Quotes from Geraldine Youcha

American women have taken on nontraditional jobs in every war since they made musket balls in the Civil War, and after every war they have gone back home, but as a crane operator observed, "Women were different in World War II: They didn't want to go back home and many of them didn't. And if they did go back home, they never forgot, and they told their daughters, 'You don't have to be just a homemaker. You can be anything you want to be.

The single-parent family, far from being a modern problem, existed at close to today's level for much of this country's history—because of accidents, illness, and high mortality rates, rather than divorce. In 1930, there were more than three million female-headed households.)

IN WHAT IS TODAY a nearly forgotten social experiment, the federal government subsidized nationwide child care for working mothers of young children during World War II. It was the first time in the nation's history that day care for children who were not poor was supported by public funds.

From Colonial times to the present, children have lived with a bewildering variety of caretaking systems. Some, in the bosom of their families, have been looked after by women other than their mothers. Some have been herded into institutions or sent away from home or exposed to substitute mothers in one arrangement or another. America's historical amnesia has let the details of many of these arrangements slip into oblivion, forcing society to make a fresh start again and again.

In Chicago a social worker discovered that at the same time budgets were cut for the provision of milk to children, large dogs at the animal shelter were allotted more money for meals than a man on relief.