replaces AFDC, establishing
hard limits on welfare benefits and
introducing “workfare” requirements.

40.6%

0%

1980 1985 1990 1995

40 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 Defunding the Future

The Children’s Health Insurance The Children’s Health

Program (CHIP) is established to
provide for children whose families are unable to
afford sufficient health insurance, but whose
incomes don’t fall below the federal poverty line.
Insurance Reauthorization
Act loosens CHIP requirements,
extending health benefits to about 4 million
children and pregnant mothers,
including “lawfully residing immigrants.”

The Affordable Care Act mandates
that all states expand Medicaid
coverage to all children whose families’ incomes
do not exceed 133 percent of the federal poverty
line. It also extends the CHIP program until 2015.
New York City mayor Bill de
Blasio establishes public
pre-K for four-year-olds. The program
opens with 13,000 available slots. By
the next year, it had expanded to serve
over 60,000 children.

Total Poor
Children

Poor Children
under 6

2000 2005 2010 2015

CHILDHOOD 41
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
UNEVEN AND COMBINED
God Bless the
Child
The correlation between climbing
homicide rates and child migration
is too obvious to deny.
During the past decade, around
a quarter million children from the
“Northern Triangle” countries
of Central America — Guatemala,
Honduras, and El Salvador —
may have arrived at the US-Mexico
border unaccompanied by their
parents. Academic researchers first
noticed the phenomenon as
early as 2008, but by 2014 the trickle
became a deluge: that year, US
border officials apprehended more
than 68,000 children, some as
young as six years old.
In the five years between 2011 and
2016, the United States apprehended
178,825 unaccompanied child
42
migrants from Guatemala, Honduras,
and El Salvador. This number
includes 53,287 seventeen-year-olds —
8 percent of all seventeen-year-olds
in the Northern Triangle.
In a great many cases, the children
deliberately sought out and
presented themselves to US law
enforcement, believing their claims
for asylum to be unassailable —
facing widespread and increasingly
inescapable gang violence in their
countries of origin, young children
took the only avenue of escape
available to them and braved the
arduous journey north.
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
The right of migrants to request
asylum is enshrined in international
law. According to the United
Nations, countries like the United
States have an obligation to
provide safe haven to those who can
demonstrate a credible fear of
violence in their countries of origin.
But North American leaders have
been resistant to asylum claims from
Central American children, repeat-
edly denying the risks to children’s
safety in the Northern Triangle,
and instead insisting that child
migration is the result of economic
self-interest.
But the data make it clear, beyond a
shadow of a doubt: the out-migration
of children from Central America is
spurred by violence. In 2017, several
groundbreaking studies analyzed
municipal- and department-level data
in Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador to find an irrefutable correla-
tion between heightened homicide
rates and the accelerated out-migration
of children.
Unaccompanied Migrant Children in Honduras
per 100,000 Population (2014)

> 160

70 – 160

< 70
Homicides per 100,000
Population (2013)

> 80

55 – 80

< 55
Source: Richard C. Jones, "The Central
American Child Migration Surge: A Temporal
and Spatial Investigation of its Causes," in
The Latin Americanist 61:3, September 2017.

CHILDHOOD 43
 by Catherine Liu

Every Child
Needs the Good
Enough State

The richness of childhood

needs to be embraced
as a social good.

IT TOOK THE DEVASTATION of the Civil War to establish

government provision for veterans and their kin. Panic
about childhood and its inviolability along with a col-
lective sense of responsibility for soldiers, widows, and
their children intensified at the end of World War I.
Mass immigration, industrialization, and financial
crises also cast new light on collective responsibility
for the suffering and deprivation of society’s most vul-
nerable. Agitators such as Jane Addams and Eugene V.
Debs led movements demanding social services and
publicly funded welfare for working people.

44 ILLUSTRATION BY ESTHER AARTS

 Parental anxiety begins early for the wealthiest
parents, but their faith in parenting
fads and technology are inflamed by start-ups
and venture capitalists.

Beyond just capitalists, workers faced a new class of antago-
nists at the new century’s dawn: bosses, engineers, experts,
and advertisers. In their 1976 essay, “The Professional
Managerial Class,” Barbara and John Ehrenreich defined
the salient qualities of this intermediary class, between the
proletariat and the capitalist, who advocated for wealth
redistribution while decrying working-class consumption
habits. Their role in the class war was not obvious in the
Progressive Era, but the pmc began to serve capital by
pioneering new forms of cultural discipline and reinforcing
the social order. With complete faith in their position as
arbiters of morality, the pmc established cultural norms
that would shape American child-rearing for generations.
Benjamin Spock was one of the most influential figures
of this new class. Popularizing psychoanalytic ideas about
pleasure and identification, Spock played an important role
in the formation of new pmc identities. In his best seller,
Baby and Child Care, first published in 1945 — just as the
first boomers began to toddle — Spock advised new parents
that they should trust themselves with their babies. While
the naturalness and intuition that Spock praised seemed
like an antidote to authoritarian baby care, his readers were
squarely positioned as mid-century consumers seeking
assurance and “empowerment” through the consumption
of new ideas about child development.
Breaking with family traditions of austerity and
infant discipline, the newly prosperous American parent/
consumer of advice distinguished herself from previous
generations and working-class people by embracing expert
advice. Even though Spock warned parents of both old-fash-
ioned and faddish child-rearing counsel, he still packaged his
ideas in an attractive book that has sometimes been hailed as
the American twentieth century’s second-best seller, after
the Bible. Even at the height of his New Left activism, and
while under attack for his countercultural sympathies, his
critics never failed to call him doctor. Dr Spock emphasized
the pmc love of professional credentialism even while he
reminded his readers relentlessly that they were the ones
in the know. “You can read books and articles, but the main
way you will learn is to be observant in a meaningful way.
That means spending time, looking and listening to your
baby, not just feeding and cleaning him … and then trusting
yourself. Because you do know more than you do.”
In the 1970s, as budding pmc boomers dabbled in
self-indulgent experiments with “Eastern” religions and
privileged self-expression over family ties, they looked at
their blue-collar brethren as backward traditionalists. Today,
the situation appears reversed. Historians and sociologists
like Jefferson Cowie and Jennifer Silva have shown that
working-class Americans today have more unstable family
lives and greater instances of divorce and single parenthood
than their pmc counterparts. After four decades of capitalist
attack, working-class families and kinship networks are at
a breaking point. Facing layoffs and evictions, workers find
it almost impossible to establish continuity of relationships
and stable kinship ties.
In the meantime, college-educated Americans are far
more likely to marry and remain married within their class.

CHILDHOOD 45
Every Child Needs the Good Enough State
In the past fifty years, the pmc family has become a veritable
redoubt from which class privilege is reproduced. From
the very moment of conception, which for pmc parents is
a “choice,” optimization of children and their “potential”
has become a torturous preoccupation. The 40 percent
of American children conceived outside of marriage are
deemed unworthy of collective attention or public concern.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the reproduction of
class privilege, or as the Ehrenreichs put it, “the mainte-
nance of order,” is being played out in the configuration of
childhood itself.
Paula Fass identifies fear as one of the distinctive
features of contemporary middle-class parenting as “[mid-
dle-class parents] imagine what an unsuccessful child might
face in the future.” In her best seller, Perfect Madness:
Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner decries
the anguished, competitive perfectionism of contemporary
professional-class motherhood. Since 2006, when Warner
published her book, the anxiety of parenthood has only
intensified. Jacobin editor Megan Erickson argues that
these anxieties and fears are not unjustified, “given the
increasing stratification even within the top 1 percent of
the country’s earners as the 2008–2009 financial crisis
has only exacerbated the class war that those on top wage
against all those below them.” Parenting fads like “infant
education” have become hot commodities in a society where
economic polarization and a collapse of public institutions
and goods undermine the well-being of dependents and
their caregivers.
Perfectionist pmc parents are crusading class-forma-
tion pioneers: they will not hesitate to humiliate nannies,
babysitters, teachers, grandmothers, and other parents
about the horrific effects of vaccines, screen time, tickling,
dolls with faces, cigarette-shaped candy, or sugar in general.
For their children, they model social superiority and utter
indifference to the experiences of others.
Parental anxiety begins early for the wealthiest parents,
but their pmc faith in parenting fads and technology are
inflamed by start-ups and venture capitalists. Take, for
instance, the National Institutes of Health (nih)–funded
development of the Owlet Smart Sock. A baby sock
designed to monitor your baby’s heartbeat and oxygen
levels while she is sleeping, the Smart Sock collects a con-
stant stream of data about your bundle of joy and sends
an alert to your smartphone if any of her measurements
appear abnormal. In 2012, Owlet received $3 million
from the nih as well as $25 million of private equity and
46 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
venture-capital funding, as the government and investors
all risibly claimed to be interested in improving US infant
health. Obama-era federal programs were so enamored
with entrepreneurialism that the nih was willing to back
the Orwellian idea of the “connected nursery” with tax-
payer dollars.
Smart Socks or no, should we be so worried about
infant health outcomes? A quick glance at World Bank
data on under-five infant mortality shows that there has
been a dramatic global decline in this area in the past
fifty years. Thanks to the successful implementation of
polio and smallpox vaccines and other advances, early
childhood deaths have diminished from 93.4 per 1,000
live births in 1960 to 40.8 in 2016.In the United States,
the decrease is just as dramatic, with 30 deaths per 1,000
live births in 1960 to 6.5 today — with no help from the
Owlet Smart Sock at all.
So, what in fact does the Owlet gadget do other than
attract grant money and venture-capital investment? It cuts
off communication between parents and babies; the most
carnal and demanding of human relationships is reduced
to a bitter cocktail of anxiety and information. “Owlet”
babies are strangely unable to demand the care that they
need: a sensor, an app, and a smartphone must be activated
to alert parents to a baby’s needs. As the gulf between rich
and poor has widened, and social mobility has decreased in
every ethnic group, the pmc home has become a laboratory
of increasingly lavish and expensive childcare equipment
and demanding child-rearing techniques.
The class war from above has had dire consequences
for all American children and their caretakers, but the toll
it has taken on the poorest families is staggering. Recently,
the Urban Institute found that children are the poorest seg-
ment of American society, with 22 percent living in poverty
and 38.8 percent having experienced some form of poverty
in their lives. The numbers for African-American children
are even more dire: 38.8 percent of black children living in
poverty and 75.4 percent have lived in poverty.
While pmc parenting fads promote extraordinary
caretaking techniques, D. W. Winnicott praised ordinary
devoted mothers for bonding with their infants in a way
that gave an astonishing number of people the mental
health to access play, creativity, and richness of experience.
Winnicott had a very expansive, non-gendered idea of the
caretaker; however, for the sake of brevity, I use his term
the “good enough mother,” in discussing his ideas. The
“good enough mother” is based on her imperfect responses

The unglamorous infrastructure
of good enough parenting is the good enough
state, a social-democratic system
of redistributive support.
to her baby’s needs: early adaptation to newborn depen-
dency is intense, but a good enough mother adapts to her
baby’s growing physical and emotional capacity to endure
frustration by failing to respond to the baby’s demands
immediately. These necessary failures reflect the mother’s
absorption in other tasks and represent opportunities for
the baby to establish a healthy tolerance for frustration and
recognition of self and other. Winnicott’s most famous case
study, described in Holding and Interpretation, analyzes a
man incapable of spontaneity or excitement, whose mother,
rather than identifying with the infant, had tried to be “per-
fect” in her infant-care routines.
In his introduction to The Child, The Family, and the
Outside World, published in 1964, Winnicott writes,
I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribu-
tion to the individual and the society which the ordinary
good mother with her husband in support makes at the
beginning, and which she does simply through being
devoted to her infant. Is not this contribution of the
devoted mother unrecognized precisely because it is
immense? If this contribution is accepted it follows
that everyone who is sane, everyone feels himself to be
a person in the world, and for whom the world means
something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to
a woman.… [T]he result of such recognition of the
maternal role … will not be gratitude or even praise.
The result will be a lessening in ourselves of a fear. If
our society delays making full acknowledgment of this
dependence which is a historical fact in the initial stage
CHILDHOOD
Catherine Liu
of development in every individual, there must remain
a block to ease and complete health, a block that comes
from a fear.
In postwar Great Britain, Winnicott welcomed the
redistribution of social surplus that would allow the greatest
number of Britons to experience the richness and health
of his own privileged childhood. That childhood allowed
him to expand on his ability for observation, empathy, and
play — qualities every baby deserves to enjoy.
Though it is difficult to imagine a time when the rich-
ness of childhood experience was embraced as a public good,
it was only fifty years ago that Winnicott’s psychoanalytic
theories were founded on the idea of collective and mutual
responsibility for dependents and their caretakers. The
unglamorous infrastructural support of good enough par-
enting is the good enough state, a social-democratic system
of redistributive support.
If the good enough mother can be cherished as cultural
inheritance and a social good, we can begin to build a society
where dependency is not feared or demonized. We can
begin to build a world where no child will ever be “trained”
or “fine-tuned” to “succeed” or “excel.” We will be able to
imagine a world where playfulness and the environments
that support it will be prioritized when we decide how to
redistribute the social surplus. We will be able to imagine
a world where a baby communicates beautifully with her
devoted caretaker because he has the time and space to be
absorbed from her first hour, in the richness of the infant’s
expanding world.  ■
47
Reading
Materiel
READ BOOKS
TOGETHER EVERY DAY
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER BY MIYA TOKUMITSU

ILLUSTRATION BY
ESTHER AARTS

The World’s
Toughest Job

“The perfect mother” is a cudgel to

cut down the flesh-and-blood
variety.

