During times of war, claims of obligation between the state and its citizens come into sharp focus. In these periods of national crisis, states make claims to the bodies and labor of their citizens, and as citizens make broader claims about what the state owes them in exchange, concerns of daily life become politicized. During World War II, day care underwent this process of politicization, and struggles over day care raised larger questions about the relationship between motherhood and citizenship. Did women, like men, have a direct obligation to the state, or was motherhood itself a civic duty which overshadowed all others? Did women's private obligations to children and families override their public, civic obligations? And if motherhood was a form of service to the state, what did the state owe mothers in return? To explore different conceptions of the relationship between motherhood and civic obligation, this paper examines not only debates among policy makers in Washington, but also the language used by mothers in Philadelphia who used day care centers and fought to keep them open after the war . 

What does motherhood have to do with citizenship? Since the American Revolution produced the idea of "republican motherhood," women's citizenship has often been defined in terms of their responsibilities to children and families. Women were to express their citizenship by raising their children, especially sons, to become good citizens -- not by voting, governing, or serving in the military.⁽¹⁾ 

Women's private obligations as wives and mothers thus substituted for the public obligations of male citizenship. Linda Kerber has recently argued that this idea that women fulfill their civic obligations by serving their husbands and children has been influential throughout American history, excluding women from the obligation to serve on juries or perform military service. Women's childbearing seemed to be ample reason to exempt them from further civic service: in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "the woman who has had a child...has that claim to regard which we give the soldier...who does a great and indispensable service which involves pain and discomfort, self-abnegation, and the incurring of risk of life." But while republican motherhood conferred social and political value on women's work as mothers, it was always a double-edged sword; for without the public obligations of citizenship, women could not claim the rights of full citizens.⁽²⁾ Furthermore, the idea that all women fulfilled their political duties through their families left little room for women to choose other paths to citizenship. 

Redefining the relationship between motherhood and citizenship was a primary concern for early twentieth-century women reformers who sought to make a place for women in government. These reformers, whom historians have labeled "maternalists," argued that motherhood was a vital service to the state whose value should be recognized and supported by government policy. Proponents of mothers' pension legislation in the 1910s, for instance, wanted to honor motherhood as being as significant a contribution to the state as military service. For instance, in 1911, the president of the Tennessee Congress of Mothers declared: "We cannot afford to let a mother, one who has divided her body by creating other lives for the good of the state, one who has contributed to citizenship, be classed as a pauper . . . Today let us honor the mother wherever found -- if she has given a citizen to the nation, then the nation owes something to her."⁽³⁾ William Hard, who conducted a major campaign for mothers' pensions in the pages of a women's fashion magazine, described the recipient of a mothers' pension as "an independent citizen kept from self-support only by the presence of future citizens at her knees, and requiring, in order that, as she fulfills her instinctive duty to them, she may also fulfill her indirect civic duty to the state."⁽⁴⁾ Although the promise that mothers' pensions would recast the relationship between mothers and the state was never fulfilled, its premise -- that women's citizenship was fulfilled through motherhood -- remained important for decades to come. 

World War II offered an opportunity to reconsider the connection between mothers' duties to their children and their duties to the state. As the nation recognized its need for women to work in defense plants, government officials, social workers, employers, and ordinary people had to weigh the value of women's paid labor against the value of their work as mothers. At the national level, child welfare professionals centered in the federal Children's Bureau fought with representatives of war industries over whether a mother's job was in a defense factory or caring for her children at home. By insisting that motherhood was a patriotic service as valuable as producing ammunition, child welfare advocates revived the concept of "republican motherhood" and gave it new meaning. Arguing that women fulfilled their civic responsibilities through motherhood enabled child welfare advocates in the 1940s to claim some space for children's needs as war industries sought to draw mothers into war work. But it ignored the fact that mothers made different choices about how to divide and prioritize their labor, how to meet their children's needs, and how to fulfill their duties as citizens. 

The Debate in Washington: Where Was a Mother's Job? 

Where was a mother's place during the war? At a time when men were being conscripted for military service and civilians were being encouraged to sacrifice for the war effort, could mothers be called away from their normal duties to serve the nation as well? Child welfare advocates said no, for bearing and rearing children was itself a civic service, a way of serving the nation which should be valued and given top priority. Seeing themselves as spokeswomen for children, whose interests conflicted with those of industrialists and military leaders, they urged the nation to put children first. In a speech delivered ten years earlier, Bureau chief Grace Abbott explained her role as an advocate for children in Washington: 

Sometimes when I get home at night in Washington I feel as though I had been in a great traffic jam...moving toward the Capitol where Congress sits in judgment on all administrative agencies of the Government...I stand on the sidewalk watching it become more congested and more difficult, and then because the responsibility is mine and I must, I take a very firm hold on the handles of the baby carriage and I wheel it into the traffic.⁽⁵⁾ 

It is important to remember that mothers of young children can make no finer contribution to the strength of the Nation and its vitality and effectiveness in the future than to assure their children the security of home, individual care, and affection. Except as a last resort, the Nation should not recruit for industrial production the services of women with such home responsibilities.⁽⁷⁾ 

