ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overall assessment of child care, work schedule, and parental leave policies in the United States (US). US policies concerning child care, work schedules, and parental leave do less than those elsewhere to help reduce the strains employed women with children encounter in meeting both their paid work and family responsibilities. Work-family policies in the US should be placed in the broader context of research findings about the effects of employment per se on lives of women who are married or have children. The potential positive effects on women of good work-family policies rather than employment per se has begun to be investigated only recently. During the mid- and late 1970s, alternative work schedules emerged as a popular work-family policy issue. Feminism has had an ambivalent relationship to the work-family reform movement. After the setback to the child care advocacy campaign in the early 1970s, flexible work schedules emerged as the next focal policy issue.
