The US Funded Universal Childcare For Working Women During World War II- Then Stopped

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- 'The US Funded Universal Childcare During World War II—Then Stopped,' -Ed. HNN/History News Network, GW Univ., History.com, May 12, 2021.

When the United States started recruiting women for World War II factory jobs, there was a reluctance to call stay-at-home mothers with young children into the workforce. That changed when the government realized it needed more wartime laborers in its factories. To allow more women to work, the government began subsidizing childcare for the first (and only) time in the nation’s history. An estimated 550,000 to 600,000 children received care through these facilities, which cost parents around 50 to 75 cents per child, per day (in 2021, that’s less than $12).

But like women’s employment in factories, the day care centers were always meant to be a temporary wartime measure. When the war ended, the government encouraged women to leave the factories and care for their children at home.

Despite receiving letters and petitions urging the continuation of the childcare programs, the U.S. government stopped funding them in 1946.

Before World War II, organized “day care” didn’t really exist in the U.S. The children of middle- and upper-class families might go to private nursery schools for a few hours a day, says Sonya Michel, a professor emerita of history, women’s studies & American studies at the Univ. of Md. and author of "Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy." (In German communities, 5- & 6-year-olds went to half-day Kindergartens.)

For children from poor families whose father had died or couldn’t work, there were day nurseries funded by charitable donations. But there were no affordable all-day childcare centers for families in which both parents worked—a situation that was common for low-income families, particularly Black families, & less common for middle- and upper-class families.

The war temporarily changed that.

In 1940, the U.S. passed the Defense Housing & Community Facilities & Services Act, known as the LANHAM ACT, which gave the Federal Works Agency the authority to fund the construction of houses, schools & other infrastructure for laborers in the growing defense industry. It was not specifically meant to fund childcare, but in late 1942, the government used it to fund temporary day care centers for the children of mothers working wartime jobs. Communities had to apply for funding to set up day care centers; once they did, there was very little federal involvement. Local organizers structured childcare centers around a community's needs...

More, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180259
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* 'Having Universal Childcare: Sweden, Quebec, France' Elle, 2019
https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a27496656/3-women-on-what-its-actually-like-to-have-universal-childcare/
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* WWII Universal Childcare, THE LANHAM ACT
https://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/blog/wwii-universal-childcare/

On June 29, 1943, the U.S. Senate passed the first, and thus far only, national childcare program, voting $20,000,000 to provide for public care of children whose mothers were employed for the duration of World War II.

During the war, the federal government offered grants for child care services to authorized community groups that could demonstrate a war-related need for the service. The program was justified as a war expedient necessary to allow mothers to enter the labor force and increase war production...



- 'Milk time' at the day care center in June, 1943 during World War II.