Other influential voices echoed these sentiments. Child development expert Arnold Gessell told a conference of the United Federal Workers of America in 1944 that increased child care facilities were not the answer to the problems of working mothers. Rather, he argued, women must "be practical enough to hold to what was most important -- the family." Gessell declared, "The family must get first and last protection -- if the family goes, everything goes." Children's Bureau staffer Bessie Trout reported, "He referred to Germany, Japan and Russia (in part), where the family is secondary to the State. He stressed that where there is conflict between the values of the family and the values of industry, family values must prevail, that nothing must jeopardize the family unit." Young children, Gessell explained, were growing so fast "there is a need for day to day adjustment to his growth. If the mother works this must be regarded as insoluble -- his care should not be sacrificed to anything."⁽⁸⁾ Advice columnist Angelo Patri also urged mothers to stay home with their children rather than taking up war work. After painting a scene featuring a little girl whose mother was always "too busy or tired or something" from her defense job to play with her or give her affection, Patri concluded that mothers who could choose to stay home "should do so with a free conscience," for "rearing children is the greatest service any woman can render her country now or at any other time." He concluded the column by pleading, "Let any mother who can, stay by her little children so that none of them can know the grief of not being loved by their own mothers, who are so busy with the world's affairs as to leave no time for the one special duty they owe their children."⁽⁹⁾ J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agreed that mothers should be discouraged from working in defense industries. In a 1944 article entitled, "Mothers...Our Only Hope," Hoover wrote that a mother "already has her war job. Her patriotism consists in not letting quite understandable desires to escape for a few months from a household routine or to get a little money of her own tempt her to quit it. There must be no absenteeism among mothers."⁽¹⁰⁾ 

Some offered an even stronger link between mothering and patriotic service by calling on mothers to nurture democracy within the family. At the 1940 White House Conference on Children in a Democracy, President Franklin Roosevelt explained, "A succession of world events has shown us that our democracy must be strengthened at every point of strain or weakness," and the family was the place to start. Participants in the conference resolved that the family could be "the threshold of democracy,...a school for democratic life." Once war broke out, sociologists heralded the new democratic American family as a bulwark against fascism, and called for parent education programs to bring about more democratic family relationships.⁽¹¹⁾ The Children's Bureau's pamphlet "Children's Charter in Wartime" built on this idea of the family as the cradle of democracy, explaining, "Our American Republics sprang from a sturdy yearning for tolerance, independence, and self-government. The American home has emerged from the search for freedom. Within it the child lives and learns through his own efforts the meaning and responsibilities of freedom."⁽¹²⁾ This vital task of instilling democratic values in the next generation could clearly not be sacrificed while mothers took up defense work. 

The Children's Bureau's policy of discouraging mothers from seeking employment, on the grounds that mothering itself was an essential patriotic activity, was instrumental in shaping government policy. The resolution adopted at the Bureau's 1941 conference, "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," was declared official War Manpower Commission policy in August 1942 and again in 1943.⁽¹³⁾ Although the War Manpower Commission officially forbade discrimination against mothers seeking work (and the Women's Bureau especially stressed that such discrimination was "not to be tolerated"), some public officials and private individuals urged job discrimination against mothers as an easier and more effective policy than establishing child care services.⁽¹⁴⁾ Even in the absence of formal discrimination, some branches of government clearly wanted to discourage mothers from taking up paid work: one government pamphlet addressed to employers urged that job applicants with children under fourteen be questioned closely about provisions for their children's care.⁽¹⁵⁾ The conviction of child welfare advocates and social workers that encouraging mothers to be workers would harm family life led them to resist expanding day care in the early years of the war, and then to insist on limiting and controlling it. Instead of establishing easily accessible day care centers during the war, child welfare professionals urged the creation of networks of foster day care providers along with after-school programs for older children, and advocated providing counselling to mothers in the hopes of dissuading them from going out to work.⁽¹⁶⁾ 

But maternalists were no longer the only ones with a legitimate claim to mothers' labor. Many people both inside and outside the government disagreed with the Children's Bureau's position that women's labor was better spent in the unpaid work of mothering than in paid work in industry. Although the War Manpower Commission adopted this position as official policy, it conflicted with the needs and desires of employers, other government agencies seeking to speed up war production, and many mothers who saw new wartime employment opportunities as a chance to provide their children with a secure future. Government agencies and private employers promoted the idea that women were workers and could only fulfill their patriotic duty by contributing directly to the defense effort. Motherhood need not excuse women from the obligation to engage in war work, for wartime day care centers could care for children while women went into defense plants. Popular support for day care emerged as married women's employment became desirable: by 1942, 60% of respondents in a National Opinion Research Center poll believed that married women should work in war industries.⁽¹⁷⁾ Convinced that day care was an effective tool for recruiting women employers, defense contractors like Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo and Kaiser Industries in Portland, Oregon, opened day care centers for their employees, although most other defense plants did not follow their lead.⁽¹⁸⁾ Employers and government agencies who did advocate providing day care during the war did so out of a concern with war production, seeing day care as an aid to defense industries, not necessarily as a good in itself. Day nursery activist Ethel Beer reflected the ambivalence that many day care advocates felt even as they argued for day care: "It may not be ideal for mothers to leave their homes to earn a living," she wrote. "But they do. That is why the day nursery exists...[It] is as sure a weapon as the gun on the battlefield."⁽¹⁹⁾ 

