Abstract

"'Kentucky Fried Children': For-Profit Child Care and the Politics of Family Policy in the 1970s"

Julia Fournier, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (julia.fournier4@gmail.com)

When President Nixon vetoed a landmark universal day care bill in 1971, he declared victory in a battle over the American family—but the war over child care policy was far from over. By the time Congress revisited the issue in 1975, however, the political terrain had shifted: for-profit providers had expanded rapidly and were now organizing to demand inclusion as recipients of federal subsidies.

This paper explores how the claims of small-scale proprietors and the visibility of national chains were repurposed by policymakers and activists to advance competing visions of the state’s role in family life. Child welfare advocates and activists on the left insisted that the profit motive undermined quality and demanded that Congress limit its support to public and nonprofit providers. Entrepreneurs like KinderCare founder Perry Mendel countered that efficiency and flexibility made private providers better suited to meet families’ needs than bureaucratic programs. Meanwhile, representatives of smaller operators organized to testify before Congress, protesting their exclusion from proposed subsidies and defending private enterprise in the language of parental choice and fairness.

The clash of these perspectives generated a new policy terrain: federal childcare debates were no longer simply about whether government should act on behalf of working mothers and their children, but whether private providers should be recognized as legitimate recipients of public support. Ultimately, the growing visibility and advocacy of proprietary providers had two key effects: first, they deepened divisions within an already fragile coalition backing federal involvement in childcare; second, they offered conservative strategists a new line of attack, as they claimed that federal intervention would suffocate a thriving private sector and restrict parental choice. Together, these developments helped catalyze a turn away from public solutions for working parents and toward a vision of childcare as a consumer good.