Jonathan Cohn's devastating piece on the inadequacies of American day care in The New Republic does exactly what good muckraking investigative journalism should do—it makes you ask why on earth we let this continue. As Cohn says, other countries (notably France) have safe, well-regulated, subsidized, affordable daycare for all. In contrast, daycare in the U.S. is expensive ($15,000 a year per infant on average) and of shockingly low quality. Child care workers are paid less than parking lot attendants, many are required to have little or no safety training. The anchor of Cohn's article is a horrific story about a group of children caught in a fire when their caretaker left to go shopping with kids asleep in the house and a pan of oil on the stove.

My knee-jerk reaction was to wonder where the hell the left in general, and feminists in particular, are on this issue.

This is a massive, dangerous, crushing problem that affects the lives of the vast majority of mothers in the United States. Again, one wants to ask—where are the feminists?

The simple answer to that question is that, though their success has been limited, feminists are, and have been, right where they should be on this issue. Second-wave feminism strongly supported child care reform. The National Organization for Women actually called for free 24-hour child care for all. More practically, liberal feminist groups helped to put together and lobby for the 1971 Child Development Act (CDA), which would have established federally funded community centers with a sliding fee scale based on income. CDA was a relatively modest program given the need, but it had broad support not only from feminists, but from advocates for the poor, trade unions, and employers who wanted to reduce absenteeism. However, as Cohn notes in his article, despite passing the Senate 63 to 17, President Nixon vetoed the bill.