Despite official policy about encouraging mothers to stay with their children, the government's campaign to recruit women workers targeted mothers as well as other women, publicizing the availability of employer-sponsored and public day care centers. Women workers were encouraged to see themselves as patriots, contributing directly to the war effort at home just as their men contributed on the front lines of military service. War work was women's form of civic obligation, their form of wartime sacrifice. Indeed, the white middle-class woman who took up war work out of patriotism was pictured as a heroine in women's magazines and wartime propaganda. She was a symbol of a broader message: the need for civilians to sacrifice their personal interests for the larger national good, just as soldiers on the front lines were sacrificing their lives. Women who stayed at home, on the other hand, were often portrayed as shirking their duty to their country.⁽²⁰⁾ Like men, these recruitment campaigns suggested, women owed the nation direct service in a time of crisis. Recruiters did not depend on women's abstract patriotism, however: in encouraging women to become defense workers, they appealed to women's desire to bring husbands and sweethearts home faster, just as men in the military were urged to think of their service as a way of protecting their women and children. Americans of both sexes were thus urged to join the war effort to fight for the family; by serving the state, they were also fulfilling private moral obligations.⁽²¹⁾ Both men and women were also urged to fight in order to secure a better and more comfortable future, in wartime advertisements picturing new homes and consumer goods as the reward for the sacrifices of war. "After the war, ...today's young men and women can plan instead of dream, can be sure that the homes their parents merely wished for can become a reality for them...In this war, we are fighting not only against our enemies, but for a better way of life for many more of us."⁽²²⁾ 

To encourage women to take up war work, the Office of War Information (OWI) asked popular magazines to present positive images of married women workers. Attacking the idea that the employed woman was an aberration in American life, writers and magazine editors sought to place her at the forefront of the public mind. Marriage and family responsibilities were not to be portrayed as a full-time career, but as fully compatible with the wartime duty to work.⁽²³⁾ But even the magazines that made a particular effort to help the government's recruitment campaign conveyed mixed messages about motherhood and wartime sacrifice. Magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post carried images of the heroic woman war worker gracefully managing her home responsibilities, but they also contained advertisements and stories which pictured mothers and young children in a more passive light, as symbols of what men were fighting to protect. The message of these images was that women's most important war job was maintaining the home, the centerpiece of American values -- not in making an individual contribution to defense production.⁽²⁴⁾ 

The message of wartime propagandists was that women were supposed to take jobs out of duty, not out of a desire to better themselves, and not because women had a right to work.⁽²⁵⁾ But most of the women who worked for wages during the war were not new to the workforce, and most went to work to benefit their families and themselves rather than out of patriotic duty.⁽²⁶⁾ This view of war work as a new opportunity for women, rather than a measure of patriotic self-sacrifice, was particularly relevant for Black women, who were able to earn higher wages and work in better jobs during the war than ever before. One Black woman told an interviewer, "My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks' kitchen."⁽²⁷⁾ Many white working-class women also saw the war as an opportunity. For instance, Madeline Karpowitz told a Philadelphia newspaper reporter in 1942 that she was eager to get a job, although she had not worked in the six years since her marriage. She had previously worked as a power operator of a sewing machine, but now she wanted to take a course for electricians. 

I like fooling around with electrical things. I do it around the house. The way I feel is, here's a chance for women like me to learn something that's interesting. But we haven't been able to do it on account of the children...Not that I'd swap the children for 50 jobs. But it would be nice to work and know that they're in good safe hands...And I could use the money. My husband has arthritis and can't work steady.⁽²⁸⁾ 

Defining women's war work as an expression of patriotic heroism served both to recruit women, to give them a wartime role equal to that of their men, and to define women's wage-earning work as a temporary aberration necessitated by national crisis -- not a normal state of affairs. It thus ignored the real benefits that some women gained from their employment and the reasons they went out to work in the first place. By ignoring these aspects of women's work, the public could avoid thinking about the long-term challenge to gender roles that women's wartime employment might pose. 

