A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe

Introduction

How did caretakers rooted in families, communities, and societies nurture very young children across historical time? And, how have care practices changed across different peoples, states, and political economies in the dynamic 20th century? This ambitious project answers these important, yet mostly overlooked, questions with a comparative study of early childcare in central and eastern Europe from 1905 to 2004.

Historical Context

The late Habsburg Empire and, after 1918, six of its successor states offer an ideal laboratory to explore how the invisible work of caretaking was impacted by changing political, social, and economic circumstances. In this ethnically and religiously diverse region, care continued during depressions, wars, genocides, displacements, and revolutions. This project will be the first to study early childcare in this region systematically and conceptualize the history of private and public caretaking in early life more broadly.

Objectives

To achieve this goal of defining and explaining care practices, this project has three objectives:

1. To show the nature and scope of the invisible work required during the first 1,000 days of life using unexamined voices, spaces, and things.
2. To use insights from sociological and economic literatures to conceptualize and theorize the caretaking regimes of central and eastern Europe and explain continuities and discontinuities of caretaking within one diverse region.
3. To examine the afterlife of caretaking regimes after 1989 and European Union expansion, while also exploring the legacies and debates about caretaking which endure today.

Hypothesis

This project hypothesizes that caretaking regimes – a collection of medical beliefs, moral assumptions, new technologies, and advances in material culture – interacted with changing political economies and inherited religious and ethnic sensitivities. Variations across this interaction explain how and why caretakers utilized some childcare practices and not others in this illuminating milieu.