Child Care Options or California and the Fictions of Capital

Child Care Options: A Workplace Initiative for the 21st Century

Author: Margery Leveen Sher

Child Care Options presents the facts, the background information, and the special considerations involved in discussing and selecting on-site or near-site child care, as well as programs designed to deal with difficult child-care situations. As authorities in work/family relations, the authors share the firsthand knowledge and experience they have gained as consultants to such diverse groups as the Washington Post, American Labs, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Booknews

Provides information for businesses seeking to create and select child care alternatives and develop child care programs in the workplace. Places child care into the context of current and future demographic trends and discusses legal, financial, design, and management details of direct-service child care, including information specifically for small businesses. Appendices list corporate-sponsored child care programs, insurance carriers, licensing information, and architectural and playground resources. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface: The Earth Shifts: Babies 1, Football Game 0
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Child Care! What Does That Have to Do with Our Business?	1
Ch. 2	Child Care Choices: "Multitudes in the Valley of Decision"	21
Ch. 3	Decisions: "You Can Sleep on a Matter Before You Decide, Unless You Have a Competitor Who Doesn't Need the Sleep"	40
Ch. 4	A Child Care Center! What Are We Getting Into?	49
Ch. 5	Legal Issues: "The Good of the People Is the Chief Law"	67
Ch. 6	Finances: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Bottom Line	75
Ch. 7	Child Care Facility Design: More Than Building Codes	90
Ch. 8	Management: If We Do It, Who's Going to Run It?	111
Ch. 9	Special Tips: Nothing Succeeds Like Success	119
Ch. 10	A Note to Small Businesses	128
Ch. 11	"An Invasion of Armies Can Be Resisted, but Not an Idea Whose Time Has Come"	133
	Appendix A: Executive Summaries	149
	Appendix B: Partial Listings of Employer-Supported Child Care	159
	Appendix C: Child Care Center Liability Insurance Carriers	168
	Appendix D: Current Child Day Care Licensing Offices	169
	Appendix E: Resources for Playground Information	176
	Appendix F: A Sampling of Architectural Firms with Child Care Center Experience	177
	Appendix G: Resource Organizations	178
	Appendix H: Child Care Program Inventory (CCPI) Evaluation Criteria	179
	Appendix I: Application for Board of Directors	189
	Index	191

See also: Republic of Fear or Formations of the Secular

California and the Fictions of Capital

Author: George L Henderson

Between the frequently recounted events of the Gold Rush and the Great Depression stretches a period of California history that is equally crucial but less often acknowledged. In his fresh, synthetic consideration of these in-between years, George L. Henderson points specifically to the take-off of California's rural juggernaut between the 1880s and middle 1920s--the upward spiral of city bids for country dollars and rural bids for urban investments. These decades were salve for mining's risky finances yet groundwork for the chaotic 1930s. Moreover, Henderson argues that much like the two important periods which framed it, this era produced a cultural and literary apparatus that attempted to grapple with capital's machinations, if only to legitimate them in the end.

Central to California and the Fictions of Capital is a theory of how the circulation of capital wove itself into agriculture. The book asks why it mattered to capital that agriculture was based in Nature, and then explores the procedures through which images of Nature became central to capitalism's story of itself. What unique possibilities did Nature offer to circuits of capital and what was their role in suturing the urban and rural together? How did boom and bust intervene and set the pace for regional change? How was capital linked to the racializing of working bodies? And why was the capitalist imperative expressed in landscape alterations like irrigation? Such are the key questions informing this bold, far-reaching volume.

Beyond political economy, the book also looks to the rural juggernaut's cultural and literary work, which was stamped by celebratory, if fretful, ruminations. In all sorts oftexts--but especially in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, Harold Bell Wright, and many other writers--difficult questions surfaced. Capital was seen in terms of its spillage into rural frontiers, just as rural frontiers were seen in terms of movements of capital. Capital was the new geography of money. But for whom did it work? Which identities did it favor? In mapping the real and imaginary realms that capital occupied, Henderson locates the banker-, land developer-, and engineer-heroes of California fiction as well as the fictionalized "new woman" of the capitalist, agrarian West. He unravels the colliding representations of race, gender, and class, while linking their treatment to the naturalizing rhetoric of capital's agrarian turn.

In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's--and the American West's--economic, environmental, and cultural past.

"Henderson's book is an intellectual foray into the relationships among capital investment, the productive use of agricultural land, and how these issues have fired the imagination of novelists in California history from 1870 to 1920....Students of the American West and California will find it worthwhile."--Choice