The OWI addressed the specific concerns of working mothers by putting out broadcasts, newsreels, and traveling exhibits of photographs about the Kaiser day care centers, and asked the editors of women's magazines to portray child care centers in a favorable light.⁽²⁹⁾ Fiction writers responded to OWI's request for positive images of day care centers by setting romances and comedies against the backdrop of centers. In one story, a romance develops between a shell-shocked veteran and the head of a child care center; he helps her with her duties at the center while recovering from his wounds. Another story featured two "fun-loving debutantes" who take jobs in the welfare department of an aircraft factory and encourage the workers to raise money to establish a nursery at the factory. Their project is so successful that they are swamped with requests from defense plants all across the country for information on how to set up similar facilities.⁽³⁰⁾ But even this propaganda campaign reflected the ambivalence that many Americans felt about the idea of mothers going out to work. The fact that both these stories feature women as staff of day care centers, not as clients, suggests the difficulty writers had picturing day care in positive terms. Positive portrayals of day care were much more common in middle-class magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, whose readers might see themselves as directors or volunteer workers at day care centers than in working-class magazines such as True Story, whose readers were more likely to be the working mothers who used the day care centers. Historian Maureen Honey observes that although motherhood was central to the fiction published in True Story, and heroines in these stories were likely to be mothers, the magazine gave little support to the government's child care program, never featuring a single mother who used a day care center.⁽³¹⁾ 

One way to bridge the gap between the need for women's war work and the conviction that mothers should be at home with their children was to focus on recruiting women as "foster mothers" to care for the children of defense workers. Social workers and child welfare experts had long preferred foster day care to group care in day nurseries, for it provided a substitute mother figure to care for the child in a substitute home while the child's mother was at work. Nevertheless, foster day care programs were relatively rare. The First and Sunnyside Day Nursery (FSDN) in Philadelphia, which had started offering foster day care in 1928, was the major provider of this type of service in the city. During the war, agency staff expressed concern that potential foster mothers, like other women, were being pulled out of their homes: they "have been influenced in this present crisis and many of them are considering going out to work themselves." Some apparently decided that volunteering for Civilian Defense work was more important than taking care of other women's children during the day, while "some of them ... have lost the perspective of the need for them in their own homes."⁽³²⁾ In addition to raising the wages paid to foster mothers, the agency also launched a publicity campaign to recruit more women to serve as foster mothers. "As Wacs and Waves are releasing men for active service on the battle fronts," a press release started, "Philadelphia foster mothers are making it possible for other women to do necessary war-plant work." The press release featured a woman who, with a son in the army and a husband in the navy, spent her days taking care of four young children whose mothers were employed. One accompanying photograph showed her gazing at a framed photograph of her son in uniform, while looking at headlines in the newspaper about the progress of the war; the next showed her welcoming a mother and preschool child into her home. The release continued, "Because of her, three other women are able to help the war effort in industry and business, serene in the knowledge that their children are being competently and lovingly looked after while they work. And PFC Bobby Stoever is very proud of the double-mother job his patriotic maternal parent is doing on the home front." Mundane tasks of child care were newly defined as a patriotic duty: pictures showing children playing and eating lunch in Mrs. Stoever's house were accompanied by a caption reading, "Milk goes down in a big way for four contented youngsters, and Mrs. Stoever's hands are full with this important war-job."⁽³³⁾ Not only had Mrs. Stoever heroically sent her own son off to battle, but she had found a way to make a direct contribution to the war effort by lending her mothering skills to other women's children. Her efforts on the home front, like those of defense workers themselves, were presented as an example of how patriotic mothers could join their sons and husbands in winning the war. Her story may have been particularly appealing because it showed a woman contributing to the war without leaving her home or violating conventional gender roles in any way. 

While the popular press and the government sent mixed messages about mothers' patriotic responsibilities, union women offered strong and unambivalent support for women's war work and their need for day care. Indeed, the war was the first time that union women really made themselves heard in national debates on the subject of day care, providing a voice for wage-earning mothers that had rarely been heard in earlier decades. At a conference held in Philadelphia in 1943, the CIO women's auxiliaries drafted a complete program for day care "based on the experiences of working mothers themselves."⁽³⁴⁾ They resolved that "an adequate child care program must be made available to every child of working mothers," and urged that nurseries be established "in every neighborhood where working mothers live," administered by boards of education, and located in the public schools.⁽³⁵⁾ On the local level, CIO women's auxiliaries initiated local child care committees and lobbied for government funding for day care.⁽³⁶⁾ As historian Susan Hartmann has argued, while elite advocates for day care tended to talk about day care in terms of preventing child neglect and juvenile delinquency, "union women consistently emphasized working mothers' anxiety over the security of their children and defended child-care programmes as essential for both 'the welfare of the child and the peace of mind of the mother.'"⁽³⁷⁾ In order to gain support for day care, union women could not just speak about mothers' peace of mind, however; they appealed to the government's need for women's labor. Eleanor Fowler, head of the Congress of Women's Auxiliaries, testified before Congress that "[t]he establishment of child-care centers [would] enable women to make their maximum contribution to the defense of our country."⁽³⁸⁾ 

