Over 3,000 women marched through downtown Toronto on International Women’s Day--that’s five times the number of women who showed up last year. The reason for the increase? Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plans to do away with a national child-care plan.

According to Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative, 63 percent of all children under six years-old in the United States receive some kind of regular child care or early education from someone other than a parent. And the costs are simply insane:

Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies sampled big cities to learn what child care costs. The average annual cost to provide a 1-year old with child care ranged from $12,324 in Boston to $3,633 in Knoxville. While that’s a significant sum for most any family, the burden is particularly great for families with lower incomes. According to statistics published by the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives, 60% of families earning less than $1,200 a month pay out of pocket for their child care. The cost accounts for 37% of their income. Child Care,Inc., a New York City-based non-profit organization, found that “Child-care expenses for a family of four can exceed the cost of food, rent and taxes, often making child care the single largest item in a family’s budget. Child care in New York City is $5,440 more expensive per year than tuition at a City University.”

Given the dismal statistics and the reality of women’s everyday lives--why aren’t American feminists talking more about child care? I mean, we talk about work/life issues and such whenever the latest column on how super-duper it is for women to stay at home comes out. Issues like reproductive rights and violence against women have dominated feminist activism lately--most notably within national women's orgs. What ever happened to child care?

For younger women in particular--shouldn’t working for affordable, accessible child care be a priority in our activism? And not just locally, but on a national level.

Just wondering.