Until I was about twenty-six I was a political naif. Before that I had gone to plenty of protests against the Vietnam War, for fair housing, and in support of women’s liberation[1]. But I hadn’t tried to make any concrete changes, working through the local political process. This is another kind of cultural immersion story: the culture of American politics.
In the fall of 1970 I had just returned to Palo Alto, California, after one year in Minneapolis doing a teaching job at the University of Minnesota with my newly minted Masters in Early Childhood Education. My husband was starting law school at Stanford University so we moved back to our alma mater. I got a job with Westinghouse Learning Corporation writing “Teaching-Learning Units” for an individualized elementary math curriculum (Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs–PLAN). Most of us were unemployed teachers. Since the unemployment rate was 6% in 1971 with a 5% inflation rate–stagflation– teachers came cheap.
Married, but with no children yet, I thought ‘what can I do with my spare time to further the Women’s Liberation Movement?‘ Somebody I knew encouraged me to join a new community group pressing for child care centers so women could work more easily. 
There were initially about 20 people coming: single and young married moms with toddlers, child development people, sisters in the struggle without children, and a couple of New Left men. We named the group Child Care Now! Later we condensed down to about a dozen hard core activists. Somewhere along the way the women in the group also formed a feminist consciousness raising group that met at a different time.
I had already dipped into the childcare movement before we left Palo Alto the first time. In 1969 a young female undergraduate, a future elementary teacher, invited me to help set up and run a summer daycare program for the preschool children of women in graduate school at Stanford. My job was to supply a veneer of expertise with my master’s degree. We ran it as a parent coop in an old building slated for destruction. After the summer I moved to Minneapolis, but a group of parents formed to push Stanford to set up childcare programs. Here is the story. Today there are eight child care and after school programs on campus. But back then, there were none and women were just beginning to enter graduate programs, like law, physics, and medicine.
By 1970 there were a few state-funded preschool programs in California. Child Care Now decided to create a toddler childcare program, because it was not available in the city. We tried a variety of tactics. 
We held a “diaper-in” in the mayor’s office which got us a lot of local press about the issue. We located a small protestant church in a quiet neighborhood that was willing to let us use their classrooms during the week. It required a special use permit. We went door to door around the neighborhood to build support for the idea. Some NIMBYISM developed around traffic and parking, the usual complaints when anything but a single family home with a two car garage surfaces. The time for an initial zoning committee meeting came and I and another Child Care Now member attended. At that meeting was a lawyer for the neighborhood. He acted very friendly and said “Just give us one more week before the final zoning vote. I am sure I can convince the neighbors by then.” We agreed, feeling 
optimistic.
During that next week, the lawyer instead prepared a smear piece to take around the neighborhood for signatures, indicating that we were all communists. By the time of the final zoning meeting, he had a nice long list of neighbors opposed to the zoning variance. We lost by one vote. I burst into tears, as I was caught so unaware of this kind of lying betrayal. You might think that was the end of my foray into local politics. But you would be wrong. I learned an important lesson: a tactical loss may end in a strategic victory. Lying betrayal happens. Sometimes it backfires.
After the zoning vote and the resulting press, the liberal city council of this very prosperous city decided to revisit the issue. They identified a decommissioned elementary school with a large kindergarten room and small play yard. They voted to rent it to us for $1 per year. Because of the space, we decided to go with preschool age, not toddlers. We inherited small tables and chairs and some other furniture that I no longer remember. The yard was vacant of play equipment, but had some pergola-like areas to guard against full sun. We set about creating a childcare program with $0 for budget. I found spare parts like car tires and pallets and sand to build a kind of “adventure playground” coming into vogue at the time and resurfacing recently.
We named the center Sojourner Truth Child Development Center, publicized an open house for parents, and charged relatively low fees on a sliding fee scale. Our teachers eventually would be paid from fees and I continued to volunteer once a week. Child Care Now continued to lobby for funds to support infant and toddler programs. In 1972 Richard Nixon signed into law a new federal plan to send a portion of federal tax revenue to states and cities. Those more local entities were supposed to be better able to determine local needs than the federal bureaucracy. The revenue sharing program lasted from 1972 to 1986, when it was killed because of the increasing federal debt during the Reagan administration. Child Care Now testified at the community hearings on how to spend the money coming to Palo Alto. The city council appointed a childcare task force. Child Care Now had a couple of people on it. On Aug. 14th, 1973, the city council voted to accept the recommendation of the childcare task force to establish a nonprofit corporation to establish and run four new child care programs, including one for toddlers. The board would consist of 15 members: 8 parents of children using the center and 7 who were not. $100,000 was granted immediately from city funds and more would come through new revenue sharing money coming into Santa Clara County. Sojourner Truth was brought under its wing. In the fall of 1974 I moved back to Minneapolis.
In 1977 I returned for a visit with my toddler daughter to visit the new programs, especially the toddler program. 46 years later Sojourner Truth Child Development Center is still running.
[1] My favorite chant during these protests was “Women’s Liberation gonna get your mama, gonna get your sister, gonna get your girlfriend!”
Other states, other lives, other souls 