Review of Mothers:
An Essay on Love and Cruelty
by Jacqueline Rose (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2018)

In 2014, the advertising firm incredulous. Billions of people

MullenLowe launched a campaign, already do this job, the interviewer
“World’s Toughest Job.” The ad says: “Moms.” Cue the piano and
firm listed a fake job, “Director of strings. “Moms are awesome!” one
Operations,” in newspapers and of the interviewees shouts after
online, and held interviews with a the reveal.
variety of hopefuls. The inter-
Probably unintentionally, “World’s
viewer then went over an extensive
Toughest Job” zeroes in on the
roster of requirements: working
conflicted nature of motherhood. Just
on one’s feet for most of the day, no
how selfless are those late nights
breaks, excellent negotiation skills,
with a sick child and hours spent
availability to work through the night,
pushing swings? As we fixate on
increased workload on holidays, and,
the obviously contrived figure of
the pièce de résistance, “the position is
mother-as-cheerful-martyr —
going to pay absolutely nothing.”
the mother we want to remember —
The interviewees look appropriately
what levels of their resentment,
eager, then surprised, then
pride, boredom, and rage do we

CHILDHOOD 49
 CANON FODDER
suppress or refuse to acknowledge?
Expressions of these motherly affects
are allowable only in the tiniest doses,
or else they make us squeamish.
In her latest book, Mothers: An
Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline
Rose examines these complex
dimensions of motherhood. Her ambi-
tion thunders in its opening
question: “What are we doing —
what aspects of our social
arrangements and of our inner lives,
what forms of historic injustice,
do we turn our backs on, above all
what are we doing to mothers —
when we expect them to carry the
burden of everything that is
hardest to contemplate about our
society and ourselves?” Striving
towards an answer, Rose’s text ranges
across sensationalist headlines
about migrant mothers in the British
tabloid the Sun, ancient Greek
tragic drama, the works of Edith
Wharton and Sylvia Plath as
well as their relationships with their
mothers, and the fiction of Elena
Ferrante, Simone de Beauvoir, and
Adrienne Rich, to name a few.
Impossibility emerges as one
leitmotif of this diverse survey.
Across millennia, it seems to be
the inescapable condition of
mothering. According to Rose’s
50
framing, mothers are the origin points
of all people, and hence the origin
of all the world’s problems, as well as
their scapegoats. Cultural ideals
of motherhood from which no devi-
ation is acceptable keep mothers
trapped in this bind; as Rose wisely
repeats throughout the book, to
idealize is the surest way to punish
oneself and others. “The perfect
mother” is a cudgel to cut down the
flesh-and-blood variety.
This quandary is hardly breaking
news, though perhaps no one
plumbs its primal sources, its lite-
rary expressions, its darkest
psychic manifestations as elegantly
as Rose. She describes the problem
meticulously, from numerous angles.
Mothers sits primarily within the
realm of psychoanalytical and literary
inquiry — Rose’s home terrain.
The feminism of Mothers is, funda-
mentally, a feminism of the
seminar room. As such, the book feels
slightly out of step with some
of today’s most dynamic women’s
movements, which have gained
traction by enjoining themselves to
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
workers’ movements and
tangible political projects, such as
the National Domestic Workers
Alliance — an organization dedicated
to winning better pay and condi-
tions for domestic workers while also
spotlighting the sexist devaluation
of care work.
On the other hand, there is no
denying that mothers loom large over
not only our material, but also
our psychic lives. And that how they
figure in both affects their own
earthly and interior lives. A dynamic
left can handle shoe-leather
organizing and primal questions
of the variety Rose asks: are
humans doomed to keep demanding
the impossible of mothers, and
then punishing them in turn when
they flinch at the burden?

Early in Mothers, in her discussion of
right-wing panics over migrant
mothers, Rose artfully balances the
broader, almost eternal questions
about motherhood with contempo-
rary oppressions like militarized
borders and the deliberate under-
funding of public health services.
It is such moments when the book is
especially illuminating — when
she provides glimpses into how the
untenable situations of mothers
and their children are exacerbated
by political decisions.
Rose dares to journey into the
forbidden corners of motherhood.
She writes frankly about aban-
donment and even infanticide, not
to excuse such behavior, but to
confront us with the idea of
mothering as struggle — a struggle
that can sometimes end tragically.
In the most compelling section,
“Hating,” Rose argues for not merely
lifting the taboo on airing the
negative emotions brought about by
mothering, but embracing them,
publicly. She writes, “It is this
demand — to be respectable and
unexplosive — which I see as most
likely to drive mothers and by
extension their infants crazy … if a
mother cannot hold things together,
who can?” And more saliently,
For if Western culture in our
times, especially in the US and
Europe, has repeatedly con-
spired to silence the inner life of
the mother, by laying on
mothers the heaviest weight of
its own impossible and most
punishing ideals, and if the term
“mothers” is so often a trigger
for self-willed perfection that
crushes women as mothers
before anyone else, then how
can they be expected to hear
their children’s cry — not as
wailing babies, which is of
course hard enough — but as
protest and plaint?
CHILDHOOD
The World’s Toughest Job
As Rose clarifies, in constraining
mothers not to feel their frustrations,
or to be ashamed when they do, we
create a rift between them and their
children. The question then
becomes, how do we create a society
in which every aspect of the “inner
life of the mother” finds some
expression?
The now-famous “whisper network”
of the #MeToo movement is
hardly the only such surreptitious
chatter that has percolated
among women for generations. Those
sweet-looking mother-and-baby
groups frequently serve as venues for
voicing the rage and despair that
new mothers often find themselves
stewing in — the frustration that
one’s body is no longer one’s own
(and never will be again), the sleep
deprivation, the Sisyphean laundry
loads. But as we’ve learned with
#MeToo, whisper networks are unre-
liable and structurally flawed by
dint of their being inaccessible to
those without an “in.” The real
problem is that they exist because
there is no publicly validated
venue for what they communicate.
Because our culture either renders
certain motherly emotions unaccept-
able or pathologizes them,
mothers are left to understand these
experiences as monstrous, only to
be horrified at themselves.
51
 CANON FODDER

The feminism of
Mothers is a feminism
of the seminar room.

This situation is hardly helpful to

mothers or children. But why, Rose
asks, should such experiences
of mothering be censored, or when
voiced, whispered? Why must
they be kept private?

Rose echoes Ferrante in her fasci-

nation with two infamous mothers of
the ancient Mediterranean world,
suburbanization and its dearth of next to and around the prams, with
Medea and Dido, who exploded their
sidewalks and parks; public transit no one calling the cops or disturbing
grief into the public realm, com-
that’s barely usable by the able- the nappers. For those new to this
mitting political assassinations and
bodied, let alone those with mobility routine, it’s a remarkable sight — a
vowing enmity between kingdoms.
needs or strollers; and, more society unsentimentally acknowl-
But of course, Medea and Dido are
recently, employer and social media edging their youngest members’ claim
royalty. We are left to ask, how
prodding to project ceaseless to the public sphere as well as their
might a poor migrant mother separa-
happiness are all socially engineered parents’ need get out of the house.
ted from her children make cities
conditions that isolate all people,
quake with her anguish? A coffee during junior’s nap won’t
especially caregivers of children. All
cure postpartum depression,
Ferrante and Rose view Emma Bovary of these conditions physically
end sexism, or completely calm the
and Anna Karenina as the stifled impede or socially deter the airing of
psychic storms Rose describes.
descendants of Medea and Dido, left motherly dissatisfaction that Rose
But practical gestures such as acco-
to curdle in their frustrations so astutely articulates.
mmodating the street-side pram
rather than unleash them onto the
A powerful antidote to the privatiza- snooze bring children and caregivers
world. Fair enough, but the
tion of motherhood that Rose into the world, which is where
cloistered conditions of modern and
describes is on view any given day in they belong. Articulating problems
contemporary mothering didn’t
Copenhagen, Denmark. Outside is essential to solving them, or,
just blow in like the wind. They were
almost every cafe is a pram or four, failing that, determining ways to live
put in place by those with an
containing snoozing babies. Their with them humanely. Rose’s book
interest in reproducing patriarchal
parents are often found inside, usually is useful in this respect, particularly
traditions to facilitate the accu-
near a window affording a pram as she describes the poisonous
mulation of capital and close down
view, enjoying a precious moment of interplay between the idealization and
dissent. Bourgeois values that
calm with a coffee and a magazine privatization of motherhood, and
fomented a cult of consumerist
with the passive support of those in how it harms mothers and children
feminine domesticity;
proximity. Street life carries on alike. It is an important insight.

52 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018


Nevertheless, one wonders how well
her book will speak to those who
aren’t showing up to class already.
Recent events such as the 2018 wave
of American public-school teachers’
strikes and Donald Trump’s surprising
portion of the women’s vote in 2016
have upended conventional wisdom
about what feminist issues are,
who constitutes the working class, and
which people can or will get
on board with progressive causes.
Within this context, writers like
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nancy Fraser,
and Naomi Klein, whose work
exposes the ways in which a profit-
driven world establishes and
entrenches sexist oppression, have
invigorated new generations.
Most critically, they are able to speak
to and beyond the choir in a way
that Rose’s Freudianism does not.
Fraser’s emphatically materialist
approach to examining the impos-
sible conditions of motherhood is a
useful addition to Rose’s. Fraser
observes that contemporary mothers,
suffering from a poverty of time
and crushing pressure to earn enough
to support a family in a society
with meager public goods, are presen-
ted with technological fixes — that
they can purchase on an individual
basis. Egg-freezing technology,
which Google and Facebook subsi-
dize for their female employees,
makes up for the fact that conceiving
a child, or even exploring relation-
ships with possible partners, might
be necessarily de-prioritized for a
student-debt-saddled woman during
her most fertile phase of life.
Mechanical breast pumps allow
wealthier women to follow “breast is
best” dictates while returning to
work as early as possible: “No longer
a matter of suckling a child at one’s
breast, one ‘breastfeeds’ now by
expressing one’s milk mechanically
and storing it up for feeding by
bottle later by one’s nanny.” Fraser
demonstrates how care, and
mothering in particular, is dehuman-
ized and rationalized to its most
basic functionality, leaving no room
for mother or child to experience
the love and pleasure, as well as the
frustration that Rose describes as
the complex richness of motherhood.
Working-class projects that tackle
political economy head on and
articulate specific, tangible goals with
broad social reach, such as the
fight for an increased minimum wage
and an end to mass incarceration,
have been those with the greatest
traction. Most critically, these
have been the platforms from which
feminists have expanded beyond
the predictable — and small — cliques
of university circles and corporate
mentoring groups.
None of this is to say that historical
or literary analysis has no role in the
fight to create a less constrained
existence for mothers and children.
Nor is it necessary to fly a Marxist
flag to do so. French feminist writer
Élisabeth Badinter, who Rose cites,
set out in her 1980 book, Mother Love:
Myth and Reality (L’Amour en plus),
to demolish the essentialist notion of
maternal instinct. Badinter argues
that the staggering rates of infant morta-
lity in eighteenth-century France
owed to maternal preoccupation with
other aspects of their lives, noting
that many of these infants died away
from home, while lodging with
poorly paid wet nurses providing
(understandably) half-hearted care.
CHILDHOOD
The World’s Toughest Job
According to Badinter, it was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and like-
minded contemporaries who
characterized children as precious,
unique creatures — the stars
around which French family life
orbited. They advocated hyper-
attentive mothering, which they cast
as “natural.” Though eagerly
adopted in nominally leftist counter-
culture groups, similar ideas
about “natural” or attachment
parenting are, for Badinter, nothing
but the systemic oppression of
women, who through breastfeeding
on demand, co-sleeping, and
responding personally to every
infant whimper, must subordinate
themselves completely to their
child’s demands.
Other feminists have pointed out
that despite its granola-and-tie-dye
connotations, attachment
parenting is a lifestyle possible only
for families who don’t require
the mother to earn an income. Ulti-
mately, attachment parenting, or
any other prescriptive child-rearing
regime, is only another ideal for
mothers to fail to live up to. While
critics and historians have quibbled
with Badinter’s interpretation of the
past, her success in charting a
liberatory path for contemporary
mothers renders her a commendable,
and formidable, feminist voice.
In the end, a more humane mother-
hood will not be one devoid of
impossibility, frustration, conflict,
and fatigue. But it will be one in
which these conditions unfold in a
society of mutual care and
empathy — a society that lets these
aspects of motherhood shape it
rather than try to stifle them.  ■
53
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER

We Read
a Bunch
of Parenting Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother
Books Amy Chua

Such level-headed parenting advice

was blithely disregarded by
“Tiger Mom” Amy Chua, who assured
anxious Americans that the US
Now let us raise your could once more compete with China
children. if they only spent more time
insulting their kids and forcing them
to play piano until they started
gnawing on the keys. Nine out of ten
2011

sociopaths agree: it works!

