Perspectives on Political Appointments : Who Did We Think Tended Our Children? : The lower class has always been exploited; it won’t change until we elevate child care to the skilled labor that it is.

Just who do the American people imagine have taken care of this nation’s middle- and upper-class children for the last two centuries? Waves of immigrant women have been America’s baby-sitters. The hours were long, the wages subsistence. Since few American-born women would take the jobs, the care of wealthy children--inside their homes--fell to African-American and immigrant women who had few other economic alternatives. It is they who allowed American men to work--without worrying about child care--and for their wives to immerse themselves in volunteer and reform activities.

Chinese men built our railroads, Mexican men grew our food, Polish men slaughtered cattle and the wives of nearly all immigrant groups took care of the offspring of the families who owned the railroads, the slaughter houses, the farms and the factories. How else could middle- and upper-class women of the early 20th Century have gained higher education, pioneered in the professions and sustained their reform work? When women fought for suffrage, campaigned for factory regulations and public health services for working-class women, crusaded against lynching and created the welfare institutions that absorbed the casualties of capitalistic society, they exploited legal or illegal immigrants to care for their homes and children.

Few cared that wealthy ladies exploited poor women until women became potential appointees for high-level government positions. But a child-care crisis has been brewing for the last half-century as women poured into the labor force. Most Americans, however, have been in denial about who changes the diapers. Does anyone else remember that the three demands of the 50,000 feminists who marched in August, 1970, in New York included legal abortion, equal pay and child care?

Kimba Wood has been wronged by gross cowardice on the part of the President. She broke no law by hiring an undocumented worker when it was legal to and for whom she paid taxes. Bill Clinton, worried more about public relations than justice, squandered a rare opportunity to instruct the American people about the differences between right and wrong.

Women all over the country are asking whether a man, nominated for attorney general, would have been asked about his child-care arrangements. Maybe. But he probably would have scratched his head and said he’d have to ask his wife.

The outrage against Zoe Baird was fueled by class resentment, xenophobia and the pervasive belief that only mothers are responsible for the care for their children. Baird had the income to hire and pay legal workers decent wages, which Kimba Wood did. The problem of child care is not predominantly a problem of the rich, but of the poor. There are millions of working-class women--not just lawyers--who are also desperately seeking child care. They, however, often opt for the cheaper alternative of bringing their child to the home of an undocumented care-giver. Exploitation of women by other women is built into our chaotic “system” of child care. Women get blamed for child care, whatever their class--as wealthy mothers, working women or illegal child-care workers.

Our nation has turned into one large consciousness-raising group. The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings pushed so-called “women’s issues” to the center of national politics. Anita Hill lost the battle but started the war. The William Kennedy Smith and Michael Tyson trials exposed the complicated problem of date rape. The Tailhook scandal revealed that although the military fear the presence of gays and lesbians, they are perfectly comfortable with the sexual abuse of women.

But it is child care that is the linchpin of family and work life. If the President had supported Wood, he could have grabbed the nation’s attention and exposed the magnitude of the child-care crisis in the United States. If many potential female appointees for high office have hired illegal aliens, it is because undocumented workers are among the few who will labor for subsistence wages at work still classified by the immigration service as unskilled labor.

But caring for children requires exquisite patience and extraordinary skills. Feminists used to quip that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be the 11th article in the Bill of Rights. When men agree that child care is the responsibility of both parents and society, child care will be reclassified as skilled work, wages will rise and lo and behold, the government will ensure high quality care for the nation’s children.