Nixon Vetoed Universal Childcare Investments to Maintain Women's Role as Subsidizing Resource, Not Social Participant

Patriarchy always produces the systemic subhuman treatment of children in service of ensuring women's unpaid labor subsidizes men, the state, and the economy at large

We’re picking up with Part Two of our conversation on the history of child care in America, especially in connection to women’s independent social participation - or lack thereof.

In our last chat, we talked about the successful federally subsidized, locally administered child care centers that America established during World War 2 - and then swiftly dismantled post war.

Yes, America had universal child care support that cost parents the modern equivalent of $9-12 per day, per child for a standard of care we’ve been falsely conditioned to believe is impossible to recreate today.

As we discussed, a major motivation for defunding the child care centers was pushing women - especially white middle class women - out of the workforce and back into their assigned social role of dehumanized domestic servant whose unpaid, unsupported, and unprotected labor within the isolation of nuclear family subsidizes not just the lives of men, but also our state and economy at large.

The push to defund community child care support was seen as especially necessary after women immediately outcompeted men in skilled, well paid labor that pre-war was gate kept for only men.

Including black and brown women who were historically relegated to domestic service work - the lowest paying, most unprotected work at the margins of society.

Women of all backgrounds wanted to keep those skilled respected jobs and that could not stand! So social funding for childcare was withdrawn and a coordinated propaganda campaign commenced to engineer the baby boom to restore the tyranny of the patriarchal nuclear family system.

Go check out that article for the deep dive and we’re picking up our history in the late 60s and early 70s.

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Despite defunding child care centers, the memory of their success did not die. Many of the children who actually attended the WW2 child care centers grew up to lead lobbying efforts to restore national investments in the wellbeing of all children.

Their work helped usher a swell of bipartisan support for the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA), passed by Congress and vetoed by Nixon in 1971.

The CCDA would have re-established federally subsidized, locally administered child care centers across the country with a sliding pay scale based on income to ensure every family could participate in community based child development centers

It was very much a bipartisan effort, as many Republicans had not yet been radicalized against the humanity of women and children under the guise of “pro family” patriarchal fear mongering.

The defeat of this childcare investment would be a turning point for “pro life” conservatism that we see today where it’s prolife to withhold medical care to pregnant women and if they perish a slow, horrible, and preventable demise from sepsis or misscarriage, so be it.

Such is the cost for being the vessel of a man’s legacy, amIrite?!

The will to create community infrastructure to serve children and families was so nonpartisan that even President Nixon was (initially) all about it. Nixon campaigned on promises to invest in federal child care support because the science and intuitive knowledge was clear and uncontroversial.

In his April 1969 address to Congress, Nixon said:

IN MY MESSAGE to the Congress of February 19th on the Economic Opportunity, Act, I called for a "national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life." I again pledge myself to that commitment.

No such commitment has ever before been asked in our Nation. No such pledge has ever been given.

We know today that the process of human development is in certain fundamental ways different from what it has been thought to be. Or perhaps it is the case that mothers have always understood, but that only men have failed to take notice:

We have learned, first of all, that the process of learning how to learn begins very, very early in the life of the infant child. Children begin this process in the very earliest months of life, long before they are anywhere near a first grade class, or even kindergarten, or play school group.

We have also learned that for the children of the poor this ability to learn can begin to deteriorate very early in life, so that the youth begins school well behind his contemporaries and seemingly rarely catches up.

He is handicapped as surely as a child crippled by polio is handicapped, and he bears the burden of that handicap through all his life. It is elemental that, even as in the case of polio, the effects of prevention are far better than the effects of cure.

For once with Nixon, no lies detected. The intuitive understanding and science is crystal clear: the first 5 years of development is absolutely critical for establishing a person’s cognitive and emotional health for the rest of their life.

This truth is so indisputable and uncontroversial that even the Princess of Wales has made it her signature campaign issue. Babies and children thrive in supportive and well-resources environments where they receive stimulating attention and social nourishment.

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Within impoverished communities, where all of adults are in survival mode all of the time just trying to keep the lights on, there isn’t enough extendable energy to focus on those vital investments. It’s not a moral failing or validation of eugenic theories that under-resourced and over-extracted communities are stuck in this destructive cycle.

Impoverished communities aren’t the only ones dealing with this destructive cycle either. This engineered poverty of human investment in BABIES, in women, in nourishing the necessities of development and connection is an American epidemic.

Social Infrastructure is Critical, Not Frivolous or Luxurious

That’s why social infrastructure is critical - it’s not a luxury. Humans are social creatures who require cooperative and reciprocal social support for optimal development.

Just the way it works! Conservatives who rally against investments in children and common sense social infrastructure try to project all sorts of complications on this truth.

