Strengthening the Case for Policies to Support Caregiving

Abstract

W omenhavemade impressive gains in the past forty-five years. But progress toward family-friendly social policies has been exceptionally slow. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive child-care bill only to have Richard Nixon veto it after concerted lobbying by antifeminists and right-wingers. It took until 1993 just to get the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gave workers in large companies up to twelve weeks of unpaid job-protected leave. Yet nearly half of American workers are ineligible for this leave, andmany of those eligible fail to take the full period because they can’t afford it. By contrast, every other wealthy country now guarantees more than twelve weeks of paid leave to new mothers. Demands for better work-family policies have been growing. In February 2016, the Pentagon, which already runs the best affordable and universal child-care system in the country, announced that women in the military will get twelve weeks paid maternity leave. New York State and the District of Columbia may soon join California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, along with more than a dozen cities, in mandating some form of paid family leave. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business did not create this momentum. In fact, the article on which the book was based generated considerable criticism for focusing on issues facing elite white women and neglecting the caregiving dilemmas of men, along with the distinctive work-life challenges facing minorities and low-income workers. But since then Slaughter has mined the work of pioneering work-life scholar-activists such as Ellen Bravo, Heather Boushey, and Joan Williams