Child Development Group of Mississippi, “A Letter to you from Tom Levin”

“A Letter to you from Tom Levin”

Child Development Group of Mississippi
Newsletter #3 [1965]

A letter to all those who have made CDGM possible –

Dear friends,

This summer in Mississippi we have built upon the struggles of passed years. We built CDGM upon the ahes of churches where poor people spoke out for equality. We built CDGM upon the bodies of Negro and white workers for the poor who were killed because they would not stay quietly at home to live in peace with injustice. We built CDGM upon the hunger and humiliation of men and women who were not allowed to work at a decent job before they would not give up being free. We built upon hundreds of years of the suffering and courage of mothers and fathers throughout the state of Mississippi who wanted something human and decent for their children and themselves. If we are proud of what we have done we must remember that we could not have schools run by the poor people, schools with black and white working together, if a place in history had not been won for us by brave men and women before this summer – men and women who said loudly and clearly “All Men Must Be Free.” We have a large debt to these brave people of the “Movement.” We can only pay it by never being satisfied until all men in Mississippi have political, social, and economic freedom. 

Ellen Reese, “But Who Will Watch the Children? State and Local Campaigns to Improve Child Care Policies”

“But Who Will Watch the Children? State and Local Campaigns to Improve Child Care Policies”

Ellen Reese

Intimate Labors Conference, UCSB, 2007 [PDF]

Note to readers: This paper is a draft of Chapter 5 from a book manuscript, They Say
Cutback, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Reform Activism in an Era of Retrenchment. This
book focuses on struggles over welfare policies after passage of the 1996 federal welfare
reform act in two states–California and Wisconsin– and the two largest cities in those
states. As I explain in an earlier chapter, the information for this chapter comes from
various sources, including participant observation, interviews with activists,
organizational literature, and media coverage of relevant events.

Although the 1996 welfare reform act largely cut back government assistance to
low-income families, it led to expansions in publicly subsidized child care.1 Putting poor
mothers to work meant that someone else would have to take care of their children. In
1997, an estimated 3.5 million additional children were expected to need subsidized child
care due to the implementation of welfare reform, on top of the 7 million already
receiving it.2 To ease the transition from welfare to work, politicians at all levels invested
to expand and improve the subsidized child care system. Congress authorized more
federal funds for child care for low-income families through the Child Care and
Development Fund and TANF.3 Head Start programs were also expanded.4 President
Clinton’s 1997 White House Conference on Child Care also drew attention to the need to
expand and improve the nation’s child care system and to enhance child care workers’
training and earnings. State legislatures and local governments also increased their
investments in child care to help meet the growing demand for these services.5 By 2002,
33 states were spending more in state and federal funds on child care than on cash
assistance for poor families.6 Despite these increases, subsidized child care programs
were insufficient to meet the demand for them, which was growing as maternal
employment increased and real wages stagnated and declined for most Americans.7

Martha A. Ackelsberg, “Organizing Women: First Steps”

“Organizing Women: First Steps”

Martha A. Ackelsberg

excerpt from Free Women of Spain: anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women [1991]

Lucia and Mercedes were instrumental in beginning Mujeres Libres in Madrid. Amparo joined them on the editorial board of Mujeres Libres and later became active in Barcelona as the director of Mujeres Libres’ education and training institute, the Casal de la Dona Treballdora. All three were spurred to action by their prior experiences in male-dominated organizations of the anarcho-syndicalist movement. But the groundwork for the organization was also being laid by women around the country, many of whom were virtually unaware of one another’s existence.

In Barcelona, for example, Soledad Estorach, who was active both in her ateneo and in the CNT, had also found existing movement organizations inadequate to engage women workers on equal terms with men.

In Catalona, at least, the dominant position was that men and women should both be involved. But the problem was that the men didn’t know how to get women involved as activists. Both men and most women thought of women in a secondary status. For most men, I think. The ideal situation would be to have a companera who did not oppose their ideas, but whose private life would be more or less like other women. They wanted to be activists twenty-four hours a day-and in that context, of course, it’s impossible to have equality …. Men got so involved that the women were left behind, almost of necessity. Especially, for example, when he would be taken to jail. Then she would have to take care of the children, work to support the family, visit him in jail, etc. That, the companeras were very good at! But for us, that was not enough. That was not activism!!!

Women’s Work Study Group, “Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”

“Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”
Women’s Work Study Group
Radical America Volume 10, Number 2 [March-April 1976]

HISTORY: WOMEN’S WORK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
Women’s work and the development of American capitalism can
be examined in three historical phases: the pre-capitalist phase
prior to 1820; the phase of competitive capitalism between 1820
and 1890; and the monopoly capitalist phase from 1890 to the present.
In this section each period is briefly described in terms of the
organization of production and the implications of the organization
of production for the lives of women.

Patricia Hill Collins, “Work, Family and Black Women’s Oppression”

“Work, Family and Black Women’s Oppression”
Patricia Hill Collins
Chapter 3, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 2000. Second edition.

 

Honey, de white man is the de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find
out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but
we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and
tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t
tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so
fur as Ah can see. —Zora Neale Hurston, 1937

With these words Nanny, an elderly African-American woman in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, explains Black women’s “place” to her young, impressionable granddaughter. Nanny knows that being treated as “mules uh de world” lies at the heart of Black women’s oppression. Thus, one core theme in U.S. Black feminist thought consists of analyzing Black women’s work, especially Black women’s labor market victimization as “mules.” As dehumanized objects, mules are living machines and can be treated as part of the scenery. Fully human women are less easily exploited. As mill worker Corine Cannon observes, “Your work, and this goes for white people and black, is what you are . . . your work is your life” (Byerly 1986, 156). 

Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life”

“Right of Death and Power over Life”
Michel Foucault
Part five, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, 1978. [PDF]

 

 

For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to “dispose” of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without “directly proposing their death,” he was empowered to “expose their life”: in this sense, he wielded an “indirect” power over them of life and death. But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign? In any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dis symmetrical one. The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.

Susan Thistle, “Support for Women’s Domestic Economy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”

“Support for Women’s Domestic Economy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”

Susan Thistle

Chapter 2, From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work [2006]

To fully grasp the striking changes that took place in women’s lives and the
American economy in the last half of the twentieth century, we need to step
back a bit from the present. In order to see the underlying connections between
these events, and their deeper causes, we need a larger perspective. To understand
why support for women’s work in the home has come apart in recent
years, for example, we must first gain a clear sense of what once held support
for such work together. 

Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the family”

“Communism and the family”

Alexandra Kollontai

from Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai [1920]

Women’s role in production: its effect upon the family

Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”. No wonder that working women are beginning to think these questions over. Another fact that invites attention is that divorce has been made easier in Soviet Russia. The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars issued on 18 December 1917 means that divorce is, no longer a luxury that only the rich can afford; henceforth, a working woman will not have to petition for months or even for years to secure the right to live separately from a husband who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness and uncouth behaviour. Divorce by mutual agreement now takes no more than a week or two to obtain. Women who are unhappy in their married life welcome this easy divorce. But others, particularly those who are used to looking upon their husband as “breadwinners”, are frightened. They have not yet understood that a woman must accustom herself to seek and find support in the collective and in society, and not from the individual man.

Angela Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”

“The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”

Angela Davis

Chapter 13 of Women, Race and Class [1981]

The countless chores collectively known as “housework” – cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping etc. – apparently consume some three to four thousand hours of the average housewife’s year.^[1] As startling as this statistic may be, ir does not even account for the constant and unquantifiable attention mothers must give to their children. Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending toil as a housewife rarely occasions expressions of appreciation within her family. Housework, after all, is virtually invisible: “No one notices it until it isn’t done – we notice the unmade bed, not the scrubbed and polished floor.”^[2] Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative – these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

David Hilliard, “Child Development Center”

“Child Development Center”

David Hilliard

from The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Program, 2008. [PDF]

Child Development Center
In the two years since the Child Development Center began, the staff
working with the children have had the unique opportunity of observing
children in their early stages of development in a communal lifestyle and
they have been very conscious of the profound effects it has had on the children’s
development.

Because of the racism that is prevalent in American society, there has been
no previous study of the Black child’s development at what is termed the K pre•
school age and younger. And because communalism is the opposite paragon
of the American family there are no resources to study the development of
children in a communal lifestyle.

Ericka Huggins, “The Liberation Schools, the Children’s House, the Intercommunal Youth Institute and the Oakland Community School”

“The Liberation Schools, the Children’s House, the Intercommunal Youth Institute and the Oakland Community School”
Ericka Huggins, 2007. [PDF]

The Oakland Community School (OCS) was one of the most well-known
and well-loved programs of the Black Panther Party. Point Five of the Black
Panther Party’s original 1966 Ten Point Platform and Program, emphasized
the need to provide an education that, among other things, taught African
American and poor people about their history in the United States. To this
end, the Oakland Community School became a locale for a small, but powerful
group of administrators, educators, and elementary school students whose
actions to empower youth and their families challenged existing public
education concepts for black and other poor and racially marginalized

communities during the 1970s and 1980s.

Valerie Bryson, “Production and reproduction”

“Production and Reproduction”
Valerie Bryson

Chapter Eight, Marx and Other Four-Letter Words (2005)

My starting point in this chapter is the classic Marxist theory of
historical materialism: the idea that the basis of human society,
the key to understanding its history and future potential, lies in
the production and reproduction of material life. While accepting
the value of this approach, I also use feminist theory to argue that
‘malestream’ theorists have interpreted production and reproduction
in unhelpfully narrow ways to produce an analysis which is not only
male based but also male biased. I argue in favour of an expanded
notion of (re)production that includes the socially necessary work
disproportionately performed by women; I conclude that without
such an expansion we can neither understand existing society nor

develop effective strategies for changing it.

Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, “Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001″

“Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001”

Marcy Whitebook, Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley (2002)

View the full report here.

Introduction
In 2001 and 2002, over $100 million dollars will be spent to augment the earnings
of child care teachers and providers across the United States. These financial rewards
will come in the form of annual stipends, health insurance coverage, and, for a small
number, targeted, sustained pay increases.  Driven in part by a robust economy in the late
1990s, combined with a growing demand for child care services and a shortage of trained
child care workers, many states, including California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina,
Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, have initiated or expanded publicly-funded
programs focused on building a more skilled and stable child care workforce.  Initiatives
are also being developed in Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Additionally, workers in Head Start, Department of Defense and some pre-kindergarten
early childhood programs are benefiting from salary enhancements built into those
delivery systems (Whitebook & Eichberg, 2002; Montilla, Twombly & De Vita, 2001).
While most child care teachers and providers continue to earn poverty-level
wages, and many beneficiaries of the above-mentioned compensation initiatives still are
woefully underpaid, there is little argument within the child care field, and a slowly
dawning awareness among policy makers, that improved services for young children in
the U.S. require better compensation for the child care workforce.  This level of
acknowledgment was not present a decade ago, even within the child care community.  In
many communities, the focus is not on whether to raise wages, but on how best to do so,
and a great deal of experimentation and debate is underway (Whitebook & Eichberg,
2002).