Feminist journalist Susan B. Anthony (niece of the famous suffrage leader) also based her arguments for day care on the government's need to mobilize women for war production. Anthony's book Out of the Kitchen -- And Into the War was a passionate argument for the government to take the necessary steps to enable women to contribute fully to the war effort. She did not accept the maternalist argument that motherhood was women's only contribution to the state: rather, she argued that women's civic obligations were similar to men's. She clearly saw the war as a chance to increase opportunities for women and promote equality between the sexes, and felt that women could only claim equal rights if they made an equal contribution to the nation. Her contempt for the claims of domesticity was particularly evident when she spoke of the need to bring housewives "and other irrelevantly occupied women out into the open of direct war production."⁽³⁹⁾ In response to the War Manpower Commission's policy stating, "The first responsibility of women with young children...is to give suitable care in their own homes to their children," Anthony replied, 

The first responsibility of women with young children as well as all women is to join the war effort, where and when they are needed. The first responsibility of the War Manpower Commission...is to provide a vast network of approved, low-cost nursery schools and other child-care programs, so that the children we cherish will not be among the growing list of war casualties...[T]he mother's place is not at home caring for her children, if that mother can help defeat Hitler by her labor in factory, farm or office.⁽⁴⁰⁾ 

Rather than contributing to the state indirectly by raising good citizens, Anthony argued, women must lend their labor directly to the war effort. In this way, she implied, women would prove their worth as full citizens as well as their ability to take advantage of expanded opportunities after the war. But in order to fulfill their obligations to the state, women needed the state to fulfill its wartime obligations to them by providing care for their children. Citing the case of two defense workers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose three children burned to death while in the care of their elderly grandmother, Anthony called for a large-scale nursery program with secure federal funding and high quality standards. 

The arguments of most day care advocates were thus completely dependent upon the need for women's labor caused by the war emergency. Although these proponents of day care referred to the idea that quality day care programs could be educational for children, their main justification for why the government should provide day care always rested on women's work in war production. This was a compelling claim in the midst of a labor crisis, but it could not speak to the long-term needs of children and working parents. Child care programs predicated on the war emergency could only be temporary. For instance, a spokesman for the federal agency entrusted with the government's day care program explained that approval of the program "was predicated exclusively on a war-connected emergency need. That need would cease to exist when Japan surrendered, and promptly upon the consummation of that event the Federal Works Agency was to retire completely and irrevocably from the child-care field."⁽⁴¹⁾ The focus on women's war work left no voice for mothers who would continue to earn wages so after the war, for mothers who worried about the quality of care their children received in government-funded day care centers, or for the children themselves. While CIO women and feminists like Anthony may have envisioned a broader future for women's wage work and day care, their core argument about the nation's need for women's labor during the war did not provide the basis for any kind of ongoing claim to day care. 

Mothers Redefine Day Care 

While politicians, bureaucrats, and child welfare professionals argued about providing public day care, working mothers in Philadelphia continued to use private day nurseries as well as public day care centers. Distanced from the national policy debate about whether women's labor should be spent in defense factories or in their homes, these mothers do not appear to have adopted the images of female heroism promoted by those who wanted to encourage war production. Most went out to work because they needed to support their families or because the war created new opportunities, not because they felt obligated to sacrifice their own interests for the good of the nation. Their words and actions suggest a more private experience of the war, one more concerned with family obligations than with patriotic sacrifice. These women may have shared the child welfare professionals' conviction that women's family duties overshadowed other obligations of citizenship. But their view of how they could best fulfill their family obligations differed from that of Children's Bureau staffers, as they explained to social workers that their wage-earning was the best way to ensure their families' interests and their children's future. 

Indeed, while day care advocates like Susan Anthony and the CIO women's auxiliaries relied on arguments about the contribution women workers were making to the cause of the war, mothers themselves described their wage work in terms of family needs, not on the grounds of service to the nation. Many of these mothers seem to have agreed with the Children's Bureau's sense of priorities, portraying their struggles to support their children as more worthy of recognition than their defense work. Yet their solution was not to stay home with their children (as child welfare advocates might have wished), but to find good day care so they could go out to work. One woman wrote to the Wharton Centre, a settlement house in an African-American neighborhood which operated a wartime day care center, in 1943, "Why is it that getting your children into a 'Day care Centre' is such a difficult matter...I'm not just a worker in wartimes, but a lone mother trying hard to make a living for a family of three."⁽⁴²⁾ To this woman, her struggles as a mother trying to support her children were more important -- or more likely to help her get assistance -- than her status as a war worker. In requesting day care, other women cited concerns for their children's safety, their conviction that private arrangements were inadequate, and their fears of juvenile delinquency. Mothers were much more likely to request day care "for the welfare of my child," as one Wharton mother put it, than on the grounds of their contribution to the war effort, even if they were defense workers.⁽⁴³⁾ For instance, Mrs. Ball applied to Wharton, explaining, "Her mother is old and not too well and cannot assume responsibility of this active, young child. Every night Mrs. Ball hears some tale about Edward going off, or almost getting run over. Therefore, Mrs. Ball finds it hard to work with her mind ill at ease."⁽⁴⁴⁾ Gloria Farley came into the Wharton social worker's office in 1943 with a similar story. Waving a piece of paper with the name and address of the day care center on it, she talked rapidly about finding someone to make her nine-year old son go to school. Apparently Earl "had recently been associating with an older group of boys who were leading him astray," skipping school and stealing money from the landlord. Since she had to work, she explained, "she has to 'find someplace where he can stay and be made to go to school.'"⁽⁴⁵⁾ The anxiety that wage-earning mothers carried with them about their children's care and physical safety was a frequent theme in the Wharton case records, and several mothers expressed their empathy with social worker M.S. Toombs when she explained that she was leaving her job in order to take better care of her sick son. One mother seemed to be speaking from her own experience when she said, "this will be a good thing for you as it will rest your mind."⁽⁴⁶⁾ 