How To Talk So Kids Will Unconditional

Listen And Listen So Parenting
Kids Will Talk Alfie Kohn
Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish A lot of parenting ends up as a game
Considered the “parenting Bible” for of covert psychological and
decades, Adele Faber’s book intro- emotional manipulation, trying to
duced a host of soon-to-be-standard get kids to do what we want
parenting concepts, such as through a mixture of punishments
acknowledging kids’ feelings and and rewards. Alfie Kohn urged
avoiding punishment in favor his readers to instead work with their
of empathy. kids, figuring out what they
need and how to meet those needs.
2006
1979

54 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 Bringing up
Bébé
Pamela Druckerman
When publishers needed to find the
hot, new post-Tiger Mom foreign
locale from which to draw parenting
wisdom, they headed to France
with Bébé. The conclusions? Breast-
feeding and tending immediately
to a crying baby are out; talking to
2016
infants like real people and
feeding kids “adult” food are in. It’s
not advice conducive to raising
2012
a billionaire, complained Forbes.
“Nine out of ten
sociopaths agree:
it works!”
2017
The Danish Way
of Parenting
Jessica Joelle Alexander, Iben
Dissing Sandahl
Denmark was next, as an intrepid
pair of writers tried to figure out
why Danes are consistently ranked
the happiest people in the world.
The answer, it turns out, is the Danish
parenting style, which prioritizes
empathy, teamwork, and play. We
have a sneaking suspicion that an
extensive welfare state might also
have something to do with it.
2014
2018
CHILDHOOD
The Informed Parent
Tara Haelle, Emily Willingham
No one has time to read all the
contradictory scientific literature on
child-rearing out there, so these
authors created something akin to
the policy wonk’s guide to
parenting, sifting through hundreds
of peer-reviewed studies to give
parents a supposedly neutral, science-
driven perspective on what to do.
How to Talk So Little
Kids Will Listen
Joanna Faber, Julie King
Just last year, Joanna Faber released
the follow-up to her mother’s
1979 classic, adding a chapter for kids
with special needs. Once again,
the emphasis is on cooperation and
giving kids choices over punish-
ments and commands.
Achtung Baby
Sara Zaske
Berlin is the most recent exotic place
with an extensive welfare state
whose culture has been mined for
parenting tips. In this case, a
more hands-off parenting style that
lets kids play and walk to school
without supervision is presented as
the answer. It sure seems like a lot
of these European parenting havens
have something else in common
though ...
55
 READING MATERIEL
GLOSSARY

Grit
If your kid doesn’t end Attachment
up rich and “successful,” Parenting
it wasn’t a rigged
A parenting approach
economy; you just didn’t neg
that stresses the kind of
them enough when
constant, loving nurture 2
they were little to imbue
that’s all but impossible for any
them with this. 1 parent working on minimum
wage. Doubles as great
rainy-day fodder for

How Children
lifestyle columnists.

Are Made
Scaffolding
When parents give their kids
guidance and support to reach
the next stage of their develop-
ment, such as by holding
their arms while they learn to walk,
9 or giving them a place
to crash next time the global
economy collapses.
A Jacobin 10
glossary. Infant-Directed Speech
What you say when you don’t
want to use the term “baby talk”
in an academic paper.

8 Zone of Proximal
Differentiation Development
The task of eventually turning your The gulf between what a kid can
child into an overbearing middle do on their own, and what they
manager. Typically involves pushing 11 can do with “scaffolding,” as in,
them into extracurricular activities “I’m not broke, I’m just in the
they’ll quietly resent you for well zone of proximal development.”
into adulthood.

“Most Precious
Asset” Prosocial Behavior 6

A way to express Behavior that involves sharing,

how much your kids cooperating, and helping
mean to you by others, which kids are
ranking them in your encouraged to adopt in their
investment portfolio. early years, and encouraged
7 to ruthlessly drop once they’re
old enough to vote.

56
 Resilience READING MATERIEL
What kids need to bounce back FIELD NOTES
from the disappointment
and misfortune in their lives, e.g.,
seeing their first student loan
bill, or finding out they’ll have to
keep working well into
their eighties.

Convention
on the Rights Abridged, 

of the Child
obviously
Aggression
Something to be whittled out of
boys to stop them from
becoming the next Donald
Trump, or alternatively, to
be instilled in girls to help them
become the next ceo
of Lockheed Martin.

4 Ratified November 20, 1989

196 countries are parties to the

convention — that’s every member-state
of the United Nations, except
Practicing Leadership the United States.

A stage of development that

involves becoming aware of oneself
as a unique individual, and involves
that childhood is entitled to special

rejecting destructive individuals and

Declaration of Human Rights, the

experiences from your past, i.e.,

The States Parties to the present

United Nations has proclaimed

Recalling that, in the Universal

parents obsessed with “grit” and

“practicing leadership.”

5
Have agreed as follows:
care and assistance,
Convention,

CHILDHOOD 57
 FIELD NOTES

The family separation policy pressures Facing a lawsuit

parents into pleading guilty to unlawful from the ACLU,
entry in immigration court, thereby the Trump
invalidating any future asylum claims. administration
On June 9, 2018, the Washington Post admitted that it
reported that, after the mass guilty plea had no record of
of 71 migrants in a Texas courtroom, the the identities or
Between October 2017 and May 2018, as
federal prosecutor assigned to the case precise locations
many as 3,000 children were separated
high-fived a colleague, saying, “I said I’d of the children
from their parents at the US-Mexico
get done by 3:20.” She was nine minutes separated from
border, only to be incarcerated in
ahead of schedule. their families. The
private shelters while their parents await
Office of Refugee
deportation proceedings.
Resettlement
began manually
reviewing the
case files of
almost 12,000
“unaccompanied”
minors to
determine which

request, provide the essential information concerning

of those had
except when such separation is necessary for the best
taken by public or private social welfare institutions,

States Parties shall respect the right of the child who

Where such separation results from any action initi-

been forcibly
separated from his or her parents against their will,

parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to

In all actions concerning children, whether under-

States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be

is separated from one or both parents to maintain

separated from

ated by a State Party, that State Party shall, upon

the whereabouts of the absent member(s) of the

their families.
the best interests of the child shall be a primary

personal relations and direct contact with both

the child’s best interests.

interests of the child.
consideration.

family.

Article 3 Article 9

58 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 In July, a court The residents of Flint, Michigan continue Convention
judgement to drink water delivered by dangerous on the Rights
ordered the lead pipes. Even if all goes according to of the Child
Trump plan, these pipes will not be replaced
administration to until 2020.
return 102
children under
Central American and Mexican children Racial disparities A 2018 study of 90,000 public
the age of five to
entering the United States typically in American schools determined that
their families.
do so as asylum seekers. A 2015 survey pediatric health American students —
Only 54 of these
conducted by Doctors Without care provision particularly black, Latino, and
families were
Borders revealed that more than have, by some Native American students —
reunited by the
40 percent of migrants from Honduras, measures, gotten are routinely exposed to toxins
court’s deadline
El Salvador, and Guatemala had dramatically that pose serious risks to
— many parents
lost a close relative to murder during worse since 1998. health and development at
had already been
the previous two years. school.
deported or were
still in criminal
custody, and
some could not Global maternal
be identified due mortality rates
to sloppy fell by more than
and humanitarian assistance. States Parties shall cooperate with the
States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure that a child

(c) To combat disease and malnutrition, including within the frame-

accompanied by his or her parents, receive appropriate protection

record-keeping. a third between

(d) To ensure appropriate pre-natal and post-natal health care for

nutritious foods and clean drinking-water , taking into consider-
2000 and 2015.

health care to all children with emphasis on the development of

work of primary health care, through the provision of adequate

who is seeking refugee status shall, whether unaccompanied or

(b) To ensure the provision of necessary medical assistance and But the trend
United Nations and/or other organizations for the purpose of

was the opposite

in the US, where

ation the dangers and risks of environmental pollution ;

maternal
identifying and reunifying children with their parents.

enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health

1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to the

mortality
and, in particular, shall take appropriate measures:

actually
increased by
more than half
between 1990
(a) To diminish infant and child mortality ;

and 2015,
reaching a rate
three times
higher than
Canada’s.
primary health care;

mothers ;

Article 22 Article 24
The United States has the highest rates
of infant and child mortality in the
advanced capitalist world.

CHILDHOOD 59
60
1. States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of
living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and
social development. [...]

Article 27
3. States Parties, in accordance with national conditions and within
FIELD NOTES

their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and

others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in
case of need provide material assistance and support programmes ,
particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.
families receive public benefits.
about a quarter of impoverished
“workfare” in 1996, the number of
American children living in extreme
Since President Clinton replaced the

poverty has skyrocketed. Today, only

traditional family welfare program with

States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with
a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal

№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018

opportunity, they shall, in particular:

Article 29
(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;
Detroit and New Orleans.

(b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary

education, including general and vocational education, make them
public school systems in cities like
than public alternatives, for-profit

available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate mea-

drained money and enrollment from
Despite evidence that charter schools
don’t provide better student outcomes

education companies have successfully

sures such as the introduction of free education and offering

financial assistance in case of need;

(c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity

someone
debt. The
44 million

burden of

by every appropriate means;

average debt

college in 2016
in student loan
Approximately

Americans hold

graduating from
about $1.3 trillion

was over $37,000.

 abe pledged to create a japan in which
“all women can shine,” but behind the
glitter is a program that has little to
offer working-class women.

