Not only the cost: many parents struggle to find any childcare at all.

The first National Women’s Liberation Conference, which took place at Ruskin College, Oxford, in February 1970 was conceived by Sally Alexander and fellow historian Sheila Rowbotham as an event to look back at women’s experiences across time, but it attracted far more participants than the organisers expected, and the focus shifted from past to present, ending with demands for the right to equal pay, equal employment opportunities, free contraception and free 24-hour nurseries.