This dissertation contributes to the study of the reciprocal relationship between social categorization and nation-state structure by exploring the impact of gender and racial dynamics on the development of U.S. policies of child care and early education. I use a mixed-methods approach that combines an historical and interpretive analysis of federal policy development since the Progressive Era with a quantitative analysis of variation in state child care and preschool spending and in measures of child care quality standards and regulation. The quantitative analysis includes random-effects growth-curve models to examine levels and trajectories of state spending between 1999 and 2004 and OLS analysis of variation in child care standards and regulation.

I explain the increasing subsidization of child care in the 1990s and early 2000s as the institutionalized expression of shifting cultural understandings regarding women's work and children's care. I examine how racial and gender boundaries shaped these understandings, impacting the emergence of social groups, the definition of group interests, and the formation of politically-fruitful coalitions across the century. When examined in historical perspective, current policy portends a narrowing of the divide between children's access to early care resources. Contemporary policy does not suggest, however, growth in public subsidization that would narrow gendered differences in access to work and the social benefits connected to labor market participation.

The quantitative analysis of state-level variation connects child care and early education expenditures to variation in state racial and gender context. I find that states with prior institutional support for women's labor market participation are more likely to fund child care more generously. Racial bifurcation, represented by a larger proportion of black residents, is also associated with greater levels of spending. Non-Confederate states with greater child advocacy and higher levels of Democratic legislative representation also spend more generously. Evidence suggests that states are converging in their levels of early care spending if early education (preschool) expenditures are included. With regard to child care quality, states with more traditional orientations toward government involvement in family life are also those more likely to have high standards, while the enforcement of standards is associated with union density and the relative presence of women in high-status occupations.