Childcare: People's Liberation (1970, sound)

[Music] I dropped out of high school to get married. I had to work to get married, you know, to save. And then I got married. I didn't like the work I was doing, you know. I was secretarial. That's about all they train you for anyway, right? So, you don't have much of a choice, right? That's my belief. You must think I'm oldfashioned, but a woman's job is at home. You got two or three kids, you should be home and watching those kids. That's all they say. That's all they say. But this is your job. These kids are yours. Why are they just ours? Cracks me up is that a husband can get dressed and go out, but a wife can't go to the without dragging three little kids with you. It's very hard to take children going shopping. Are you kidding? I go to the store and if I take 10 minutes too long, where were you? Why was it so crowded? But they could go to fishing tackle store and spend 10 hours there picking out this one little signaling thing without the kids. How can you pick out a dress and say, "Don't touch this and don't touch that. Don't touch this. Get over here. I don't have any time to myself. I can't. If I tell you about going to the bathroom, forget he won't even keep the kids out of the bathroom while I'm bathing. So, you know, how am I going to get out of the store? No, my husband does not think it's or think that it's every woman's job to do this. I'm not the only woman in the world that that did it. [Music] If we ever formed a union and got paid for all our jobs, you know, like I I don't have a minute's rest at all. I'm always with my children. I have no free time. I'm I'm quite tired by 9:00, so I usually go into bed myself. Very rarely that I stay late. I really have no free time. I don't know what I feel that sometimes I need something more. I don't know what it is. Just get out someday and like meet some friends for lunch or go visit someone without having the children all over you and you know maybe go to a show or something, you know, because I mean when you're you're stuck in the house all the time, you don't really need too many people. And uh it's hard. It's really hard. We're not close to the park, so we really more or less have to sit around in the street front of the door. And it's it's not good for the kids. They don't have anything to do. And it's not good for us to have to sit there all the time. It's terrible. But there's not to me there's not enough I want to say entertainment but there isn't enough things that they can do to make them grow with other children and like I said they really don't know what to do with themselves. There's nothing to do at all. You have to watch it that this park is filthy dirty. You have to watch his glance all over the park. constantly all over the parking. You can't even walk. It's dirty. They never sweep it up. Drug addicts hang out here. So, you got to watch the children that uh they uh don't pick anything up and put them in. Put it in their mouth. They love these two love to eat. It's amazing. They go I can't even bring them by the sand pit because they'll eat it. But I I think they should have something for children. I see these kids running around now. They're always in the park and they're always with their parents or with their parent, their mother. I've never in my life felt so lonely surrounded by people that were in exactly the same position I was in. A while back, they wanted to start a nursery, but you have to have all kinds of permits and you have to have this and that and u it just couldn't work out. And then on the other side, less than $20 a week to send a child to a nursery. So, you can't pay that kind of money. So, I think it would be a great idea if they had a day center here. Free child care center started meeting to be held October 28th, 8:00 p.m. Come with your friends and neighbors. We need space, equipment, we need ideas. We need ideas because we need child care center in Canc. This is going to turn out to be some monumental act. with all this space in the community that was not being used. Space in the health department, in the church. Yeah. The church has bingo, right? Monday nights, I think. And that's the only time they ever use that room. They'd rather leave it empty than let you use what's rightfully yours to use in the first place. And we went through all the channels and we still couldn't, you know, they wouldn't let us. They just wouldn't give us the space. We were really getting angry. And we knew that there was a storefront on the avenue that the city had taken over and it was all boarded up but the water was still, you know, running and we could sort of put the electricity on. We took down the boards and we had childcare the next day. It was all in the beginning brought in by donation. We got the workbench and things. His son was in the group in the beginning and he was willing to give us nails and some hammers and things for nothing. Um, someone They had a friend who donated brushes and we painted it. [Music] After we got the space, we all got together for a big meeting to see how we were going to run it. We figured out we'd each need to pay $8 a month and that includes a hot lunch, two snacks during the day, and all the supplies, you know, the crayons and the paint and the hammers and the nails, wood, you anything we want. And what we wanted to do was to have an exchange that we would be the teachers. We could have two people working in the morning and two in the afternoon for 5 days a week. We can make it. [Music] I'd like to go. In the beginning, we were all really afraid cuz I thought I'm not I'm not a teacher. You know, I don't know what to do with a lot of little children. And we talked about that at a