Feminism and the Politics of Childhood

“Women and children” often appear as a single population needing protection. When resources tighten, their interests can instead be made to compete. Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley’s edited collection refuses to choose between these frames. It asks how children’s agency, inequalities among adults and the labor sustaining interdependent lives can become visible without deciding either group’s interests in advance.

The book brings feminism, childhood studies and activist knowledge into dialogue. Its editors are not joint authors of every chapter, and contributors do not speak with one theoretical voice. Arguments, interviews and empirical research move from tense encounters between gender and generation, through the work of sustaining life, to political projects and movement building. Relations and conflicts become subjects of inquiry rather than obstacles to an assumed natural alliance.

Dependence does not make one homogeneous group

The introduction challenges the merging of women and children into a dependent category. This can cast both as lacking political judgment and needing male protection, while obscuring adult women’s power over children. Children have wishes, work and organizing practices of their own; women cannot be reduced to delivery systems for children’s welfare. Separating the categories need not deny interdependence. It makes differences within that relationship discussable.

Childhood studies consequently challenges feminism’s own assumptions. A critique of gender essentialism may still treat adulthood as naturally competent and childhood as incomplete socialization. The editors ask how people are made into children and adults, and how these boundaries vary with class, place and history. This is not a claim that ages are indistinguishable. It questions whether a difference should automatically determine whose account matters.

Forms of knowledge also distribute authority. The introduction describes an effort to bring academic, practical and movement knowledge into reciprocal conversation rather than use activists only as research material. The collection’s varied forms therefore matter politically. Scholarship concerned with rights can reproduce hierarchy if academic qualifications alone determine who may define its questions.

Child protection cannot be financed by invisible labor

Susana Borda Carulla’s chapter on community childcare homes in Bogotá makes the problem institutional. The arrangements she examines designate community mothers as volunteers while requiring compliance with public childcare, nutrition and administrative standards. Child protection carries powerful moral and legal authority, while carers must struggle to have their activities recognized as work.

The designation changes who pays. Calling sustained labor a voluntary contribution can secure women’s availability without equivalent recognition of wages, social protection or retirement needs. Carers are not an external obstacle to children’s rights: their conditions help determine whether care can continue. The chapter traces organizing and legal change; its historical arrangements should not be presented as the present condition of all Colombian childcare.

Claudia’s struggle to obtain food specified in the children’s menu complicates an equally reductive picture of uniformly selfless, victimized carers. Borda Carulla records disputes over resources within the association and differences in carers’ household finances. Inadequate funding, diversion of resources, oversight and family survival cannot collapse into one moral story. Taking labor rights seriously does not mean overlooking what children actually receive, or assuming all carers occupy identical positions.

The case reconnects apparently competing claims through shared material arrangements. If children obtain services only because another group lacks reliable remuneration, the institution has not resolved dependence; it has hidden costs inside women’s obligations. Conversely, recognizing workers’ rights must include service availability and children’s opportunities to express needs. Adult advocacy should not automatically become the child’s own voice.

The collection itself remains within that problem of representation. The editors acknowledge the absence of child contributors; even some children’s movements enter through adults’ writing. Bringing two fields together does not mean everyone concerned has participated. This limitation leaves readers with a demanding question: who is discussed, who can change the agenda, and who supplies the time and labor needed to establish a dialogue?

The open-access book can be read alongside Essential Labor to compare care’s public importance with its privatized costs. Revolutionary Mothering asks what collective childrearing can change in resources and authority, beyond praising women’s willingness to give. Together these routes shift the question from which group should come first toward institutions that can sustain both.