ABSTRACT
I am delighted to be included as a discussant at this important symposium on child care in the 1990s. Let me say at the outset that if it were not for the availability of child care in the 1960s, I would probably not be a professional sociologist and demographer and thus would not be making this contribution. In 1960 — over 30 years ago — I entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, as a single mother with a 2-year-old daughter. The decision to do graduate study, and my selection of UNC, related directly to the availability of a child-care center on the campus — a rare, if not unique, service at that time. The center was set up primarily to assist married male students, whose employed wives were helping to put them through graduate school. In 1960 there were very few wives in graduate school who had children. I believe I was the only single mother using this service, and perhaps the only single mother in graduate school at UNC at the time.