It’s the most common of common sense that it takes a village to raise a child. A village is more than a group of people - it’s a bond of common care and reciprocal investment.

The village is the social investment in itself. It is created through every member contributing to the wellbeing and needs of every other member. Not for profit, but for purpose.

SO, the CCDA was about funding the social infrastructure to support the village approach at the community level. These were not state run care centers - very specifically NOT.

Through CCDA, any legitimate local organization could apply for the funds - it wasn’t limited to school boards or other politically controlled systems. A church group or parents group would be eligible for funding, so long as they could properly execute their vision.

To understand why this bipartisan, common sense, and incredibly FEASIBLE federal investment in BABIES AND CHILDREN was vetoed by minority interests, let’s listen to hags of the ages Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly describe their motivations.

These radical conservatives just lied through their teeth to scare the American public out of investing in babies.

They didn’t actually think these centers were like the Soviet collectivization, but they recognized the craven power in making those false claims to American families.

As we heard from Buchanan himself, his opposition to the CCDA had NOTHING to do with the needs of kids, it was all about HIS ideological preferences.

He relied on leveraging Cold War anxieties to assert his feelings and ideological preferences onto the American people because you can’t argue against these kind of investments truthfully when the intuitive understanding AND the science is so clear: affordable, community childcare support is what’s BEST for families and children.

Buchanan’s deceit is a good example of what I mean about patriarchy centering men and erasing women and children as props, as resources, as nonparticipants. His FEELINGS matter more than serving the indisputable needs of children.

Segregation, Racism, and Political Control

Radicals like Buchanan KNEW the CCDA was about putting funds in the hands of local parent groups - and THAT was one of the real problems to them.

Let’s put this fight in historical context of 1971. Segregation fights were as vicious as ever. While the Civil Rights movement had accomplished critical victories like Civil Rights Act of 1964, there were still bitter battles to circumvent integration and racial equality.

The Supreme Court was still adjudicating the practice of integration and many states and political institutions like school boards were still engaged in racist policies of open hostility against their own black and brown citizens.

When the CCDA was vetoed in 1971, American women could not yet open their own checking accounts or get credit cards without a male relative cosigning and controlling the accounts.

Women didn’t secure their right to have independent bank and credit accounts until 1974 through the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Which, by the way, Trump has signed executive orders to undermine as the first step to structurally eroding women’s economic independence.

In 1971, radical conservatives like Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly could see the progress on the horizon, and were determined to stop it - even if they had to damn generations of American children to do so.

Phyllis Schlafly, by the way, made her lucrative career by opposing the Equal Rights Amendment for women and telling women to be stay at home mothers while she made bank NOT doing that.

Schlafly is one of many conservative women who recognize how personally profitable it is to sell OTHER women out in exchange for cash and proximity to patriarchal power - a pattern we see continuously repeated today.

Patriarchal hags always try to shame OTHER women by selling patriarchal pond scum THEY DO NOT CHOSE TO LIVE BY.

But the radical conservatives were right that defeating investments in the wellbeing of children was a hugely successful conservative tool. Let’s talk about why.

For that, we’re going to zoom out and talk about ideologies around child care and welfare.

Social Infrastructure vs. Social Slavery

During the 60s, new federal efforts were made to combat American poverty through welfare services, but never through direct economic investment to the beneficiaries.

This meant that many welfare services were about social workers helping poor families secure legal services or nutritional information, not direct resource aid and investment.

Indirect resource aid included Food stamps instead of direct payment to purchase food. Housing vouchers instead of cash for housing.

America has traditionally set up welfare investments in that indirect (and often stigmatizing) manner because welfare is viewed as transitional assistance, never envisioned as necessary long term investments in social infrastructure designed to MEET HUMAN NEEDS without extraneous profit engineering.

If we strip back all of the intellectualization of the belief that welfare is a temporary investment, not a necessary structure of meeting needs as required by humans being social creatures, we lay the true argument bare.

That belief argues that the fundamental purpose of American government is not to provide services that facilitate humans cooperatively meeting common social needs, but that the purpose of the American government is to use violence to maintain borders, advance business interests, and maintain socially established hierarchies of power.

That belief - that the government’s role is NOT providing services - can ONLY be realized by maintaining entire classes of people, who under threat of violence, MUST labor to serve society instead of participating in society and being served by social structures.

There is no other way around it.

The fever dream of rugged conservative individualism either needs a trust fund or slaves to be experienced. It cannot exist on its own merit - it requires being subsidized by the subjugation or enslavement of others.

This, historically, was accomplished through chattel slavery - hundreds of years of kidnapping, enslaving, and forcibly breeding black slaves.

But also through marriage - through the domestic servitude and corresponding social death of women.

