ABSTRACT

A diverse body of geographic work on women’s spatial behavior and its relationship to the demands of combining waged labor and domestic responsibilities has developed with the widespread paid employment of women with young children. How child care arrangements fit into this overall picture of women’s geographies has been approached from different perspectives, most notably with a concern for the equitable provision of child care services, and the reduction of logistical difficulties faced by women as they commute to work. However, the agenda of study has broadened as conventional spatial constraint models informing early research have been rethought. Initial descriptions of women’s spatial activity, as they juggled the responsibilities of multiple roles in the context of urban land-use patterns predicated on the physical and social separation of home and work, tended to obscure the human agency of women as they responded to economic and social change. More recently, empirical work has shown women as active shapers of their social and geographical worlds, and has also challenged an uncritical acceptance of such analytic dichotomies as the public and the private, work and home, which have been important in informing analyses of women’s spatial activity. This chapter offers a perspective on child care which focuses on the informal, culturally sanctioned solutions to child care needs that women create as they respond to the rapid changes of economic and social restructuring which cast them as wage workers as well as mothers. The approach takes particular account of the active agency of mothers, rather than emphasizing spatial constraints, and draws on their own interpretations of their child care strategies.