by
kristin
surak

62 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

 FOR THE PAST DECADE,
JAPAN HAS BEEN SHRINKING.
last year alone, its population fell by 400,000
as births failed to keep up with deaths.
Total fertility rates offer some good news: they have
increased to 1.44 from a rock-bottom low of 1.26 in 2005.
(To put the trend into perspective, it was 4.54 in 1947.) But
the uptick still isn’t enough to buoy the country into growth
after years of population loss. If the trends continue, the
population is set to drop from 125 million to 88 million over
the next fifty years. The predictions make the government’s
goal to stabilize the figure at 100 million appear quixotic.
It comes as little surprise that even a conservative
nationalist like Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would look
into support programs for women. Yet his proposals repre-
sent a remarkable deviation from conventional right-wing
approaches. These have ranged from the wartime mater-
nalist slogan of “Give birth, increase [the population]!”
[umeyō, fuyaseyō], to a celebration of the “professional
homemaker” [sengyō shufu], who keeps the home fires
burning and the children on track at school as the male
breadwinner pursues the middle-class dream.
Even the tax and insurance systems are rigged to
encourage these ends. As long as second incomes within
a household remain below a threshold matching, roughly,
the amount gained from part-time jobs, taxes are low and
insurance benefits can be generous. For the most part, the
strategy of government and business has been to encourage
women to stay out of the labor force — or at least its fully
employed, generously protected professional track.
The result is that women, despite graduating from uni-
versities at higher rates than men, are channeled into clerical
rather than managerial jobs. Those who marry are frequently
pressured to quit, and those who stay are often compelled out
upon pregnancy, or else face matahara (maternity harass-
ment). Indeed, nearly 70 percent of women leave full-time
employment at this point, which reinforces employers’ claims
that women belong in clerical-track jobs in the first place.
CHILDHOOD
The gendered division of labor stacks the odds against
those who wish to pursue professional careers. The rise
of precarious employment with few benefits has also hit
women much harder than men. Where the proportion of
men in temporary work is now 25 percent, its equivalent
for women tops 60 percent.
In this context, Abe’s proposals for childcare reform
appear almost progressive. Among the goals was an
increase in day-care facilities, which were groaning under
high demand with tens of thousands of working parents on
waiting lists for spaces that never opened up. Abe promised
to create 400,000 new day-care slots for children within four
years and to abolish the waiting lists completely. On top
came generous financial support. As a part of a whopping
¥2 trillion ($18 billion) spending package to support the
young, the government pledged to subsidize care in licensed
facilities for children between three and five years old, ren-
dering it effectively free. The aid would be extended to
children under two years in low-income households as well.
By 2017, the government had achieved the initial goal
of childcare provision, but not the promise to abolish
the waiting lists. The 2008 financial crisis pushed ever
more women into the workforce, causing demand to
outstrip supply. By 2018, 500,000 new slots had been
created, but 50,000 families were still biding their time
until one opened up.
In this situation of little choice, those who can afford
it put their children into unlicensed care facilities, but at a
cost of up to five times that of licensed operators. Three out
of four deaths at day-care centers take place at unlicensed
ones. Other parents do what they can to raise their rank on
the list, even if it means divorce. To determine a family’s
need profile, points are awarded based on an array of fac-
tors including employment type, health issues, and marital
status, leaving some parents to split up as a strategy to secure
care for their children.
63
kristin
surak
still, 500,000 new childcare places is a
remarkable accomplishment in five years.
But has it liberated mothers from the drudgery of care work
so that they can pursue careers and other goals?
The history of public childcare in Japan suggests that the
transformation should be assessed with caution. Its recent
story has been one of steady privatization. Originally estab-
lished after World War II to address the needs of orphans,
the childcare system was from the start integrated into
general social welfare provisions. It was the municipalities
that were responsible for supplying day-care facilities to the
public. However, the stagnating economy of the 1990s and
early 2000s put the system under pressure as more women
took up work outside the home and the government began
slashing welfare provisions.
The most consequential moves came under Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi, known for his bouffant hair,
bromance with George W. Bush, and neoliberal proclivi-
ties. He aimed to remove the waiting lists for day care while
cutting government support. First, the Ministry of Health,
Labor, and Welfare deregulated day-care center manage-
ment and allowed for-profit companies to enter the field,
then the Diet revised the Children Welfare Act in 2001 to
push municipalities into privatizing or outsourcing their
existent care facilities.
Within a few years, the central government ratcheted
up the changes, transforming what were once monetary
transfers sent to municipalities and earmarked for public
childcare support into general fiscal transfers of an ever-
shrinking amount. While subsidies to local governments
were slashed, those to the private sector continued, as Tokyo
picked up as much as 75 percent of the cost of starting a
facility and 80 percent of the cost to run it. As a result, the
squeezed municipalities began outsourcing, and by 2015
over 60 percent of day-care centers were private.
64
The election of the Blarite Democratic Party Japan (dpj)
in 2009 — the first time the opposition party was elected to
government since 1955 — did little to stem the trend. While
waving the banner of childcare reform, the dpj simply
adapted an old Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) proposal
for integrating day-care centers and kindergartens. The
result was a bureaucratic tangle in which three different
ministries oversaw ten different types of institutions, all
held to different standards.
The dpj did little to unbalance the conservative gender
ideologies embedded in the system. Child allowances still
went to the primary earner only, and the tax and insurance
systems, coupled with the gendered division of employment,
continued to encourage women to remain economically
dependent on male breadwinners.
Once it regained power, the conservative ldp, now
under Shinzo Abe, continued with the privatization
program forged under Koizumi. A new grant scheme
encouraged more for-profit companies to construct day-
care facilities, while services were increasingly deregulated.
All of this was proffered as part of the “third arrow” of Abe-
nomics, a concoction of monetary stimulus, fiscal easing,
and structural reforms meant to jolt Japan out of more than
two decades of stagnation.
The Bank of Japan went on a buying spree, accumulating
assets worth around 75 percent of gdp, while the national
debt grew to a stratospheric 250 percent of gdp. The result
has been good for export giants, which welcomed the decline
in the yen, but families have been hit hard: an increase in
sales tax has not been matched by an increase in salaries
and real incomes have gone down. The economy totters on,
posting growth rates of 0.5 percent in a good quarter, while
the holy grail of 2 percent inflation remains in the distance
and interest rates have ventured into negative territory.
ILLUSTRATION BY VIKTOR HACHMANG 65
kristin
surak
especially in a country like japan that has
long kept its borders relatively closed.
It’s enough to make even an arch-conservative like Abe
consider the economic potential of the second sex. The
result was a pink version of his economic program, dressed
up as “womenomics.” “We will create a society where excel-
lent workers will be able to play active roles that will boost
the productivity of the whole society,” Abe proclaimed. “I
believe [that the utilization of women] should be the core
strategy for growth.”
The concept could have been cut and pasted from a
Goldman Sachs policy paper, where Kathy Matsui, the
company’s chief Japan strategist, has been advocating for
years for an increase in working women. “Many regard
childcare and family support measures as a cost, but rather
than costs, they should be viewed as investments,” she has
stated. According to Matsui, increasing female employment
to 80 percent would boost the gdp by 15 percent. For a
prime minister dead set on jump-starting the economy, sup-
porting women insofar as they can prop up growth seemed
like the perfect fix.
Abe pledged to create a Japan in which “all women
can shine,” but behind the glitter is a program that differs
little from the neoliberal ideology of gender equality seen
elsewhere. The approach to women’s issues is highly selec-
tive: it’s the mothers and the upwardly mobile who are set
to benefit directly while the rest, one imagines, get the
runoff of “trickle down” feminism. Among his promises
was to see women in 30 percent of leadership positions in
both government and business by 2020. But this recycled
policy goal was quickly revised down to a mere 7 percent in
66 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
government and 5 percent in business. The figures are so low
that one would think they could hardly be targets, except
that only 3 percent of women in the civil service serve in
leadership positions, and only 3 percent of corporate board
members are women.
Meanwhile, childcare workers themselves, predom-
inantly women, have seen their employment conditions
fail to keep up with changing times. Day-care workers
at licensed facilities are not only paid much less than
other professionals — typically one-third of the industry
average — they also have difficulty cutting back overtime
and taking days off when sick, let alone maternity leave,
which many centers say they cannot afford.
In February 2018, a story went viral about a day-care
worker who was forced to apologize to her employer for
getting pregnant before her more senior coworkers did.
Under such conditions, it’s not surprising that turnover
is high and over 750,000 licensed day-care workers have
chosen to do something else with their lives.
Abe’s reforms do nothing to address this situation.
Nor do they attempt to dislodge the male breadwinner
model as the foundation of postwar Japanese capitalism. The
gendered dual-track system of hiring employees remains
untouched, the dependency-bias of the tax and insurance
systems continues as in the past, and nothing addresses the
rise of precarious work. Less than 3 percent of men take
paternity leave, though it is equally available to them, yet
this too has remained off the table in the discussion. Women
wishing to pursue a career are instead told to, effectively,
“lean in.” Japan is still far from a gender-neutral, universal
caregiving regime, let alone a serious consideration of the
well-being of the children at the core of the debates.  ■
Cultural
Capital
SNOW WHITE EXPLOITED
SLAVE LABOR
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
RED CHANNELS
A good one-panel cartoon recently made the rounds
online featuring two medieval peasants standing in a
snowstorm. One peasant is raging about how, instead
of the normal arrival of spring, they’re having what
appears to be another winter: “My children will starve!”
The other peasant explains the cause of this disaster:
“Two princesses up north are learning about the meaning
of sisterhood.”
That’s a joke based on the plot of the Disney mega-hit
Frozen, of course, which involves a princess with magical
powers whose repressed emotions, released as rage,
cause the realm to turn to ice. Only her sister’s love can save
her and thaw out the kingdom, or something like that.
Ask some kid for clarification — they all know Frozen.
68 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
BY EILEEN JONES
Klass and
Kids’ Films
Disney-Pixar vs. Laika
Anyway, the cartoon is a nice reminder, if we needed one,
of the narrative tendencies produced by the Walt Disney
entertainment empire, and how unlikely it is that, shall we
say, the peasant point of view will be emphasized in
Disney films. This includes the films of Disney’s corporate
partner Pixar, with its digital update of Disney’s
approach to children’s entertainment. This two-headed
Goliath has an appeal to children and their parents
measurable in billions of dollars annually.
It’s no surprise to anyone paying attention to the Disney-
Pixar feature film output that it doesn’t tend to
represent a working-class point of view. It’s been noted
by critics, scholars, and journalists in a variety of
works including Janet Burns’s “Where Are All the Poor
Kids in Disney Movies?”
But it’s handy to have the numbers to back it One could point out the obvious, that bleak phys-
up. A sociological study focused on Disney- ical realities plus ideological representations of
Pixar films entitled “Benign Inequality: Frames of class are in plain sight everywhere in American
Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s society, and you’d have to be a well-fortified kid
Films,” was released in 2016 to unusual levels of not to absorb them. Still, media aimed at children
interest in the entertainment-reporting commu- isn’t a bad place to start looking for influences.
nity. It was overseen by Jessi Streib, an assistant
In the films studied by Streib’s team, only 4 per-
professor of sociology at Duke University, whose
cent of primary characters are represented as
study became the topic of a series of articles
poor, and these few characters are generally
and interviews under edgy headlines suggesting
shown to be perfectly content living in a sani-
controversy, such as the Daily Mail’s “Disney and
tized state of poverty and/or servitude.
Pixar Under Fire for Inequality.”
You may recall that happily singing servants
The study analyzes class representation in
have long been a Disney film staple in films from
G-rated American films that earned more than
Snow White to Beauty and the Beast. That includes
$100  million starting in 2014, as a means of as-
the notorious example of Disney’s most contro-
sessing one source of children’s ideas about
versial film, Song of the South, featuring the jovial
class. As Streib notes, these representations
slave character Uncle Remus singing the hit song
have a measurable impact on children, who tend
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
to see at an early age many films created for
them. “Parents don’t really like talking to their According to Streib’s study, only 16 percent of
kids about class,” Streib says, yet: primary characters in these films are clearly
working class. Comfortably middle-class fam-
Little kids have pretty interesting ideas of class.
ilies with unspecified sources of income or up-
Studies have shown that by the time kids are
per-class characters are represented as the
12, they have internalized a lot of American
norm, and positive characteristics tend to be
ideas about class — like poor people are lazy,
associated with affluent characters.
and rich people are smart and hardworking.

CHILDHOOD 69
 RED CHANNELS
Though Pixar films often focus on
work and work-like situations, the
emphasis is almost never on
ordinary people’s relationship to the
economic necessity and wearying
effort of wage labor. It’s on work as
an activity that allows for the
demonstration of elite skill. Work in
Pixar films tends to be concerned
with who is the best at their job, and
what obstacles are interfering with
the recognition of the protagonists’
excellence. This starts from their
first film, Toy Story, in 1995, in which
the “job” of Woody the toy cowboy
(Tom Hanks) is to be Andy’s favorite
toy, until the flashy space-age
astronaut Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen)
replaces him. Before that crisis point,
Woody acts as the “manager” of
Andy’s other toys, leading office-
style meetings with clipboard
agenda in hand.
The factory setting in Monsters, Inc.
keeps production up through a
competition among monster-workers
for “Best Scare-er” of children,
whose screams generate the energy
that powers the city, until the
hero and perpetual winner Scully
(John Goodman), runs up against
an evil corporate plot. Ratatouille
follows the efforts of the rat Remy
(Patton Oswalt), who’s a genius at
cooking, to make a career as a
chef, in spite of the obvious bias of
the general public against rats
in kitchens, plus the more insular
snobbery of the French food industry
and the increasing threat of the
fast food industry on haute cuisine.
One of the few sequences about the
inherent difficulties of work in a
Pixar film occurs in The Incredibles,
in which superheroes are treated
as elite ultra-professionals. When an
70
ungrateful public in collusion with starts with a poor woodcutter and
bureaucratic lawmakers makes his wife abandoning their two
superpower “work” illegal, it forces children in the woods because they
Mr Incredible to take a job in an can no longer feed them, a fraught
insurance company to support his side- beginning that the Disney short-film
lined superhero family. For the version definitely omits. The
first time, we see work in a Pixar film abandoned children run afoul of a
treated as gray misery for the wicked witch who lures them into
worker. Terrorized by his boss and a house made of desserts in order to
desperate for a paycheck, Mr Incre- fatten them up, so she can cook
dible sits at a small desk half-buried in and eat them.
paperwork, trying to explain to an
We can tell by the manifest food
anguished old lady why her claim is
obsession that such stories origi-
being denied. It’s good stuff, but
nated among the real old-world
unfortunately, the strongest contex-
precariat.
tual meaning of the sequence is
that it’s a damn shame an elite being Selecting from these classic tales,
has to do such demeaning work. Disney favored the Grimms’
“princess” narratives for his feature
In general, just like in Disney films,
films, such as “Snow White,”
workers in Pixar films live and labor
in clean, spacious, comfortable
settings that suggest middle-to-upper-
class living. Disney-Pixar has so
thoroughly established the norm of
affluence in animated films, it’s
interesting to recall where Disney
started and whether children’s
most respected film entertainment
was always this way. Walt Disney’s
primary source material for his early
film adaptations tended to operate
from the peasant/working-class point
of view. Disney often adapted
stories from classic children’s litera-
ture sources such as the Brothers
Grimm, though he thoroughly white-
washed the harsher elements.
If you’ve read the Brothers Grimm,
you can appreciate the appropriate-
ness of their name. Grimm stories,
which were the brothers’ rewrites of
European, mainly German, folklore,
often begin by describing the
harrowing lives of the impoverished
and desperate. The Grimms’
“Hansel and Gretel” for example,
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018