The patriarchal social enslavement of women is a different kind of slavery than chattel slavery and I do not mean to equate them. They exist separately on the spectrum of enslavement, and I do not mean to dilute the abject horrors and unparalleled brutality of chattel slavery through this recognition.

But you’ll notice both chattel slavery and women’s servitude both rely on forced breeding…

Forced Human Breeding Is Necessary When Life Supports Society Instead of Society Supporting Life

Let’s be clear: patriarchy is about forced breeding - there is no species where all males procreate, it’s not a thing.

Patriarchy centers men for the purpose of upending the natural order of women selecting the fittest men to procreate with. It forces women to procreate for survival - ensuring that men do not have to develop themselves and their capacities to be attractive and selected.

Upending natural selection was accomplished through a collusion of violence to hoard resources exclusively under men’s control and the violent entrapment of women to prevent them from withdrawing to live in their own secluded societies.

Marriage was invented for the purpose of using the hoarded resources and organized violence to purchase women as property.

Marriage is the institution of gendering and privatizing care work - the vital work of life - as a commodity embodied by women for men to barter and consume, not participate in or contribute to.

That’s why marriage was originally the contract of sale where a man purchased exclusive rights and ownership of the woman, exclusive rights to her sexual labor, reproductive labor, physical labor, domestic labor, and creative labor.

Marriage was created to ensure every man could BUY a woman as property. Not compete and develop his skills and strength to be chosen to pass on his genes.

This is why patriarchy is the bastardization of natural selection.

It’s also why marriage is welfare for men. It’s a form of male welfare. It’s a form of social slavery for women and forced breeding. That’s the legacy there.

A byproduct of this patriarchal organization is that patriarchal societies DO NOT INVEST in common welfare.

The state has no responsibility to provide services because society centers and serves men under the assumption that every man PRIVATELY owns a woman to be his private for profit means of production.

It’s women’s work to meet needs. Produce life. Nurse the sick and elderly. Make meals. Raise babies. Do all of the critical work of life - of creating life, of meeting the needs of life, and of creating quality of life.

Women are expected to do all of this work without compensation or reciprocal care or any social investment or even an ounce of God damn respect.

It’s women’s work to SUBSIDIZE MEN, TO SUBSIDIZE THE STATE, as dehumanized laborers, not social participants who are considered and served by society

Then, social investments are only made in service of men and dominant power structures while women’s unpaid labor subsidizes the critical work of life for them.

Real talk: many of these dominant power structures, like late stage capitalism, abuse men too.

But these abusive structures rely on the patriarchal promise of every man getting to own and use a woman privately to ensure that men don’t collectively rise against their own oppression. That division also helps ensure that men don’t join in feminist organizing to help women and children in solidarity either.

Men, generally speaking, will tolerate abuse from capitalists and the state and whoever - so long as they get a woman to use for personal profit and pleasure. Specifically, a woman who cannot enact boundaries or consequences against him.

Historical Implication of These Systemic Patterns

Of course as Civil Rights and women’s liberation movements were winning victories and establishing social change through the 60s, America would need to recalibrate federal investments in social infrastructure.

The pool of indentured labor of women and black people was no longer freely available as property for uncompensated extraction.

Childcare support is a strong representation of nexus of these struggles.

Conservatives believe that it is women’s job to raise children alone outside of community, in the isolation of the nuclear family, under the dominion and tyranny of a man, the patriarch.

That way SHE produces fully formed workers for the state to USE.

This is why patriarchy is too dysfunctional and self destructive to be sustainable. There’s no stewardship like within matriarchy.

Naturally, humans thrive under matriarchal societies. Meaning, communities and families centered around children. ALL adults participate and contribute to the welfare and development of all children and rising generations.

Patriarchy has been the dominant form of human organization for a few thousand years - which is really a blink of an eye considering that modern humans have been roaming Earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

There’s strong evidence that prior to patriarchal rise (about 5,000 years ago or so), many human communities were matriarchal in organization.

Matriarchal organization serves all people within society by investing in the longterm structures of mutual support and cooperation. By centering the needs of babies and rising generations FIRST, everyone’s needs got met along the way.

Cooperation and stewardship is the name of the game.

The rise of patriarchy decentered BABIES to forcibly and artificially center all community and family around SERVING the fears and desires of adult men. That’s the truth.

So, the conservative revulsion towards making social investments in the wellbeing of all children - through efforts like the CCDA - is about adult men competing with literal babies for collective resources AND benefiting the attention and energy of women.

SERIOUSLY.

When social investments are made into kids, it undermines men’s coercive control of women, of children, of society because it undermines their leverage of controlling all resources and being exclusively centered.

Social investments in all children disrupts men’s patriarchal entitlement of perpetually CONSUMING, not contributing.

