"Who Took Care of Rosie the Riveter's Kids?"

"The federal government initially discouraged mothers with young children from working outside the home in support of the war effort, as when the War Manpower Commission declared, “The first responsibility of women with young children, in war as in peace, is to give suitable care in their own homes to their children.” Still, tens of thousands of mothers went to work anyway, whether to fulfill patriotic duties or out of economic necessity. Soon, employers pointed to female workers’ absenteeism as evidence of the need for childcare. Wartime needs and familial realities came to a head. Testifying before the Senate, one legislator declared, “You cannot have a contented mother working in a war factory if she is worrying about her children and you cannot have children running wild in the streets without a bad effect on the coming generations.”

Established in late 1942, emergency nursery schools became the tool to relieve anxious mothers and keep raucous children at bay. Funded through both federal and local money allocated by an amendment to the Lanham Act, a 1940 law authorizing war-related government grants, childcare services were established in communities contributing to defense production. These programs reorganized one kind of domestic labor—child-rearing—to enable another kind: paid labor in the domestic economy that helped fortify America against its foreign enemies...

Even though quality varied at the Lanham-funded centers and bureaucrats in charge of the program occasionally stepped on each others’ toes, the program, with such a broad base of beneficiaries, changed public sentiment about child-rearing. Until then, daycare had been considered a pitiful provision for poor mothers. Having served families across the socioeconomic spectrum, the centers familiarized the public with sending young children away from the home for part of the day. In fact, the journalism professor Rose Kundanis observes that it was during the Lanham programs’ tenure that the term “day care” was coined...

There are signs that a Lanham-like perspective is returning today. Slowly, conversation is turning away from the individualistic question of whether women can “have it all” (a query never directed at men) toward an acknowledgment that the absence of policies such as universal childcare have constrained women’s ability to hold down employment and have children—especially in a labor system that demands long working hours, dictates high childcare fees, and pays men and women unequally. What has long been treated as a private concern for mothers is now being recognized as a matter of national policy. Public intellectuals, Nobel economists, and Democratic presidential candidates have all declared their support for affordable, high-quality childcare."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/daycare-world-war-rosie-riveter/415650/

Yaaaasssssss.

(credit to DK)