DISNEY FILMS ARE SO
IMPOSSIBLY CLEAN, EVEN
NATURE SEEMS TO HAVE NO
DIRT IN IT.
“Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty,”
in which the unjust punishment
visited on beautiful aristocratic girls
is being “dressed in rags” and
made to work like poor people until
they get rescued by princes.
Yet it’s noteworthy that Disney was a
working-class kid himself: from
a young age, on top of his schooling
he held down an adult’s job,
speci-fically his ailing father’s city-
wide paper route. He had night-
mares about doing that job for the
rest of his life.
But in his films, Disney “elevated”
class representation to make
sure they functioned from a stable
basis of middle-to-upper-class
comfort, whether they were fantasy
princess tales or contemporary
stories featuring semi-realistic humans
backing up animal protagonists,
such as Lady and the Tramp or 101
Dalmatians. In doing so, Disney
was conforming to a broad trend in the
American film industry. Starting
in the 1920s, there was a concerted
effort to create content that
would better suit the splendid new
“picture palace” movie theaters
designed to draw the middle-to-upper
classes to cinema.
In seeking a “better class of people”
than the often immigrant working
classes who had flocked to movies up
to that time, studios created
more films focused on upper-class
characters instead of the struggling
characters that flourished up
through the 1910s, exemplified by
Charlie Chaplin’s tough, canny,
homeless Little Tramp. You can see
Buster Keaton satirize this change
in his celebrated 1924 film Sherlock Jr.,
in which he plays a working-
class movie theater projectionist who
dreams he’s trying to enter the
film world onscreen. He’s blocked
from doing so until he adopts the
upper-class attributes and attire of
the other characters.
But Disney’s immense influence
on children has always made his films
CHILDHOOD
Klass and Kids' Films
the object of special scrutiny, even
before his studio’s explosive growth.
Critics of Disney films tend to focus
on their tendency to excessively
simplify and conservatively moralize
the world. Disney films are so
impossibly clean, even nature seems
to have no dirt in it. Like his
theme parks — designed to be fana-
tically sanitary, stringently policed,
and sealed off from the messy urban
world of immigrants and laborers
who frequented affordable and highly
accessible amusement parks such
as Coney Island — Disney films were
and are triumphs of bourgeois values.
If left-wing parents today are less
worried about the Disney influence
than they once were, it makes sense
given the way things have changed in
terms of new digital-media forms
and children’s viewing habits. In the
mass of available kids’ entertain-
ment, even the Disney-Pixar media
leviathan can’t hope to wield
the influence that classic Disney once
did. The parents I asked estimated
that they can fully control their
children’s viewing habits only up to
about the age of six.
Still, those early years are hugely for-
mative of basic values, and the
Disney headlock is most dominant
then. Disney merging with Pixar
in 2006 seems to have muted the once
strident critique of Disney’s
influence on children’s values, and
indeed the whole issue of trying
to inculcate morals and values in
children through media currently
seems to be a nonissue on the poli-
tical left, perhaps because it’s long
been a dominant issue on the Right.
71
 RED CHANNELS
You can find online one or two guides
to “progressive” films, but it’s no sur-
prise that they tend to involve check-
ing off a few mild content categories:
yay girl power (Matilda, Mulan, Fro-
zen, Moana), yay environmentalism
(Ferngully, The Lorax, Princess Mono-
noke, Happy Feet), nay war (Iron Gi-
ant), nay racism (Zootopia), nay cor-
porate evil (Happy Feet, Wall-E). Class
is not addressed as one of the import-
ant categories.
72 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018
Parents seeking a working-class sensibility in
children’s films might consider giving Laika a try.
Though it’s run by ceo Travis Knight, son
of uber-wealthy Phil Knight, the co-founder of
Nike who funds the company, somehow the
Portland-based Laika’s output tends to focus
insightfully on struggling proles. You might
not have heard of Laika, because thirteen years
and many Academy Awards and nominations
after its 2005 founding, it’s still a comparatively
small underdog overshadowed by Disney-Pixar.
Laika’s first and finest film was Coraline, closely
followed by the excellent ParaNorman, the quite
good Boxtrolls, and the weakest link so far,
Kubo and the Two Strings. But its approach was
established early on and extended beyond the
Laika commitment to handcrafted, stop-motion
animation minimally augmented by cgi. As
defined by Travis Knight, the mission of Laika is:
Films that are bold, distinctive, and
enduring. To tell stories that are thematically
challenging, aesthetically beautiful,
thought-provoking, emotionally resonant,
progressive, and a wee bit subversive.
What the “subversion” consists of is left
undefined, but I would argue that, in addition to
Laika films’ notably dark edge that generally
earn their films a pg rating, it’s their unusual
tendency to feature working-class people in
sometimes amazingly realistic ways that stand
out, given the fantastical plots of most of
the films. The Boxtrolls, for example, concerns
a literal underground community of trash
scavengers threated with extermination in a
fantastical version of Victorian England.
Coraline is about a contemporary thirteen-year-
old girl frustrated by her tired parents’ drab
lives of overwork and pinched economizing. She
desperately wishes for other parents who’ll

have time to pay attention and spoil
her with elaborate home-cooked
meals, dressy clothes, and all her
other pricey desires. In twisted
dreams she travels through a tunnel
in the wall of the tatty “Pink Palace
Apartments” to the far spiffier version
of her home where Other Mother
and Other Father welcome her.
This upscale world of shiny doppel-
gangers with infinite leisure turns
terrifying in the end, requiring from
inhabitants a symbolic loss of
identify, perception, and will in the
substitution of human eyes for
buttons sewn into their places. Other
Mother has for generations
functioned in the gloomy rural commu-
nity like a vampiric Countess
Elizabeth Bathory of the Pacific
Northwest, luring in and consuming
young “peasant” children who
dream of a life of plenty. Coraline
has to fight this monster to return to,
reconcile with, and even find a
way to love her workaday world of ordi-
nary human life with its harried
parents, dingy apartments, and hard
up, eccentric elderly neighbors.
ParaNorman places a similar
emphasis on a rundown American
location and its harassed inhabitants.
Set in Blythe Hollow, a kind of low-
rent Salem relying on its shaky tourist
industry based on the town’s
shameful Puritan witch-hunting past,
the film lingers over the grimly
authentic, homely details of houses
sagging on their foundations,
LAIKA FILMS DON’ T SHY AWAY
FROM ANGUISH OR RAGE OR THE
SENSE OF OUR BITTER MULTI-
GENERATIONAL STRUGGLE FOR A
DECENT LIFE.
dead grass, chain-link fences, and
discarded hamburger wrappers.
Brooding over the town is the tacky
tourist industry billboard that
doesn’t appear to be drawing many
tourists, featuring a grinning
cartoon of a witch dangling from a
noose and the slogan, “Blythe
Hollow: A Great Place to Hang
Around.”
The protagonist is a depressed boy
named Norman who sees dead
people, loves zombie movies, and is
shunned by his peers. His parents
have none of the fit, trim, energetic
qualities of well-to-do Pixar film
parents. These are people with beer
guts and bags under their eyes,
who age early from the effects of too
much work, too little exercise, and
a steady diet of cheap, processed food.
The telling details about class in a
film that never mentions class
outright are overwhelming once you
pay attention to them. And once
again, for all the fantastical elements
of witches and ghosts and zombies,
there’s no real escape for Norman
from the family, the community,
or the terrible history that binds them
together. He’ll have to find a way
to deal with them, and somehow fight
CHILDHOOD
Klass and Kids' Films
against the forces dragging them
down. This seems the most class-
conscious element of all.
Laika has just announced “its fifth
and most ambitious feature to date,”
called Missing Link, about a large,
mysterious, Bigfoot-like creature, the
last of his kind, who may be the
fabled “missing link” between homo
sapiens and the rest of the
animal world. An eccentric British
peer, voiced by Hugh Jackman,
is determined to join Great Britain’s
adventuring elite by establishing
his reputation as the foremost expert
on mythical monsters that might
not be so mythical. He intends to hunt
down the gentle Link (Zach
Galifianakis) in the deep woods of
the Pacific Northwest.
On hearing this synopsis, the first
reaction of a right-thinking person is
to want to see Link and at the same
time to hope that poor Link is never
found, especially not by some Tory.
That reaction makes clear the Laika
difference. Laika is also distin-
guished by the emotional complexity
of its films. Laika films don’t shy
away from anguish or rage or the sense
of our bitter multigenerational
struggle for a decent life.
73
 RED CHANNELS
The company is named after Laika the
dog, after all — the famous Moscow
street dog drafted to orbit the Earth
and advance the Soviet space pro-
gram. Laika’s fame as the “first dog
in orbit,” paving the way for human
space travel, was made appealing to
the Russian public as an inspirational
story of sacrifice on behalf of science.
Government officials downplayed as
much as possible the details of Laika’s
74
terrible death alone in space, the
thought of which must strike ever-
lasting pity and terror into any child’s
heart. The 1957 spacecraft launch
that carried Laika to her doom was
meant to commemorate the October
Revolution’s fortieth anniversary.
It’s a hell of a thing to call a chil-dren’s
animated-film company. We finally have
a challenge to the bland bourgeois
American history of children’s films.  ■
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE BY JONAH WALTERS

Beyoncé announced her first

pregnancy live at the 2011 mtv

The Beyoncé Video Music Awards. At that

moment, Twitter experienced an
unprecedented spike: 8,868

Treatment tweets per second, the most activity

ever recorded. In an instant,
Beyoncé’s became the most famous
fetus in the world.

It’s small wonder that Beyoncé’s

No mother should be forced
to give birth in conditions Beyoncé
wouldn’t accept for herself.
baby took her first breaths in a
birthing suite entirely unlike those
available to the rest of us. That’s
because the Knowles-Carter family
shelled out the cash for a vip
labor experience at New York City’s
Lenox Hill Hospital, where, for
$2,000 a day, you can deliver your
little one in a bubble, thoroughly
insulated from the usual dangers of
American childbirth.

For those with the means, seeking

high-priced alternative care is
a rational response to the state of
maternal well-being in the
United States. Between 1990 and
2015, while maternal mortality
rates dropped precipitously in most