Patriarchal Systemic Subhuman Treatment of Children

This is why patriarchy ALWAYS produces the systemic subhuman treatment of children.

As in our systems treat children as property of the parents, not developing human beings and citizens with their own set of needs and rights that society MUST invest in.

Recognizing the societal mandate to invest in all children runs counter to patriarchy because patriarchy centers men and men only care about their own offspring - if they have the capacity to genuinely care at all.

Children are a tool for coercive control for men and the state under patriarchy. This is why a baby boom was engineered to coerce women out of independent social and economic participation after WW2.

Once a woman is pregnant or raising children without social support, she is easy to exploit for more. A man can stop participating in meeting his own needs and simply embrace perpetual boyhood by feeding off the care of the woman he knocked up instead of contributing and fulfilling the responsibilities of fatherhood.

The state has no problem with that so long as that woman is subsidizing their books too. All that matters to the state is that women’s exploited labor ensures future workers are produced without investment.

Vetoing CCDA to Keep Women Socially Isolated

These exploitative structures require keeping women isolated from each other and without resources.

When women exist in community that values and invests in the wellbeing of women, they create social power and strength together. Through mutual aid of resource sharing - material resources, but also the emotional and intellectual resources necessary to buck patriarchal conditioning to reclaim sovereignty - women grow empowered to enact boundaries and consequences.

Can’t have that. Can’t have a woman enacting CONSEQUENCES against a man for his behaviors, his failures, his malicious insecurities, his consumption without contribution and lack of self control.

Can’t have women enacting consequences against the state by refusing to produce future workers without any supportive investments.

Investing in community child care would provide too many resources to children - and thus to women who are predominately the primary caregivers and child care experts that would lead the programs.

Community child support enables women to directly collaborate outside of male control, outside of patriarchal supervision that polices ideas and conversations to continuously reinforce patriarchal narratives and myths.

THAT’S a problem for patriarchal control. Sure, it’s what's absolutely BEST for all American children - boys, girls, and others.

To be clear, no one was STOPPING men from participating in these child care centers. It’s just understood by patriarchal men that they would refuse to participate because toxic masculinity means coercively controlling, not cooperative participating in care work!

Vetoing CCDA to Preserve Racial Hierarchies

Outside of the patriarchal gender war of it all, you can’t have investments in ALL KIDS. Even the black ones?

[Pat Buchanan if he was honest]: GAG ME WITH A SPOON AND SEND ME BACK TO THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH, I CAN’T HANDLE THAT!

MEN ARE THE ONLY RIGHTFUL PRINCELINGS OF WELFARE ENTITLEMENTS - NOT WOMEN, NOT PEOPLE OF COLOR, AND SURE AS SHIT NOT WOMEN OF COLOR NOR THEIR DAMN BABIES!

Seriously, that’s the conflict underpinning the conservative opposition to investing in the CCDA and any forms of social infrastructure. Whatever fancy pants terms they want to throw out about the founding fathers bahbah ten commandments bahabah - that’s all window dressing for these truths.

The CCDA would have provided funds for any and all legitimate local organizations who requested them and were capable of effectively administering the programs.

Granting funds outside of state control - directly to local parent groups - would undermine the ability of existing political structures to systemically abuse black communities.

Local communities could circumvent racist and hateful political structures by receiving funds directly from the feds. And many racists would sacrifice their own wellbeing than see black communities receive appropriate investments.

In Conclusion..

Let’s close out with this gem of a quote from the Nixon presidential records at University of Virginia. This is from a memo summary of his day:

The President registers his opposition to legislation that would fund child development centers across America, then expresses his support of the brutal military dictatorship of Emílio Garrastazu Médici in Brazil.

All in a days work, amIright? Supporting military dictatorship in Brazil and terrorizing women and children at home. No funds for babies, but if my guy needs some bombs, I gotta plenty of funds for that!

Busy day, I wonder if Nixon did ice baths to manage the stress of causing so much intentional harm across the hemisphere!

Yeah you need an ice bath after that amIrite? That’s called male accountability!

SO WHAT SHOULD WE TAKE AWAY FROM THIS HISTORY?

That we are capable of federal investing in community child care support. We deserve it. It’s best for kids, best for women, best for men, best for families of all stripes and configurations.

I speak to this history not to dishearten us, but to stoke our imaginations of the better future we can and will create together.

Fascists and patriarchal people are not going to win the future, but the next few years will be a rough ride.

The only silver lining from all of their destruction, incompetence, and malice is that we get to rebuild everything they are breaking on the other side. We can build it better, we can build it right this time.

Let’s tax billionaires out of existence, let’s make massive investments in community prosperity and creating spaces of collective purpose, not profit.

We can do this - hold the vision and do not let those spiteful hags diminish what we KNOW is possible and WORTH fighting for.

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