Murphy's Law
Hey, what's with this Democratic senator posting about working mothers who "outsource" childcare to "strangers"?
Howdy! This is a mid-week post for paid subscribers! I’ll be back Sunday with the free edition.
While campaigning against a bill that would expand child care to poor families in 1989, anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly sent a scathing letter to conservative lawmakers.
The bill, Schlafly argued, “discriminates against mothers who take care of their own children and taxes them in order to subsidize those who use stranger care.”
It was a neat rhetorical twofer, suggesting that working mothers do not care for their children, and denigrating daycare workers as “strangers.” That second smear wasn’t just rude; it came at the peak of the Satanic Panic, a false (and sometimes life-ruining) conspiracy theory about ritual child abuse in daycare centers. Like the contemporary child-trafficking hoaxes Pizzagate and QAnon, the Satanic Panic was politically useful for the right. Emerging as mothers were increasingly joining the workforce, the Satanic Panic threatened the trend toward women’s independence by describing a field of workers (mostly women) as potentially evil “strangers” while suggesting that working mothers (never fathers) were abandoning their children to potential abuse.
Schlafly is dead (she was revealed later in life to have hired domestic help and nannies while pursuing her career) but her argument endures. It’s a scare-tactic with staying power, shedding or taking on Satanic connotations depending on its audience, but never deviating from its core claim that mothers belong in the home and out of the paid workforce.
Anyway, here’s a tweet from a Democratic senator last week: