The United States has had a nationwide childcare program at one time in its history: a temporary program during World War II. Tim Sablik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond tells the story and summarizes some economic research on the topic in “When Uncle Sam Watched Rosie’s Kids: To support women working on the homefront in World War II, the U.S. government funded a temporary nationwide child care program” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Fourth Quarter 2024).
As Sablik reminds us, only about 10% of married women reported working outside the home in the 1920s. A number of female-dominate professions like teaching had “marriage bars”–that is, a woman was barred from continuing in the job if she got married, on the basis that married women should be focused on raising children. But World War II changed the terms of the social debate. As Sablik writes:
Once the United States entered the war in late 1941, the country needed to mobilize both the personnel and the materials to fight a war on two fronts. While American men reported to training camps and shipped off overseas, government officials called upon women to support the production of tanks, planes, ships, munitions, and other supplies at home. According to a 1953 report from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, nearly half of all single women were already in the workforce prior to the war. But the labor force participation rate for married women was much lower — around 15 percent. For policymakers hoping to ramp up war production, the report’s authors observed, “Married women constituted the country’s greatest labor reserve.”
Many of these married women were also mothers, so bringing them into the workforce meant grappling with the issue of child care. During a 1943 hearing before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, witnesses shared stories of children locked in cars or chained to trailers while mothers were at work. Factories reported an increase in absenteeism on Saturdays when schools were closed. Others expressed concerns about rising juvenile delinquency among school-age children left to their own devices after school and during the summer.
The legislative path seems to have worked like this. In 1940, Congress passed the the National Defense Housing Act, often called as the Lanham Act, aimed a building more housing. But by 1941, Congress had expanded the law so that its funding could support “any facility necessary for carrying on community life substantially expanded by the national-defense program.” In 1942, the House Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds agreed, without public debate or legislation, that the funding could also be used for child care. By 1943, Lanham act funding was available for 1,150 nurseries. At the peak in 1944, there were 3100 centers with about 130,000 children enrolled across the country.
Sablik draws on research from Chris Herbst for some descriptive details:
Lanham nurseries provided care for children from ages 2 to 5, while child care centers looked after school-age children before and after school and during the summer. Consistent with the Children’s Bureau’s recommendations, few if any Lanham facilities provided care for children under the age of 2, despite expressed demand from working mothers with young children. According to Herbst, it was typical for preschool children to spend 12 hours per day at the nurseries. When school was in session, older children might spend a few hours before and after school. The availability of care also varied according to local need. In communities with factories operating 24 hours per day, centers were open at night.
To get the program up and running quickly, FWA [Federal Works Agency] administrators rented and reused existing buildings and relied on schoolteachers for staff. Federal agencies created a training program for Lanham teachers and volunteers, and some cities partnered with local universities to create their own training. Federal guidelines recommended keeping classrooms small, with a 10:1 student-to-teacher ratio, and Herbst found that most centers followed this recommendation. Students were served lunch, a snack, and even dinner in cases where centers were open late. That said, quality varied, as the FWA left operations largely up to the discretion of local administrators. In his article, Herbst cited the example of a center in Baltimore that had 80 children in one room with one bathroom, and those children had to cross a highway to reach the playground.
It’s not clear in a statistical sense how much this national child care effort actually increased the labor force participation of women. There was no rule limiting the centers to working mothers. The centers were typically established in places where the share of mothers who were working was already quite high. Three days after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the program administrators announce that the program would be wound down. The expectation was that women would leave the workforce, freeing up the jobs for returning soldiers.
However, follow-up research “found lasting positive effects on children who grew up in areas with Lanham centers, including generally improved outcomes in high school and higher earnings in adulthood.” Given the extreme disruptions of civilian life during World War II, and many changes in the United States since then (like smaller average family size and higher education and incomes for parents), it would be unwise to extrapolate too readily from this earlier program. But the outcomes are nonetheless interesting.
For those who want a taste of the academic research on outcomes for children, useful starting points are:
- Derrington, Taletha M., Alison Huang, and Joseph P. Ferrie. “Life Course Effects of the Lanham Preschools: What the First Government Preschool Effort Can Tell Us About Universal Early Care and Education Today.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 29271, September 2021. (Article available with subscription.)
- Ferrie, Joseph P., Claudia Goldin, and Claudia Olivetti. “Mobilizing the Manpower of Mothers: Childcare under the Lanham Act during WWII.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 32755, July 2024. (Article available with subscription.)
- Herbst, Chris M. “Universal Child Care, Maternal Employment, and Children’s Long-Run Outcomes: Evidence from the US Lanham Act of 1940.” Journal of Labor Economics, April 2017, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 519-564. (Article available with subscription.)
