September 15, 2005
By Valerie Orleans

During World War II, the federal government supported day care services for any mother who worked, regardless of income levels. The reason was obvious — women were needed to work to support war efforts. Within weeks of Japan’s surrender, however, President Harry Truman announced plans to close the federally funded centers. Women in California rose up in protest.

“Were it not for this effort, the ideal of universal, education-based child care would have vanished from the political landscape in the years following World War II,” said Natalie Fousekis, assistant professor of history and associate director of the Center for Oral and Public History.

Fousekis recently received a yearlong American Council of Learned Societies’ fellowship that will enable her to finish her book, “Fighting for Our Children: Women’s Activism, the Battle Over Child Care and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-71.”

“In the early ’90s when I was working in Washington, D.C., as a legislative correspondent for [Senator] Barbara Boxer, I wanted to research and write my dissertation on an issue that mattered to women. Of course, the topic of child care came up,” she explained. “Yet, as a historian, I didn’t see much advocacy on this issue coming from the modern women’s movement. I was curious about that. I thought this would be an issue that would unite all classes of women.”

This was in contrast to what she discovered happened in the ’40s, when the federal government tried to close its child-care centers.

“During the war, there were 6.5 million women in the work force — many of these women were based in California, working in the shipyards and other war-related industries. In fact, about a quarter of the federally funded, child-care centers established were in California.

“What was great about the child-care centers was that working women didn’t have to worry about their children,” she continued. “The centers were staffed by teachers and educators, and the care provided was excellent. The fact was, the kids were doing great.

“So when the President announced that the centers would be closing, many of them rose up to organize and created a movement to save the federal funding.”

Mothers inundated government officials with letters urging them to keep the centers open. They wrote about their families and the hardships they would face if they couldn’t return to work. Working and placing their children in these centers allowed women to support their families without the stigma of being on public assistance.

“Remember, some of these mothers were now widows and didn’t have husbands returning home to jobs,” Fousekis said. “Others had husbands who were disabled. And finally, there were those who enjoyed working outside the home and wanted to continue.”

The letters that these women wrote became the centerpiece of Fousekis’s research.

“What is most interesting is when the women describe what having adequate child care means to them,” Fousekis explained. “They often decided to become politically active because, at the time, there was no one else to represent them.”

The common perception, when you look at the history of the women’s movement, is that the suffrage movement was organized to give women the right to vote, said Fousekis. Once that happened, as the traditional story goes, the movement basically disappeared. Of course, it didn’t disappear — many women were politically active, but mostly at the grass roots level, and overlooked by scholars until recently, she added.

“Despite what many believe, the ’50s weren’t a time when all women were like June Cleaver,” she continued. “Many women had to work, and became politically active despite being far removed from the centers of power.”

Based on the letters and protests, California didn’t close all the centers, but they did scale back. Because of a maximum income qualification, only single mothers and fathers qualified to use them.

In the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” the Head Start Program began and the federal government began providing additional funds for child care.

“Again, this was directed to the poor, not necessarily the working poor,” Fousekis said. “The state ended up working with the federal government and by 1972 California’s children’s centers cared for 24,000 children; 80 percent of these were children of single mothers. However, you had to be on welfare, or just coming off welfare, to qualify.”

In 1971, Congress established the Comprehensive Child Development Act — a move that would have provided federally funded child care to every American on a sliding scale. President Richard Nixon vetoed it.

“But the need was there so, eventually, the federal government had to step in,” Fousekis said. “Over the years, more and more has been done to provide good child care to our nation’s children, but it was the effort of California’s mothers and teachers that saved it after World War II.”

Even today, Fousekis believes that the federal government hasn’t done nearly enough to provide for good child care.

“I still don’t think we make affordable, quality child care a priority,” said Fousekis. “But these women saved public child care at a time when it existed nowhere else.”

The intensity of the letters that these mothers wrote in the ’40s resonated with Fousekis. “As a historian, I like to view this as a time in which women began to discover their influence on the political process. When I interview some of the women who wrote letters or organized, they’ll indicate that they didn’t play much of a role. But, upon further questioning, you’ll find they put in countless hours. Some mothers would organize letter-writing parties at their homes. The mothers would be writing and planning and coordinating demonstrations while their children were asleep in the next room.”

Natalie Fousekis is interested in speaking to anyone who used these child-care centers for their children or taught in them. She can be reached at nfousekis@fullerton.edu.

« back to News Front