JD Vance’s beautiful dark twisted fantasy
  September 8, 2026 Dearest Meteor readers, Today my older kid finally went to Official, Legit, Free School, also known as universal pre-k (and yes, my obsessive ass snagged a spot at aftercare). What should I do with the extra thousand dollars in my bank account each month?! Wrong answers only.  Speaking of government-funded childcare, today we’re examining a JD Vance-backed plan that could be good but…isn’t. Plus, a Lindsay Clancy reading list, and another reason to love Dolly Parton. Lunch is free, too!!! Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT’S GOING ONLabor of love: Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the White House was preparing a rule that’d give parents money to stay at home with their kids. For families under a certain income level, a stay-at-home parent could receive about $9,000 per child per year. Sounds great, right? Anyone who’s cared for a kid fulltime knows it’s no joke; the six weeks I was the sole caregiver for my older daughter were eye-opening. That sweet and satisfying but also isolating and exhausting period made it crystal-clear that the vaunted concept of “parental love” obscures the fact that the labor of raising a kid is, well, still labor. But the proposed draft, which may not need the approval of Congress, is decidedly not in this spirit. For one thing, the subsidy would only be available for married couples. And the Trump administration—specifically J.D. Vance, who has long denigrated daycare as “crap” and “a disaster” and praised stay-at-home parents (read: moms)—isn’t providing additional funding for this program. Rather, the plan is to steal from an existing, already underfunded federal program called the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes childcare for low-income parents so they can work or go to school. Right now, four out of five families receiving these subsidies are helmed by single working parents, most of them mothers. If this proposal is enacted, many of those families would lose benefits to the ones that Vance openly favors: married, 1950s-style families (unlike the Times, I will not be saying “traditional” because, well, they’re not!). The change could deepen the poverty of individual families and worsen the ongoing childcare crisis by depriving centers of money they depend on. The tragedy of this proposal is that it’s a twisted and extremely dark interpretation of a concept that feminists have been demanding for decades. The Wages for Housework movement—launched by Silvia Federici, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in 1972—argued that wives’ domestic work, including caring for children, was an unconscionable system of mass exploitation. “They say it is love,” Federici famously declared. “We say it is unwaged work.”  I FEEL THE ROBE-TUGS OF THOSE CHILDREN SO VISCERALLY. (VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS) Despite its name, the movement was not necessarily about calling for literal pay as much as demanding an awareness of how profoundly capitalism depends on the unpaid work of women. But WFH intersected with another movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s that was very much about dollars and cents: the welfare rights movement. Activists like Johnnie Tillmon, a Black single mother on welfare and a founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), spoke out against the invasive, “super-sexist” welfare system and reframed government support for caregivers as a guaranteed right—no strings attached. Notably, neither of these movements pitted stay-at-home moms against women who wanted to or had to work. Instead, they were about expanding all women’s ability to shape their own destinies; Tillmon called the women of the NWRO “the frontline troops of women’s freedom.” These women understood that mothers who worked inside and outside the home have a lot in common. And as for Vance’s policy: There are plenty of ways to support stay-at-home parents without screwing over working ones. By creating a government incentive for women to stay home with their children while penalizing working mothers at the same time, the Trump administration is trying to make us into enemies. One of the goals of Wages for Housework was precisely to undercut this artificial rivalry. They were “reconstructing a real solidarity among women,” Mariarosa Dalla Costa wrote in 1971. “A common solidarity against a common form of labor.” Or, if you prefer, Silvia Federici’s pithier rallying cry from 1974: “We are all housewives.” P.S. Dr. Federici spoke with Reshma Saujani for The Meteor back in 2021 about the care crisis and women’s “labor of love.” Check out the conversation here. AND:
ONE MORE THINGThe Lindsay Clancy case ended in a mistrial, but I can’t stop thinking about these devastating deaths and the mushroom cloud of cultural commentary around them. Here are some reads that have helped put this case in perspective for me:
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