While they worried about their children's welfare, these women also expressed the conviction that their wage work would benefit their families. For instance, Naomi Gardiner applied to the Neighborhood Centre day nursery, explaining that she and her husband had bought a house and storefront in North Philadelphia with the intention of opening a dress shop. "They have a very good chance to make a success of the business in this locality if both of them are free to devote their time to the store."⁽⁴⁷⁾ African-American mothers applying to Wharton for day care also explained that their wage work was necessary to improve their families' standard of living. For instance, a woman who had moved to Philadelphia explained that her "boys are not used to the cramped, unsanitary living conditions to which they are now exposed," and she wanted to work in order to provide them with a better home.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Another woman said that she and her husband had decided that she would go to work "so that they could help each other and get ahead."⁽⁴⁹⁾ When questioned whether she absolutely needed to work, given her son's apparent need for attention, a third woman "said she had been thinking a lot about it. Frankly, she did have to work. They were buying their house and her earnings were greatly needed."⁽⁵⁰⁾ 

Women applying for day care during the war also expressed the conviction that day care would be good for their children. Mrs. Kingston told the Wharton social worker that she "realized whether or not it was necessary for her to work, Beatrice had to learn how to get along with other children and she felt it would be much simpler for other children to teach her this to her than for an adult."⁽⁵¹⁾ Similarly, Jessie Low "said, laughingly, that she could not explain this part to her mother but had said she was coming over here...because she is anxious for her [daughter] to be able to get along with other children."⁽⁵²⁾ Another mother explained to the social worker that "she thought it would be best for all of them if she were able to go to work and leave Harry in a place where he could be associated with other children and where the adults around him would not have such a tendency to spoil him." She also mentioned her hopes that Harry would learn to read and learn his ABCs at the nursery.⁽⁵³⁾ Jennie Lobofsky, who applied for day care at Neighborhood Centre so she could help her husband with the family's dress shop, also felt that her daughter would benefit from attending the nursery. In their current situation she had no playmates, "and being a gregarious youngster, has manifested a need for group association that the family cannot supply. The mother feels that the child can gain a great deal from...group experience, learn social amenities and get a chance to develop."⁽⁵⁴⁾ The idea that day care was beneficial for children as well as for parents thus bolstered women's perception that wage work was a good way to fulfill their family obligations and improve their children's future. 

So while public debate swirled around them, mothers made their own decisions about how best to fulfill their family obligations. Although they did not speak in terms of patriotic sacrifice, their attitudes were shaped by the way in which government campaigns to recruit women as defense workers helped legitimize maternal wage-earning, and, by extension, day care. 

"Indignant Mothers' Marches": Arguing for Day Care 

The end of the war did not bring an end to debates over the reciprocal obligations of mothers and the state. With a broadened sense of entitlement, Philadelphia women challenged politicians and policy makers, insisting on their right to have care provided for their children. These "indignant mothers" were successful: instead of closing their doors when the soldiers came home, Philadelphia's public day care centers became the focus of public protest and controversy throughout the late 1940s, and continued to operate in a quieter fashion for more than twenty years after that. Drawing on arguments about the state's obligation to soldiers' families, the dangers of juvenile delinquency, and the virtues of women's wage work in supporting their children, these women effectively pressured city officials into expanding what had been an emergency wartime measure into a long-term obligation of government. 

Looking back in 1948, the Philadelphia Bulletin described the city's public day care program as having a "stormy history, punctuated by indignant mothers' marches on City Council, skirmishes with the police, political recriminations and repercussions, and the like."⁽⁵⁵⁾ Although the public day care centers had been clearly defined as a temporary wartime measure, the prospect of their closing with the cutoff of federal funds in 1945 brought waves of protest. From 1945 to 1949, Philadelphia mothers wrote angry or pleading letters to Washington, carried petitions, organized demonstrations in front of City Hall, filled the gallery of City Council meetings, and met with the mayor and with school officials. The School Board kept trying to terminate the program, but with support from the Mayor's special budget, about ten day care centers continued to operate throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Thus Philadelphia became one of the very few cities across the country that carried on its wartime day care centers for years after the end of the war.⁽⁵⁶⁾ 

Although it had many limitations, the public day care program was significant because it presented day care in a new light, advancing the view that day care was a straightforward need of many families, and a public responsibility, rather than a charity for poor and dysfunctional families. Removed from the realm of private charity, day care became politicized. Significantly, public day care was something that could be fought for, something that women could argue they had a right to. By contrast, the private day nurseries were offered as a gift, and mothers could not object when it was taken away. When the Neighborhood Centre nursery was closing in 1950, for instance, due to budgetary constraints and demographic changes in the settlement house's neighborhood, the only recorded protest came from one of the children who attended the nursery: "My mommie said she knew we just had to close, it just couldn't last."⁽⁵⁷⁾ This fatalistic statement makes a striking contrast with the vigorous and sophisticated protests conducted by the mothers using the public day care centers. 