76
of the world, pregnancy-related
death rates for American mothers
rose by more than 50 percent. By
2013, maternal mortality was more
prevalent in the United States
than in Iran, Romania, or Vietnam.
Almost 1,000 American mothers die
from pregnancy-related causes each
year, and 65,000 more come close to
death. A recent study by the Centers
for Disease Control found that almost
60 percent of these incidents are
entirely avoidable — the result of ina-
dequate medical care.
Beyoncé’s delivery would suffer from
no such negligence. The New York
Daily News compared Lenox Hill’s
executive delivery suite, freshly
renovated in anticipation of Beyoncé’s
visit, to “the top-dollar accommo-
dations at five-star luxury hotels.” It
reportedly included multiple
bedrooms, a kitchenette, four tele-
visions, “a sweeping view of the
tony Upper East Side,” “cozy maho-
gany walls,” “colorful abstract
paintings,” even “Formica-top coffee
tables topped with crystal candy
bowls.”
Beyoncé reported feeling “a very
strong connection” with her
daughter during labor. “It was the
best day of my life,” she told the
Daily Mail. Such a worry-free birth
is a blessing in New York City,
where black women experience life-
threatening complications at a
rate of 387 per 10,000 — “roughly
comparable to rates in Sierra
Leone,” according to a 2018 New
York Times editorial.
Later, Lenox Hill came under
scrutiny for its special treatment of
the celebrity couple. The hospital
administration admitted that
Beyoncé and her family did receive
a standard of medical care normally
unavailable to other expectant
mothers. But they insisted that treat-
ment wasn’t “special” — it was just
expensive.
Beyoncé was “billed the standard
rate for those accommodations,” their
statement insists. Beyoncé may
have been the first to use them — “the
stars really did align,” commented
the hospital’s executive director —
but “our executive suites are
available for any patient, including
the food service and amenities
provided to the Carter family.”
“Any patient,” of course, means any
patient with deep pockets.
No one can blame Beyoncé and Jay-Z
for skirting the dangers of Ame-
rican childbearing by retreating into
a gilded birth-bunker. But it’s clear
that the Knowles-Carter family was a
beneficiary of an outrageous
fact — safe and comfortable medical
care is available to those who can
afford it, but denied to those of us
who cannot.
The hospital administrators were
true to their word: their Beyoncé-
christened executive suites
remained open and available for use,
with names like the “Park Avenue
Studio,” the “Premium Executive,”
and, of course, the “Beyoncé
Room.” Having earned a reputation
as the palace that birthed Blue Ivy,
the hospital had no trouble attracting
affluent mothers.
This luxury maternity floor is
“a different world,” according to the
Daily News. “The smallest ‘deluxe
private’ room goes for $850, the larger
‘premium deluxe’ goes for
$1,400, the biggest one — the
CHILDHOOD
Beyoncé Room — goes for $1,750.
And that can be expanded into two
suites for a cool $2,400 per night.”
All of these prices are in addition to
normal “medical care costs,” of
course, but they do get you high thread-
count sheets, a concierge service,
and, most significantly, “close to the
bedside” nursing.
“Close to the bedside” means you
get your own nurse. Upstairs,
in general maternity, nurses were
expected to care for up to eight
patients at once. Downstairs, in
the executive birthing suites,
managers maintained a one-to-one
nurse-to-patient ratio.
If an executive patient went into labor
unexpectedly or scheduled an
induction on short notice, a nurse
from the general maternity ward
would be moved downstairs to tend
to the personal needs of the vip.
This led to frequent nurse shortages
on the budget ward — one night
a single nurse was left to supervise
eighteen infants while her
colleagues assisted an executive
guest downstairs.
During union contract negotiations,
an anonymous group of nurses
took their worries to the New York
Daily News. The day after a
strike authorization vote, that paper’s
morning addition ran with the
headline “‘Beyoncé’ rooms for affluent
new moms at Lenox Hill Hospital are
putting newborns at risk.”
The article describes “institutional
linoleum floors and harsh white
lights” giving way to “lush gray carpet
in the softly lit fourth-floor hallway,”
which leads past delivery rooms with
dark cabinets and “blond wood
floors.” “They’re trying to make this
77
 BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE
the Ritz,” one nurse said. Another,
who had worked at the Lenox Hill
maternity department for decades,
warned that the hospital’s efforts to
provide individualized care to
high-paying patients while cutting
nursing costs put lives at risk:
“It’s incredibly stressful. You have
too many babies. You can’t do all
you need to do for them.”
As far as we know, the Beyoncé Room
is still open for business at Lenox
Hill, though the hospital did come to
an agreement with the nurses’
union in 2012, avoiding a strike. The
most recent data on maternal
mortality in New York City comes
from 2012, so it’s impossible to
say for certain if things have gotten
any safer for expectant mothers
since then. But it’s likely gotten
even worse.
New York City hospitals have been
closing at an alarming rate, leaving
many without a reliable place to seek
urgent care. About twenty of the
city’s hospitals have closed their doors
since 2000, including sixteen
public hospitals that disproportion-
ately served working-class patients.
In New York City and across the
country, high-quality medical care is
becoming harder to come by for
expectant mothers and their children.
Not for Beyoncé, though. In 2014,
when she was expecting twin boys,
she jilted Lenox Hill and opted to
deliver at Hollywood’s Cedar-Sinai
hospital. There, the “deluxe
maternity suite package” ($3,600–
5,100 a night) can you get a hair
stylist, a personal doula, manicures
and pedicures, two big-screen
televisions, three bedrooms, two
bathrooms, a full bathtub, and a
78
Can we imagine
providing Beyoncé
levels of luxury
to every expectant
mother?
refrigerator, stocked with chilled
juices.
Can we imagine providing this
level of luxury to every expectant
mother?
In Sweden, where you might be
charged a day rate of about 100
kroner ($12) for the hospital stay, all
patients receive one-on-one
attention from a licensed midwife,
who works in tandem with a
doctor. After the child is born, both
parents are entitled to stay in a
“patient hotel” — the Scandinavian
alternative to uncomfortable (and
often unsanitary) hospital wards —
where meals are provided and
nurses are available 24/7 to assist with
swaddling, breastfeeding, burping,
and the like.
Recently, Forbes published an
interview with Emma, an American
woman living abroad who had
delivered a child in Denmark. In the
early stages of her labor, Emma
revealed, she was given the choice of
soothing herself with a hot bath or
shower — typical amenities in Danish
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
birthing suites. During the birth
itself, which was performed by a mid-
wife with a doctor assisting,
the lights were dimmed and candles
placed around the room (“It was
so cool.… The most amazing thing”).
After the child was safely delivered —
and after hospital staff had brought a
tray of jam and cookies, decorated
with a miniature Danish flag, to the
new parents’ bedside — Emma, her
partner, and their son were admitted
to the hospital for an additional five
days, where they were provided with
a king-sized bed to share, three
meals a day (“it was delicious”), and a
breast pump to assist with feeding.
The whole thing cost them nothing
out of pocket.
Denmark and Sweden are able
to offer stellar care, but they’re not
radical outliers in the developed
world. Here in the United States  —
with our inflated prices and dismal
outcomes — our new goal is simple
to express: no mother should be
forced to give birth in conditions
Beyoncé wouldn’t accept for
herself.  ■ 
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BEYOND A BOUNDARY BY MEAGAN DAY

The Spoils
of War

Participation trophies
are actually good — give one
to every child.

away empty-handed made victory

awards less meaningful.

Where along the trail from childhood

to adulthood might people
In a research paper titled “Trophies,
encounter this idea that the sweet-
Triumphs and Tears,” Harvard
ness of triumph is proportional
sociologist Hilary Levey observed a
to the devastation of defeat? The
distinction between how kids and stones of capitalist ideology. They
answer is: everywhere. The
parents view participation trophies. manifest all around us in market
notions that individuals are natu-
The parents she interviewed often society. And the participation trophy
rally locked into competition
felt that awards for effort devalued debate is no exception.
over scarce resources, that contests
awards for achievement, while kids
must have unqualified losers in It’s no surprise that the people
were unlikely to reach that conclu-
order to also have genuine winners, angriest about participation trophies
sion. It’s not that the children didn’t
that paltry compensation for also tend to cherish the idea that
grasp the difference between parti-
losers incentivizes all competitors society is naturally unequal, and to
cipation and placement trophies.
to perform better, and that safety disapprove of any collective attempt
But only the adults believed that a
nets of any kind undermine the will to “artificially” reduce material
scenario in which nobody walked
to compete — these are corner- disparities. “‘Oh gee, everyone gets

CHILDHOOD 79
 BEYOND A BOUNDARY
a ‘trophy’ isn’t healthy for society,”
pronounced right-wing media perso-
nality Glenn Beck. “The world
doesn’t shape-shift for you, you have
to find your way in.” Beck has
relied on similar reasoning to dis-
parage welfare programs, saying,
“The more you make people comfort-
able in their poverty, the more you
strip them of the reasons of standing
up on their own again.” In Beck’s
view, the only way to incentivize a
young athlete to play hard, or to
compel a poor person to make some
money, is to ensure that the
consequences of losing are as
humiliating as possible.
According to the Paul Ryans of the
world and various cottage-industry
snowflake scolds, the root cause of
poverty is an epidemic of unearned
handouts — or, by another name,
participation trophies. But for many
conservatives, it’s more than just a
comparison: participation trophies
actually teach kids left-wing poli-
tical values, like taxing the rich to pay
for social programs. Right-wing
radio personality Adam Carolla made
this point, seamlessly trashing
downwardly mobile left-leaning
millennials in the process:
You get out into the real world
and you realize, “I’m a fucking
loser.” You’re not doing that
well, you’re not making that
much money. There’s no
more participation trophies.…
Instead of looking in the
mirror and going, “Why am I
not doing better?” you just
find some guy who’s got more
shit than you and go ‘Hey
man, what do you need all that
80
shit for?’ It’s the same as, “Hey
man, what do you need an mvp
trophy for?” Because I busted
my ass, that’s why.
Many liberals instinctively like the
idea of participation trophies
because they seem right and fair.
They’re inclined to defend
them, though they typically shift
the debate to different terrain,
retreating from political ideology
into the realm of childhood develop-
It’s no surprise
that the people
angriest about
participation
trophies also tend
to cherish the
idea that society
is naturally
unequal.
ment and self-esteem. They’re
not terribly misguided: self-esteem
is important, and we should
structure childhood recreation in
ways that foster a sense of belonging
and confidence.
However, there is an ideological compo-
nent to the participation trophy
debate. The notion that some people
naturally have to lose everything
in order to make high achievement
possible is a fiction. All people
deserve a decent and dignified life,
for no other reason than because they
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
are human beings. It’s completely
possible for society to give it to them.
That’s not a threat to individual
accomplishment — it’s a precondition
of individual flourishment for the
majority of people.
Beyond allegory, we want actual kids
growing up to believe that pros-
perity is not a zero-sum game. It’s
possible that participation trophies
bring us a tiny bit closer to that
vision. Perhaps, in a small way, they
meaningfully assert the value of
cooperation against the stream of
alienating messages we receive
about our place in the world under
capitalism. When neighbors and
fellow workers perceive each other
as natural adversaries in a winner-
take-all contest for a decent standard
of living, unity becomes impossible
and capitalists reap the rewards.
In 2016, Pittsburgh Steelers line-
backer James Harrison announced
on social media that he was
returning his sons’ participation
trophies. Children shouldn’t be
awarded at all, he said, “until they
earn a real trophy.” He added,
“I’m not about to raise two boys to be
men by making them believe
they are entitled to something just
because they tried their best.”
Why not? They may not be enti-
tled to a placement trophy without
actually placing, but aren’t
they entitled to anything at all, any
acknowledgment that they
too put in time, training, energy,
and ambition into making the
game possible — that they too were
citizens of the game?  ■
The Tumbrel
OUR LOVE IS
NOT UNCONDITIONAL
 Guangdong Province, China: Worker using sewing machine in textile factory — James Hardy / AltoPress

THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS BY MARIA HENGEVELD

Workers need independent and

Girls to the strong unions, not corporate-
sponsored ngos, to fight their
Rescue bosses and support their families.

Fashion has long had a love/hate
relationship with youth. As
consumers, the kids are alright —
influencers, even — but as laborers
in textile factories, they’ve been
known to reduce Kathy Lee Gifford
to tears on national television.
When a litany of bad press and the
work of groups like United Students
Against Sweatshops brought the
idea of sweat-free apparel to the
mainstream in the late 1990s, brand
executives were faced with two
choices: give up the overwhelming
powers they had accumulated under
globalization, or change the way that
consumers understood their power.
They went the public-relations
route. Rebranding themselves from
pariahs to ethical businesses — and
rhetorically repositioning them-
selves on the side of the sweatshop
worker — meant that corporations
had to replace the anti-sweatshop
activist language of conflict and
accountability with the logic of
“win-win” partnerships, responsible
business ethics, collective challenges,
and “continuous learning journeys.”
They pulled the sweatshop issue
away from unions and campus
activists and into the domain of
the business school, the ngo, and
the United Nations. In the new
environment, blame was shifted to
transnational corporations’ business
partners, the factory bosses. Since
brands were the only actors with
real bargaining power over the
factories they contracted with, they
argued that they were in a unique
position to coach their partners
toward humane treatment of
workers. Corporate power had to be
seen as a force to be harnessed
through collaborative self-regulation
with ngos, rather than curbed
through regulators and unions.
The corporate social responsibility
(csr) regime has today morphed
into a global network of brand-

CHILDHOOD 83
 GIRONDINS
sponsored sweatshop inspectors,
supply-chain-management firms,
ngos, foundations, and UN
agencies that monitor, certify, and
rate brands’ supply-chain perfor-
mance, “name and fame” them for
their innovative new ideas with
“leadership awards,” invite them to
webinars on “Why Ending Gen-
der-based Violence is Good For
Business,” and implement corporate
charity projects that train impover-
ished East African teens to found
their own social businesses.
On the philanthropy side, the
empowerment of teen girls (think
self-esteem clubs, rock-band role
models, learning apps, and can-do
attitudes) turned into the corner-
stone of brands’ philanthropy. The
past few years, we’ve seen Gucci
team up with unicef and Beyoncé
to brighten the futures of Tanzanian
Savar, Bangladesh: Rama Plaza building collapse, 2013 — Rijans007 / Flickr
84
girls with “social messaging tools” offer girls and their future children
and “awareness.” We witnessed in developing countries a way out
the success of Maria Eitel, one of of poverty. The truth is, without living
Nike’s top pr and csr chiefs, in wages, strong unions, and a radical
channeling both csr budgets and redistribution of profits across
official development aid to brands’ supply chains, disempower-
sketchy Girl Effect programs and, ment, poverty, and exploitation
astoundingly, get accepted by will remain the norm.
the European Commission as a
csr, contradictorily, frames fashion
legitimate women’s rights advocate
brands and their global sourcing
in the Commission’s most recent
model as the solution to, rather than
campaign on women and develop-
a cause of , the suffering of the
ment. Then there’s Benetton, the
sweatshop worker, and rhetorically
Italian brand that, with support from
transforms the capital generated
the UN, combines the worst of
by that very same sweatshop worker
both (csr) worlds by training Bangla-
into a philanthropic opportunity
deshi garment workers to “increase
for “girl-led,” “sustainable
their productivity” and push for promo-
development”
tions through resolute mindsets.
The former ceo of the fla — a
Corporate executives at places like
factory-oversight scheme that
Nike or Benetton claim that
receives most of its funding from the
entrepreneurship — ideally of the
brands it oversees, including Nike,
social kind — and factory jobs

Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Vien Dyna, age 15, used a fake ID to get employment working
grueling hours for poverty wages — Jason South/Fairfax Media / Getty Images
Adidas, and Hugo Boss — has argued
in a ted talk that the sweatshop
problem is best tackled if we expand
the “safe spaces” where corporations
and ngo partners can “come
together, sit down without fear of
judgment, without recrimination”
and collaboratively build trust and
“move to action.” What sweatshop
workers primarily want from
brands, he insists, is not “more
money” but dedication to making
sure that their factory bosses start
treating workers “as human beings.”
But money and dignity are con-
nected. They certainly were to the
eighteen sweatshop workers I
interviewed in Vietnam in 2016
(between twenty-three and fifty-five
years old). The workers were
employed at five different factories,
but had a lot in common: they were
all women, they were all by law
forbidden to form an independent
union, they all made products for
Nike, and they all faced harassment,
humiliation, abuse, forced overtime,
wage theft, and extreme work
pressure on a daily basis. Money
mattered a lot to their sense of
dignity and security. They said they
had to earn three to four times as
much to offer their families just a
basic level of economic security.
Poverty wages and wage theft made
it impossible for them to ensure
their children’s safety. The ten
mothers with young children whom
I spoke with either sent their
children to unlicensed childcare
services they considered underquali-
fied or dangerous, or they left
them with family in home villages,
meaning they could only see
them once or twice a year.
Who was responsible for the
squeeze? Two women, employed by
two different factories, told me
their managers had complained to
them about Nike’s purchasing rates.
Nike’s prices, they claimed, hadn’t
kept up with factories’ rising costs in
materials and wages. Nike’s profits,
meanwhile, have never been higher.
In reality, the safe spaces hailed by
the former fla chief exist to
avoid these difficult questions.
They often take the form of
conferences, organized in upscale
hotel and business centers. In
November 2017, I attended one such
conference in London. Organized
by the influential csr firm ele-
vate, the event brought speakers
from ngos, brands, and major csr
groups together to exchange —
through PowerPoint presentations
and panel discussions — new
ideas and experiences about what
CHILDHOOD
The workers I
talked to all
faced harassment,
humiliation,
abuse, forced
overtime,
wage theft, and
extreme work
pressure.
supply-chain-management systems
“work” and which challenges
remain. A csr techie imploring the
audience to embrace “worker-voice
technology” as a new innovative tool
to “incorporate worker voices” into
supply-chain-management programs
represented a typical contribution.
I expected that factory bosses would
be primarily depicted as brutal,
corrupt, and ruthless. But here, the
figure of the unsophisticated,
inefficient, stubborn, and clumsy,
childlike factory boss seemed much
more popular. When a panelist put
up a slide with the cover of the book
You Can’t Make Me (But I Can be
Persuaded): Strategies for Bringing
Out the Best in Your Strong-Willed
Child to drive the parallels home,
the audience seemed amused, but
not at all shocked.
In some ways, csr is quite funny.
There’s something comical
about the ngo that claims to fix
health and safety “challenges” in
factories by encouraging “managers
and workers to move past existing
power dynamics [and] identify
innovative solutions” together, or
about the business lobbyist who
defends poverty wages in the
morning, lectures governments on
their responsibilities in the
85
 GIRONDINS
afternoon, and tweets about girls’
entrepreneurial potential after
dinner. But the effects of the csr
regime are real, and they are grim.
csr renders invisible the tens of
thousands of garment workers who
risk their livelihoods and safety by
striking for better wages and basic
labor rights, and derails efforts
to include strong social clauses in
trade agreements and create
binding obligations for brands.
On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza
building in Bangladesh — an
eight-story commercial building,
housing multiple factories — col-
lapsed, killing at least 1,134 garment
workers and injuring over 2,000. It
86
was the deadliest garment factory
accident in history, and the
devastation was at least in part
preventable: despite cracks
observed in the foundation, laborers
had been ordered to return to
work the next day.
Today, the vast majority of garment
workers still depend on the same
secretive csr monitors that, just a
couple of months before its collapse,
visited the Rana Plaza building and
deemed it a safe facility that was
“maintained in good situation” with
“good construction quality.”
Back to London. During a q&a
session, I asked a speaker if it was
at all possible that brands’ own
Wuhu, China: Seamstresses work at a garment factory — China Photos / Getty Images
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
purchasing practices — such as the
prices they pay factory bosses and
the deadlines they place on their
orders — were fueling violations in
their supply chains. I got my answer
from a vice president of elevate,
who walked up to me immediately
after the q&a ended to lecture
me about my misguided question.
By questioning the responsibility
of brands, he said, I was effectively
helping factory owners hide
behind this “low-pricing” excuse.
Sure, he said, price pressure exists,
but low profit margins — and the
abuses that result from cutting
costs — are the outcomes of ineffi-
cient management practices. Like

children, he explained, factory bosses
always point fingers to others when
they are caught breaking the rules.
But if prices were as unreasonably
low as they claim, he said, they should
either prove it “with statistics” or
stop accepting orders they know they
can’t turn a profit on.
Many of the workers I had talked to
in Vietnam, however, were not
employed by small factories,
operated by unprofessional “locals,”
but by highly efficient textile
conglomerates. The extreme work
pressure, poverty wages, wage theft,
forced overtime, and humiliation
they faced did not seem any milder
than those suffered by workers in
small factories. On the contrary, at
the factory run by the Pou Chen
Group — a Taiwanese multinational
accredited and praised by the fla
for its transparency and grievance
systems — managers were so
professional that they even printed
wage penalties in a company
handbook. The handbook stipulated
penalties for sitting down, for
manufacturing mistakes, and even
for “fabricating false stories or
starting rumors that can cause
damage to the company’s order
or reputation.”
Pou Chen is no exception. Around
the same time I was in Vietnam, the
Worker Rights Consortium (wrc)
found similarly abusive conditions
and rules — including a ban on
yawning — at the Vietnamese plant
of the South Korean firm Hansae,
another fla-covered Nike supplier.
Hansae workers said that excessive
temperatures, abusive management
styles, and forced overtime caused
some of them to routinely collapse
during work, only to be told to get
back to work after waking up.
What these stories tell us is that
contrary to the lecture I was
given in London, we should be
pointing fingers at the brands.
The findings of a large supply-chain
survey by the International Labour
Organization (ilo), published in
2017, provides powerful evidence
in support of this idea. It said
that garment buyers —more than
other industries — impose extreme
price pressure on their suppliers.
More than half of surveyed garment
manufacturers said they had
produced orders below production
costs that year. A study on Bangla-
desh by Mark Anner from Penn
State University found that since
Rana Plaza, the prices paid by
retailers and brands to supplier
factories had declined by 13 percent
and that the lead times had also
gone down. The result: real wages
went down, forced overtime went
up, and union growth stagnated.
Some defend csr by arguing that
“something is better than nothing”
and that ultimately, csr pursues the
same ends as unions, students, and
In the late 1990s, brand executives
were faced with two choices: give up
the overwhelming powers they
had accumulated under globalization,
or change the way that consumers
understood their power.
CHILDHOOD
Girls to the Rescue
other csr critics. But any initiative
that sees corporate power as the
solution, rather than the problem,
and pretends obscene corporate
profits are not directly connected
to poverty wages and union
repression, ultimately undermines
the ability of workers to collectively
bargain for better jobs, lives, and
futures for their children.
csr rhetoric talks a lot about
“giving.” Worker rights start “with
just giving people back their dignity,”
said the fla chief in his ted talk.
We “give” girls the skills and
opportunity to entrepreneur their
way to liberation, say the brands.
Patronizing charity and false
individualized empowerment
promises won’t get workers
dignified jobs, safe childcare, and
a path out of poverty for their
children. Not without the freedom
to collectively fight those who
exploit — who take from — them.
If the voluntary approach of csr —
with all its capital, power, and decades
of experience —could produce
meaningful change then it would
have already done so. Sweatshop
workers need rights, not excuses.  ■
87
 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR BY ALEX S. VITALE

Lorem Ipsum
Dolor Sit Amet
If we want to offer
children a better
The
DEK: Nam aliquet, ipsum et
semper convallis, quam lacus luctus future, we need to
Criminalization
nisi, ac cursus enim diam ut leo. get the criminal
of Youth justice system out
of their lives.

“Gang bangers,” “superpredators,”
dangerous “illegal aliens.”
While the Trump administration has
intensified tough-on-crime rhetoric,
there is nothing new about
equating youth with criminality.
Children in the United States
continue to be subjected to police
abuse in their schools and
neighborhoods, or torn away from
their parents by the state.
Trump’s efforts to equate immigrants
with violent gangs has enhanced the
hysteria around gangs. But police
across the country have long sought
to define the behavior of youth as
“gang involved.” They have entered
hundreds of thousands of children
into gang databases, subjected tens
of thousands to injunctions, and
swept up thousands in broad
conspiracy cases. By defining young
people as gang members, police
and prosecutors are signaling that
these children are beyond help and
must be subjected to the most
extreme forms of punishment.
This negative characterization of
poor and largely nonwhite youth is
in sync with the broader push to
replace social services with
criminalization. As more and more
deprived neighborhoods are
denied access to decent jobs and
schools, their young people are
criminalized as “the worst of the
worst” to ensure that the problems
in these communities are under-
stood as individual and group
moral failures, rather than the
result of rapacious market forces
and a hollowed-out state.
In many cities, however, young
people are fighting back. The Youth
Justice Coalition in Los Angeles
recently won a victory against the
use of gang injunctions. Black Youth
Project 100 and other groups in
Chicago are pushing back against
the use of gang databases. Their
recent report, “Tracked and
Targeted” showed that 128,000
people are in the Chicago data-
base, including 11 percent of the
city’s black population. Youth
advocates and organizers in New