lot of our meetings and everybody else felt the same way. What we found was that mostly it was just fear. And once we were doing it, it was real easy. If you can do a puzzle, you're a teacher. Now you can do a puzzle and you sit down and do a puzzle and the children come over and then you're you're what's called teaching. It's not a big mystery. [Music] That's where it's beautiful. One of the girls brought in the carbon copy. She said, "What do I do? I'm in the office." I said, "Well, bring home some of that carbon thing." I remember when I was a kid, I used to spend hours, you know, going over it and looking at the other side. It was fascinating. She did and it was a great success. And, you know, do what you are about. and you get 50 women who are doing something that they know and love and this is going to go over to the children. You find out that your own personality somehow or another is acceptable to children. You know that you don't have to pretend and you don't have to play those games with kids all the time. Well, the first time I came into the center, it was uh just to do some painting and help fix up. And at first I felt sort of funny. You know, men are always told that playing with children or changing diapers or stuff like that is uh a woman's role, but I was there and other other people were busy and I just changed the diapers a couple of times. You have to do it once, you know, you just change a diaper once and it's, you know, it's you learn it fast. And to see women as people is a step, but to see everybody as people is a revolution. Mostly what it felt like is that it was people's liberation. that it wasn't just daycare to get rid of your kids so you had time for your work, for what you had to do, but that it gave everybody something. It gave the kids brothers and sisters and a sense of caring about the other one's feelings and of learning that other children feel the way they do. They're much more open. They're much more able to to deal with things on by themselves without having to rely on adults. [Music] Hi, brother. [Music] When other children used to come over the house, she didn't want to share her toys. She could have an arm full of toys and as soon as she saw someone else pick up something that belonged to her, she would automatically drop everything and get very angry. Now when they come over, she offers them her toys. She shares her cookies and it makes me very happy because now she she knows how to get along with other children and she learned so much. You know, before I used to say, let's see who could keep quiet the longest, you know, and everything, but no, I don't know. I just I enjoy her more. [Music] She she comes home and she tells me, "Mommy, I love John. John, I you know, I love Janine." She names about 10 between five and 10 kids every day. Different ones, you know, that she's in love with now, you know, and she tells me they're her friends. You like me? For the first time, we found that we had had friends that that we weren't so lonely and there was like a community that felt like a community. The thing is that people really got to know each other and and they were able to depend on each other instead of only having depending on themselves. I'm seeing how we could work together and sort of take care of each other's needs. In this thing, we we were thinking about other things we needed and food was one of them. Everybody was sort of pissed off about the high prices of food in the supermarkets. We started a food co-op and it would save us almost half of the money that we spent and there's a free store now. And we began thinking of names like maybe we call ourselves a community workshop because it was really much much more than a school or a daycare center. Angie, you want to bring your So the daycare and and schools uh build relationships outside of its basic needs. What it does is it builds a community. It builds friendship. It builds an extended family. You know, I need that. No, he's express and we need child care for everyone. There just isn't hardly enough for women who work. And 43% of the women in this country work full-time. The public daycarees for what they're worth only take one out of 10 of the women who needs them. Some of us got together and demanded time off from our jobs so that we could cover and spend time in our daycare. Right now, that's really hard, especially since it's so hard even to find a job. The corporations and industry are saying that they're going to give child care to women. Huh? They just care about their profit. They don't care about children or what the child care is like. If we want to make our jobs better, they can always take away the child care. If we want to make the child care better, they can always take away the jobs. They're going to offer it and we should take it, but we have to control it. That's very important. We have to control it. We have to make it ours. I mean, for me, child care is a right. It's not a privilege. It's a right. We should have it everywhere. We should have it where we work. We should have it where we live. We should have it where we study. We should just have it everywhere. We need it everywhere. And the way anyone can start is if you find seven people, seven people can start exchanging children every day, you know, during the week or something like that. Once you have a group together, other people see it. As soon as, for instance, you can get a storefront, any place where you're visible or put a sign up, the need is so great that you will get a lot of people. And once you have that, you've got it. Because when you have people caring and really needing it, then you find the ways to get it. 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