The types of arguments that protesting mothers made as they tried to secure permanent funding for the city's public day care centers suggest that the sense of mutual obligations between women and the state had been heightened during the war. This was particularly true of women whose husbands were serving in the military. The government granted these women allotments to replace their husbands' wages, and many of the women used government-funded day care centers for their children when they went out to work to supplement those allotments. When the federal government withdrew funding for the day care centers before many men had returned home, these women expressed their righteous indignation. One woman wrote to ask how she was supposed to support her family until her husband returned from war. "Have you considered what would happen if the centers closed? How would I support myself, my children? Must I depend on charity? It is inevitable if the centers close."⁽⁵⁸⁾ Rose Bloomfield, one of the leaders of the group of protesting mothers, wrote to the Children's Bureau in 1945, saying that the closing of the centers was "so unfair it makes my blood boil." Her husband was a soldier who would not be home soon, despite the official end of hostilities, and she needed to work "to keep my apartment together." She was not only concerned with herself, she said, but with "so many other mothers" who must keeping working in order to support their children. "Now what will they do?" She closed by asking Katherine Lenroot to "convince Congress how important it is to allocate funds immediately," writing, "We've won the bloodiest war in history, now let's win permanent Day Care for our children."⁽⁵⁹⁾ Although her immediate claim was based on her husband's military service, she clearly saw a long-term need for day care. Daisy Glass, whose three children attended the day care center at the James Weldon Johnson housing project, explained that she needed to work in order to pay her children's medical expenses in her husband's absence. She was "endeavoring to keep a nice comfortable home for my children and my husband when he returns. I can do these things only if I am working." She moved from pleading on the basis of her special needs to arguing that the government owed her a debt: "I think our government owes us mothers a moral favor in return for the use of our husbands and I ask that money be appropriated to keep these centers open."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Women who had sacrificed their private interests by "loaning" their husbands to the war effort deserved something in return. 

This sense that the wives and children of servicemen had an especially strong claim on the government was shared by many. A letter from a sailor still in the service expressed his anger when he heard that the day care centers were to be shut down and that his wife would have difficulty in continuing work without having care for their daughter. He wrote, 

That, my good people, is what we in the service enjoy getting. We just love serving our country and giving our life and blood and just as soon as the skies look clear again, people just forget all that we gave up so that we could live in a peaceful world again....I could just as well stood hidden behind my 2-B classification and would have been a civilian today, instead of in the Navy worrying whether my wife and children have enough to eat or wear. Did you ever try to run a house and take care of two children on $100 a month?...We didn't kick about that either, instead our wives went out and worked so that they could have enough. Filling jobs in defense plants, donating blood, buying war bonds and doing everything they possibly could to help the war effort. So, now that it's all over, you say "Thanks a million sucker" and start kicking our families around.⁽⁶¹⁾ 

Mrs. Max Weintraub explained that although she was lucky enough to have parents to take care of her son while she worked, she was writing on behalf of other mothers less fortunate than herself. Without the centers, she wrote, "these other women are lost," for it would take months until their husbands returned and established themselves, "enabling the mothers to become plain housewives as they desire." She portrayed these women's decision to work as virtuous self-sacrifice, and pleaded for "a little consideration for these other mothers, who tried all they could, not [only] in giving up their husbands, but also the pleasures of taking care of their own children, so they could plan and hope for the future."⁽⁶²⁾ 

The mothers who organized the public protests were obviously aware of the claim that servicemen's wives and children had on the state. One of the first delegations lobbying the mayor for the continuation of the centers was made up of the wives of servicemen, the group of sixty mothers who sat in on City Council meetings were all servicemen's wives, and the women and children demonstrating for the centers in October 1945 carried placards detailing cases of servicemen's families who depended on the centers; one read, "Husband Killed in Action." As they saw their husbands and other returning veterans benefiting from the G.I. Bill, perhaps these women felt that they, too, deserved some government help in recognition of what they had contributed to the war effort, whether through their own labor or through the "use of their husbands." City Councilman Wallace Eagan also recognized the city's responsibility to the families of servicemen when he argued that the city "is duty bound to take care of only those children whose parents are away because of military service."⁽⁶³⁾ 

