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Patrick W. ONeil| The Fayetteville Observer

The nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court has reignited the debate over womens ability to balance motherhood and career. The Christian right quickly made Barrett an icon, praising her for raising seven children while still achieving her professional goals. Meanwhile, commentators on the left argued that Barretts work-life equilibrium was out of reach for single mothers, poor mothers, and people facing chronic illnesses.

The debate Barrett evokes goes back at least to the famous 1978 cover of Ms. Magazine, which depicted a woman torn between a briefcase in one hand and a child clinging to her other hand, asking, Can Women Really Have It All? The question seems somehow both a relic of the early Womens Movement and an albatross hanging around our collective necks: Today we might well update it to ask, Can Women Really Have It All, and Have We Seriously Not Answered This Question Yet?

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But what is surprising is how little effort America has put into ensuring that women could have it all and how close we came, 50 years ago, to doing so.

In its 1966 Statement of Purpose, the National Organization for Women (NOW) defined the feminist agenda as bringing women into the decision-making mainstream of American political, economic and social life. Since then, Americans have indeed forged a national consensus that women should, like Barrett, be able to attain the highest levels of American social and political life.

But no matter how far women climb, motherhood remains a problem: It forces women out of the workforce in their 20s and 30s, just as their careers are getting going just as they would be joining law firms, putting together tenure packets or clerking for Supreme Court Justices. Some studies suggest, indeed, that motherhood accounts for much, albeit not all, of the gender pay gap. There are women who have the resources to withstand this setback Barrett seems to have relied on her aunt for childcare but many do not.

The founders of NOW proposed a simple, obvious solution: Have the government provide child care. True equality, they knew, was impossible until women could get back to work after having children. To that end, they proposed a (free) nationwide network of child-care centers, which, they said, would make it unnecessary for women to retire completely from society until their children are grown.

It almost happened. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act with overwhelming bipartisan support: it cleared the Senate 63 to 17. The law would have offered childcare from infancy, with costs allocated according to need and income to all American parents. After initially backing the bill, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, in terms designed to draw right-wing culture warriors to his side in the 1972 election: He would not, he said, commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.

Nixons answer to whether women could have it all was an unambiguous No. Rather than letting the federal government provide child-care, Nixons family-centered approach left childcare where it had always been. Women who could afford it would pay others to look after their children; working women with helpful family members would remain dependent on them; and the majority of women would have to perform the same calculation many families do today, weighing the expense of day-care costs against their own career ambitions.

What did the Womens Movement accomplish? In cultural terms, it was gangbusters: My students at Methodist University universally agree that women should have every opportunity to do whatever they want; and theres no way that would have been true 50 years ago. It also did important work removing political and social barriers to equality, inspiring government actions to allow married women to have credit cards and access to abortion, and mandating their inclusion in educational ventures. But it failed to get government to put its money where its mouth was: it failed to give women material opportunities to achieve equality.

Amy Coney Barrett is a product of the same culture wars that kept Nixon in office and elected Donald Trump, and conservatives would be proud to say that she exemplifies a family-centered approach to childcare. But the keystone to real gender equality the kind of equality that would let women have children without paying a price at work was not family-centered; it could only be government-provided. Barrett is proof of what Americans decided almost 50years ago, when they reelected Nixon after he vetoed free, accessible childcare for all Americans.

Can women have it all? Amy Coney Barrett is Americas answer: Some can.

Patrick W. ONeil is associate professor of history at Methodist University and chairman of the universitys History Department.

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Judge Barrett, and why non-Supreme Court nominees can't have it all - The Fayetteville Observer