88 № 30  /  SUMMER 2018

York City recently pressured the
City Council to hold hearings on
how the nypd uses its databases to
carry out sweeping conspiracy
cases. Among other things, they
learned that 99 percent of people
in the database (some as young as
thirteen) were nonwhite and that
police continue to use young
people’s social media profiles to
target them for inclusion in
databases and conspiracy cases.
Young people continue to be
criminalized in schools as well.
Indeed, delinquency can be
assigned to children beginning in
toddlerhood — preschools routinely
suspend pupils as young as three
years old. The undermining of public
education through high-stakes
testing, cuts to support services,
and privatization schemes has been
combined with zero-tolerance
discipline policies and an increasing
number of school police. The result
has been high levels of suspension,
expulsions, and arrests, especially
for students of color and those in
special-education programs.
The burden of these policies has
fallen not just on young men. As
Monique Morris shows in her
book, Pushout: The Criminalization
of Black Girls in Schools, schools
are where girls face the greatest
risks of police abuse. Recent
school shootings have encouaged
calls for even more school police
and the arming of teachers,
while overall funding for school
counselors and alternative disci-
plinary systems declines.
Groups like the aclu and the
Advancement Project are fighting
against school policing on the
national level by pointing out the
gross racial disparities in arrests at
schools and the ways in which
school police brutalize students. At
the local level, students are
demanding that resources be
shifted from policing to counseling
and instruction. Young people
organizing with Freedom Inc. in
Madison, Wisconsin learned that
the $360,000 a year spent on
school police was coming out of the
school budget, not the police
budget. They are demanding that
those resources be radically
redirected. In New York City, the
“Counselors Not Cops” campaign
has been fighting to abolish
zero-tolerance disciplinary policies
and shift policing resources to
student needs. They point out
that there are more nypd personnel
in public schools than counselors
of all varieties.
By defining young people as gang
members, police and prosecutors
are signaling that these
children are beyond help and
must be subjected to the most
extreme forms of punishment.
We have all been appalled by
recent images of children being
torn away from their parents while
seeking asylum in the United States.
This separation is part of a
dehumanizing policy of “deter-
rence” intended to discourage
future refugees fleeing violence in
Central America. Child refugees
are usually the most at risk from
reactionary border policies. As
Reece Jones points out in his book,
Violent Borders: Refugees and the
Right to Move, it is young people
who are most likely to die crossing
borders and languishing in camps.
CHILDHOOD
Our criminal justice system has
long torn families apart under the
false logic of deterrence, though.
Millions of American children have
a parent taken away from them
through mass incarceration.
Thousands of mothers give birth
each year while imprisoned, and
most have their newborn infants
taken from them within hours or
days of giving birth. There is a
huge amount of research on the
negative consequences for these
children in terms of mental health,
educational achievement, and
future incarceration.
But there is some good news.
Overall youth-incarceration rates
have dropped in recent years.
Several states have moved to rely
more on community-based
solutions that attempt to work with
young people while they live at
home. The outcomes from these
approaches are usually better,
and shuttering locked youth
facilities is saving states millions of
dollars. Courts have also curtailed
the use of the death penalty and
life without parole for juveniles.
Unfortunately, as Alexandra Cox
found in her study Trapped in a
Vice: The Consequences of Confi-
nement for Young People, many
of the “reforms” undertaken in the
juvenile justice system reproduce
a relationship of control and degra-
dation, rather than truly addressing
the profound needs of many of
these young people. If we want to
offer children a better future,
we need to get the criminal justice
system out of their lives. These
young people need sustained care,
support, and opportunities to build
a safe and stable future, not more
threats, coercion, and punishment.  ■
89
 THE TUMBREL
VERSAILLES
AltSchool
Less a school than a Black Mirror
episode, AltSchool was founded by
two former Google employees
with one simple idea: what if you
could teach kids while literally
surveilling everything they did? At
AltSchools, kids learn by interacting
all day with software on laptops
(or tablets, for pre-K), which in turn
gathers data about their progress and
sends it over to both teachers and
parents. All the while, audio recorders
and cameras capture everything
they do for further analysis. Rather
than a set program, kids do assigned
activities customized to their interests
through a playlist. It didn’t take long
for AltSchool to start failing — kids fell
so far behind academically that
parents forked out tens of thousands
more dollars for private tutoring,
complaining that the whole thing was
a front to develop software.
90
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Coding for Kids
Education is no stranger to fads. One
of the latest to spread like a fungus
through the sector is the concept of
coding boot camps. Originally
designed to cater to bewildered high
school graduates, it’s now being
forced on small children. The United
Kingdom has made coding classes
mandatory for kids aged five and up,
Apple has been hard at work bringing
its coding program to Chicago’s
public schools, and one company has
even designed a wooden playset
for toddlers to learn to code, all with
the idea that the economy of the
future is going to apparently be based
entirely on billions of people writing
software.
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
Ad Astra
Elon Musk has continued a banner
year of public-relations calamities
with ArsTechnica’s uncovering of his
secretive space-genius school, Ad
Astra. Operating quietly out of
SpaceX’s headquarters for the last
four years and fully funded by Musk
himself, Ad Astra has a more elite
student body than any other on this
list, educating students from Los
Angeles’s schools for gifted kids, the
children of certain SpaceX
employees, and Musk’s own sons. Its
exclusivity, mystique, and Musk’s own
celebrity have made it one of the
most in-demand schools among the
area’s families. The students, who
have an average age of ten, work on
projects involving artificial intelli-
gence, flamethrowers, and robots. It’s
not clear if there’s a civics compo-
nent, but given Musk’s Twitter
ramblings about short laws and
automatically expiring rules, that’s
probably for the best.

THINK Global School
What could be more “disruptive” —
literally — than not having a classroom
and jetting around the world from
exotic locale to exotic locale each
semester? This is the concept of
THINK Global School, which touts
itself as “the world’s first traveling high
school.” Founded in 2010, the New
York–based boarding school has no
physical campus, and flies its students
around the world to say, take up
cross-country skiing in the Arctic, go
scuba diving at the Great Barrier
Reef, and retrace the steps of Ody-
sseus in Greece, thereby turning
school into a reenactment of a Roger
Moore–era Bond movie. All of it
will set you back a cool $79,000 a year
for tuition.
Class
Clowns
WeGrow Meet the Silicon
It seems like anyone can start a school Valley “disruptors”
nowadays. Just look at WeWork, who want to teach
a New York start-up that went from
creating office and coworking
your kids.
spaces to starting its own grade
school focused on teaching kids
“conscious entrepreneurship.” “There’s
no reason why children in elemen-
tary schools can’t be launching their
One of the benefits that
own businesses,” said Rebekah
comes with absurd wealth is
Neumann, the company’s cofounder.
the ability to put that wealth
WeGrow is the school set up to bring
to equally absurd uses. Some
to life that terrifying idea by teaching
buy islands and exotic pets.
kids sales techniques, supply and
demand, brand creation, as well as Others simply send their kids
meditation and yoga, alongside to high-concept schools whose
more conventional subjects. Oh, and half-baked themes were ripped
of course, coding. Neumann says straight out of the “disruptive
conventional education crushes the innovator’s” handbook.
“entrepreneurial spirit” in children
before society asks them “to be disrup-
tive and recover that spirit.” If
WeGrow is an example of this spirit,
the crushing couldn’t come fast
enough.
CHILDHOOD 91
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Leftovers
SOME PARTING WARM
MEMORIES
 LEFTOVERS
THE DUSTBIN
The Newsies
Were Real
Picket lines once made the best
playgrounds around.
It was July 24, 1899 in New York City.
Brooklyn streetcar workers were on
strike. Twenty-one strikers faced
allegations of plotting to dynamite
the Fifth Avenue elevated train
track. In the evening, the Socialist
Labor Party’s Daniel De Leon
gathered a crowd at Cooper Union
to discuss the strike. “All the
Socialists in New York go to such a
mass meeting as they would go to a
circus,” reported the next day’s New
York Sun, noting the meeting’s
raucous atmosphere and impolite tone.
But this wasn’t where the real action
was. Across town, five thousand
young boys spilled out of the New
94
BY JONAH WALTERS
Irving Hall, making a racket heard
from the Bronx to the Battery. “A
citizen unused to the ways of the New
York newsboy might have thought
it was a riot,” noted one journalist. In
fact, it was a meeting of the News-
boys Union and their supporters to
discuss the rapidly escalating strike
action they had begun several days
prior. One colorful character after
another, children and adults alike,
took the stage to beg the boys to
soften their tactics — just that day,
the young strikers had overturned
newsstands and delivery wagons,
clubbed scabs, shredded unauthorized
newspapers, and even intercepted
and destroyed shipments of newsprint
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
at train stations in New Jersey and in
the Hudson Valley.
Daniel Simmons, the recently elected
Newsboys Union president, took
the stage first. “We’re goin’ to win this
fight, boys, only we must stick
together and hold firm.” Their
enemies may have money, he
reminded his comrades, “but we got
the situation in our hands, and
they know it.” Having spent his day
busily negotiating with the news-
paper owners and their allies in city
government, trying desperately
to keep his members on the street and
out of jail, he had but one request
for the strikers: “Now, I’m going to
ask you to use no more violence. Let
up on the scabs.”
One boy bleated a sarcastic response
from the back of the hall: “Oh,
soytently!” Jeers rose from the crowd,
playful punches were thrown, and
the call for civility was roundly
rejected. The strikers would not be
calmed.
This episode in summer 1899 was a
gift to newspaper writers still

immersed in the yellow sensibility of
the times. Reporters for the
unaffected newspapers covered the
strike with a giddiness that slid into
hyperbole, quoting the newsboys
phonetically and describing their
antics with a sense of Dickensian
drama. Who could blame them? It
was one hell of a yarn. The newsboys
strike was a David and Goliath story
that pit two of the richest men in the
world — William Randolph Hearst,
owner of the New York Journal, and
Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New
York World — against an army of
poor children, some as young as five.
The cause of the unrest was the
magnates’ stinginess. Newsboys had
always been required to purchase
their papers wholesale before selling
them. During the 1898 Spanish-
American War, all the papers — not
only Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s
World, but also the Sun, the Eagle,
and others — responded to
increased demand by raising their
wholesale prices by ten cents.
This arrangement suited the news-
boys just fine during wartime —
Americans were eager for news
from the front lines, and the newsies
had no trouble soliciting buyers,
oftentimes by hollering exaggerated
summaries from soapboxes, then
hurrying the coins from their
customers’ hands before they could
skim the paper.
When the war ended, however,
members of the reading public were
less willing to part with their
pennies. The Sun and the Eagle
lowered their wholesale price to the
prewar rate. But Hearst and Pulitzer
maintained the wartime hike,
putting the squeeze on the newsboys.
To the kids, this smacked of greedy
opportunism. “Ain’t that ten cents
worth as much to us as it is to Hearst
and Pulitzer, who are millionaires?”
asked Kid Blink, another strike leader,
at that rambunctious gathering at
New Irving Hall. (“Soak ’em, Blink!”
came the cry from the crowd.)
Some grown-ups were eager to
throw their lot in with the boys,
including the owners of the rival
newspapers, who had everything to
CHILDHOOD
Kids on strike,
talking foul —
it seems made to be
a tv musical.
gain from gumming up the works of
Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s operations.
City politicos seized the opportunity
to capitalize on the newsboys’
popularity. The strikers attracted
widespread attention and
won public sympathy, much to the
amusement of sympathetic news
writers, but much to the consterna-
tion of the intransigent magnates.
While the strike lasted, the World’s
daily circulation dipped from
360,000 to only 125,000.
After two weeks, the strikers’
representatives reached a compro-
mise: the prices would stay the same,
but the news companies would
automatically buy back unsold wares
at the end of the day. Despite some
initial outcry, this agreement was
enough to guarantee peace. The
street demonstrations ended, and
newsboys once again included the
Journal and the World in their daily
bushels of merchandise.
It’s tempting to look back on this
strike as a novelty, a quirky episode
in the adult saga of American labor
95
 THE DUSTBIN
Child worker strikes
were not uncommon
during the nineteenth
and early twentieth
centuries
organizing. Kids on strike,
talking foul — it seems made to be
a tv musical. However, child
worker strikes were not uncommon
during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when hundreds
of thousands of children spent
the majority of their waking lives
working in mines, textile shops,
factories, or, like the New York news-
boys, on the streets.
In 1836, for example, nearly two
thousand young girls, many not yet
96
teenagers, walked off the job at
textile mills in Lowell, Massachu-
setts as members of the newly
formed Factory Girls’ Association.
The Philadelphia silk strike of 1903
included as many as 16,000 children
and ended in the famous “March of
the Mill Children,” a three-week
march from Philadelphia to New
York City led by labor icon Mother
Jones. In 1933, the “baby strikers” of
Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley
captured the attention of reformers
across the country when they began
№ 30  /  SUMMER 2018
picketing sweatshops in Allentown,
Easton, Northampton, and else-
where. The famous 1899 standoff in
New York wasn’t even the first
newsboys strike — it came on the
heels of similar actions in 1881, 1884,
1886, 1887, and 1894.
A breathless memo sent to
Mr Pulitzer by one of his underlings
captured the tenor of the times. Job
actions by children were “an
extensive and menacing affair” for
capitalists like himself.  ■
 LEFTOVERS
MEANS & ENDS BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

Jacobin Is
for the Children

Help keep Jacobin alive for

generations to come.

Democratic socialism is everywhere

it seems — on the lips of leading
politicians, in New York Times
columns, on the set of The View.
(We could use some more buzz in
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When Jacobin was founded in 2010,

I couldn’t have imagined socialism
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Eight years later, “socialism in our
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But Jacobin and the Democratic
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These are exciting times for the Left,
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And Jacobin has a role yet to play
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CHILDHOOD 97
Jacobin (ISSN: 2470-6930) is published quarterly by Jacobin Foundation Ltd., 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217-3399. Periodical postage
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 “When you kiss your child,
say to yourself, it may be dead
in the morning.”

— Epictetus
 BY JACOB KRAMER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MALINA OMUT
When the children
seized power,
we agreed

5
 MORE
BATS!

6 7
More bats, free bats, bats to flutter
and swarm. Bats in every nook
and cranny. Bats to darken
the summer sky.

Vesper bats, horseshoe

bats, long eared and
short nosed bats.

8 9
 We stayed up past
bedtime watching
them dive and
We planted flowers and squeak.
fruit trees and grapes.
We let the grass
grow long.

Still,
we demanded:

10 11
 Fruit-eating bats and bug-eating
bats and blood-eating bats.
Bats beyond number.

MORE Bats for days.

BATS!

12 13
 Some people were worried about
rabies, so we arranged
free medicine.

14 15
The attics were full,
so we built more
houses.

16 17
 The bats were thirsty, so we
opened more parks
and ponds.

18 19
The bats kept bumping
into walls, so we tore
them down.

20 21
 Some people were
afraid of bats.

The bats are quite sweet.

Calm down. Stroke
them gently.

So we held classes
about getting-to-know-the-bats,
with hands-on activities.
22 23
The bats began to look hungry. We looked around.
They needed more food. We were We decided some things
running out of mosquitoes must be changed.
and peaches.

“But who will grow

the food?” asked the adults,
“There are people who don’t
even have enough food.”

24 25
 We disbanded the Armies and Navies.
The soldiers became farmers.
The tanks became
tractors.

The battleships became

research vessels,
for visiting islands with
interesting bats.

26 27
 MORE
WHALES!

28 29
JACOBIN
JACOBINMAG.COM