Women’s Activism on Childcare in Italy and Denmark: The 1960s and 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s were a crucial time in Europe not only for the development of child care policies, but also for the framing of new ideals of care for children under six. Despite basic differences in their welfare regimes, Denmark and Italy illustrate how foundational these decades were in shaping understandings of what is good child care and how it should be provided. Looking from below, women's organisations emerge as key agents of these changes, by promoting models of care which departed from full-time motherly care, and by calling for public responsibility. Women organized within and outside party politics catalysed advocacy alliances around a challenge to the primacy assigned to motherly care, providing them with new frames. A crucial element of women’s organizations was the redefinition of the needs that child care should meet, in particular breaking down the idea that children's basic need to be cared for by their mothers clashed with mothers' needs or wishes to devote their time and energies to other activities (Kremer 2006). Following Fraser's (1989) analytical proposal for claimsmaking processes, women’s organisations’ claims on child care can be seen, in fact, as interventions in the political struggle over needs interpretation. While demanding public provisions for child care, they justifed their claims by referring to the needs of particular subjects, speaking on behalf of children, women (as mothers, as workers), or other categories (that is to say, families). These actors were thus at the same time asking for certain policy measures, and making claims for the recognition of the needs of certain social groups as legitimate political issues. Exploring the role of women's activism in shaping child care policies, this essay analyses the claims that women’s organisations addressed to public institutions on child care issues in Italy and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses in particular the place assigned to public, collective child care services in the broader framing of their claims (Bertone 2002, 2003). The actors analysed include women’s organisations and groups that identified political reform as a means to improve women’s situation and engaged in voicing claims for public measures regarding child care. They consist of the main autonomous women’s organisations, women’s organisations or units in political parties and trade unions, and groups of the new feminist movement taking the scene in the 1970s. With such a broad definition of women's activism, this essay shows how the distinction between organizing on the inside or outside of mainstream institutions needs to be questioned, since these boundaries get shifted and blurred in processes of claimsmaking (Bergman 2004; Randall and Waylen 1998). Based on extensive archival research and interviews with some of the protagonists, this essay investigates the process of construction of the claims. It shows how normative arguments on how public child care should be provided and the needs it should meet are the outcome of strategic choices, depending on the configuration of actors involved, on their goals and on the perceived opportunity structure.