Parenting & Family Quote by Eddie Bernice Johnson

“Generally speaking” is the politician’s scalpel: a disarming preface that signals reasonableness while still landing an indictment. Eddie Bernice Johnson isn’t offering a quaint sociology lesson; she’s naming a governing assumption that has shaped American policy by stealth. Calling child care “female business” exposes how gendered labor gets naturalized into tradition, then quietly written into budgets, workplace norms, and the very design of public life. The phrase carries a sly double edge: “business” sounds like private, domestic stuff, but also like an enterprise that sustains the entire economy. That tension is the point. If it’s treated as women’s private duty, the state can pretend it’s not a public infrastructure problem.

The subtext is political arithmetic. When caregiving is coded female, its costs are pushed downward: onto mothers’ unpaid hours, onto low-wage care workers, onto families making impossible tradeoffs. Employers get a workforce that’s expected to be “flexible,” meaning women absorb the shocks of sick days, school closures, and the daily logistics that keep households functional. Men, meanwhile, are granted the cultural permission to be “helpers” rather than co-owners of the work.

Johnson’s historical framing matters, too. As a longtime legislator and a Black woman who came of age amid segregated institutions, she’s invoking a “history” that includes who was allowed to work, who was expected to serve, and whose labor was discounted as merely familial. The intent is to shift child care from sentimental rhetoric to structural critique: not a women’s issue, but a democracy and labor issue hiding in plain sight.