Yvette Cooper, in her campaign literature, claims: “I delivered Sure Start – my proudest achievement of the last Labour government.” Sure Start was supposed to “eradicate poverty within a generation”, although, as several eminent academics pointed out, how and why this was going to happen was always unclear. In the event, very little has changed as a result of the money spent on it. The expected gains, in poverty reduction, intellectual improvement of the children who attended, and increased employment of women, simply did not happen. It is a much more complex affair to bring about major shifts in poverty, education and employment, and Sure Start was always a feelgood, headline-grabbing solution. Universal childcare and education need fundamental reorganisation to bring them up to continental standards.

Instead, Sure Start was another add-on, and not embedded in nursery education nor systematically linked to regular childcare for working parents, so it was easily dismantled, as Ed Balls later admitted. All those years of Labour government served mostly to entrench costly private childcare for most working parents, a situation now made even worse by the Tory government’s botched attempts to offer free “nursery care” – whatever that means – within an unresponsive privatised system. At least Jeremy Corbyn is asking some critical questions about what universal childcare means, questions one wishes other leadership candidates would ask, instead of drawing on past failures and presenting them as triumphs.

Helen Penn

Professor emerita, East London University

• The Guardian endorses Yvette Cooper because “a female leader would be a plus in itself” (Editorial, 14 August). But Labour women lead the surge for Corbyn: 61% put him as their first choice, compared with 48% of men, according to a YouGov survey. Corbyn’s anti-austerity, anti-war, pro-welfare, labour rights and environment programme rides on a wave of local campaigns, many started by women – against hospital and library closures, welfare cuts, zero-hours contracts, evictions, deportations, deaths in police custody, the mass rape of children, and the arms trade. Only 25% of women supported the Iraq war, but most female MPs, including Cooper, voted for it. Austerity is sexist, attacking carers first of all. Cuts in wages and welfare have targeted women as waged workers in caring and public-service jobs, and as unwaged workers deprived of services. In 90% of families, the primary carer is a woman. Corbyn offers women 50% of his shadow cabinet, plus free childcare and the “recognition and valuing” of women’s unremunerated caring work.

As secretary of state for work and pensions in 2009, Cooper abolished income support and extended Labour’s infamous work-capability assessment for sick and disabled people. The money that recognised unwaged caring work, and enabled mothers to leave violent men, and disabled people to live independent lives is now gone or under threat. Professor Alison Wolf has attacked as a “betrayal of feminism” the “obsession” with women in boardrooms or in parliament while the poorly paid female shift workers on whom “golden skirts” depend are ignored. Better men against sexist austerity than women for it.

Selma James and Nina Lopez

Global Women’s Strike