...women were utterly dependent on men.

The conditions you describe are also tied to those halcyon days of yesteryear.

The child care dilemma directly relates to the chronic underpayment of women for "women's work". Nursing, teaching, housekeeping and child care were either "free" (unpaid) or paid so little that a woman might be able to support herself, maybe, in a hand-to-mouth kind of way, but certainly not a family. It has been an effective way to keep women busy and productive, yet personally poor.

Paying for child care is like paying for anything else. You get what you pay for. We don't want to pay much, so the quality is spotty, and talented people can't wait to move on.

The solution? Convince women to return to doing it for "free", that is, to pay for it with the most valuable currency we have, the only thing we can't recoup: our lives. Where's the pension? Where are the matching funds for the retirement account? Where's the health insurance, the 40-hour week (or even the 70-hour week), the paid vacation, the training and support? Why is this work less valuable than playing professional sports? Please don't tell me how the pool of people who can do it is so large, and then turn around and tell me the work is so priceless it should be done for no price at all. Women's work is too worth something. Mothers' Day cards are very nice, but they won't pay for the hip replacement or the heating bill when we're old. The realization that it's dangerous to depend too much on men to take care of us drives women into the workplace just as much as economic need.

I stayed home. I'm not sorry. But I was raised in the wild by nuns. They used to turn out suckers like me all the time. Nurses and teachers have organized now. Child care workers would profit by their example. Child care has never been free; its cost has merely been hidden.