As the mothers who protested the closings of the day care centers were well aware, however, arguments about the public's obligation to the families of servicemen could only be effective for a limited period of time. To "win permanent day care for our children," the protesters would have to make the more difficult argument that the state had an obligation to provide care for children even in peacetime. They thus had to counteract the idea that working mothers and day care were somehow un-American. When the School Board was debating taking on the child care program during the war, board member Leon Obermayer explained his opposition by saying, "Mothers should be sent home to look after their children. The idea of day care centers is copied directly from Russia, where children are brought up in similar centers."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Writing to the Bulletin's 1948 forum on day care, Agnes Lewis of the Blue Star Mothers of America declared, "America is built on the bedrock of family ties and we refuse to imitate the Soviet Union, where 6,000,000 children are in such centers while the mothers are in forced labor camps." She explained that her group opposed the "communistic" child care centers, instead urging public officials to increase appropriations to mothers' assistance funds so that mothers could stay home with their children. Others who wrote to the Bulletin objecting to providing public day care also felt that it violated the proper balance between women's responsibilities to their families and the duties of the state. For instance, Mathilde Christman wrote, "Nursery-age children should be in the home ...A child is each parent's responsibility, not the state's." ⁽⁶⁵⁾ 

Arguing for permanent day care could only be successful if mothers' wage work was portrayed as legitimate means of meeting their private obligations to their families. Day care could thus be cast as a way for the government to help women serve their families better, just as it had helped them serve the nation during the war. In order to counteract the popular image of mothers who went out to work in order to avoid responsibility for their children, supporters of day care stressed that mothers worked out of economic necessity, not from choice. Child welfare professionals in Philadelphia described women's work as an obligation, suggesting that mothers who were "forced to help support their families" were equally deserving of assistance as military widows and women whose husbands had been crippled during the war.⁽⁶⁶⁾In response to the Bulletin's request for readers' opinions about day care, one woman who was the sole support of her family wrote simply, "Who will help me if I don't work? Nobody. I could write all day and night and you couldn't understand what this means to me." Another mother explained that she was working only because she was separated from her husband. Without her wages (which were dependent on having affordable day care), her children "would have had to be put away." In response to those who worried that public day care centers would encourage women to work and abandon their children, she declared, "So that's how I am working. No mother would want to work to leave her children."⁽⁶⁷⁾ 

Another way in which day care furthered state interests, proponents argued, was by helping mothers avoid dependence on public welfare. Mrs. James Clancy wrote to the Bulletin, "Keep these centers open. They are the most worthy thing this city has ever done for people who would rather work for their loved ones than take charity." Mrs. John Kotzian agreed: "God bless the child care centers. They enable us to maintain our dignity and pride by using the two hands God gave us, instead of crawling and begging for charity." And Milo Upjohn of the American Association of Social Workers pointed out, "Many women with small children do not have a choice between working or staying home. Aid to dependent children does not provide even the minimum amount of money needed for enough food, clothing, and fuel." ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Many of the women applying for private day nursery care for their children also expressed their preference for working over relying on government support. After talking with Viola Taylor, a widow who brought her son Jamie to Wharton, the social worker suspected that the boy was having difficulty adjusting because he sensed his mother's own reluctance to go out to work. Mrs. Taylor agreed with this explanation, but "she quickly added that she could not accept relief and stay home. She is accustomed to being responsible and wants to provide for her family in her own way."⁽⁶⁹⁾ Naomi Scott, whose husband had left her two years earlier, expressed her shame about being reliant on the charity of friends. When the social worker asked if she had ever considered getting mother's assistance, 

Mrs. S said that she knew of this, but that she did not want to get charity. She had always worked up until the children's birth and even worked for a period after Jefferson's birth until that of Daniel's. She feels that she is young and strong and that she can get work and support herself and her family, without having to get help from a charitable organization.⁽⁷⁰⁾ 

Emma Hawkins, who received a mothers' pension while she took a vocational course at evening high school, explained that she "prefers employment to continued dependence on State Funds," and later "expressed the feeling that she would be failing [her children] if she did not now take over the role of chief supporter."⁽⁷¹⁾ Although these women knew that the day nurseries were linked to charity, they all saw the nurseries as part of a strategy of self-reliance that preserved their dignity in a way that public aid did not. 

Mothers pushing for the continuation of the public centers rarely made claims based on the educational, developmental, and social benefits that day care gave their children. Given how frequently mothers applying to place their children at Wharton and Neighborhood Centre day nurseries cited these types of explanations, their absence from public debates and demonstrations is striking. Most advocates for public day care felt more comfortable talking about the need to keep children safe and prevent juvenile delinquency than talking about the positive benefits of day care to children. Instead of arguing that day care was educationally beneficial to children, many parents defended the public day care centers merely on the grounds that they protected children from physical danger. Truck driver Charles Stokley wrote to the Bulletin's forum on day care to say that he saw "so many children running the streets and I don't want my truck to hit any of them." He was grateful for the good care that his little girl received in one of the public day care centers, writing, "The Board of Education is doing a swell job. I hope they can continue."⁽⁷²⁾ Concern over juvenile delinquency ran high during this period, and was particularly associated with wage-earning mothers; this concern was one of the strongest points that day care advocates had on their side. During protests in April 1948, mothers picketed City Hall carrying signs reading "Help Keep Our Children Off the Streets," and "Prevent Juvenile Delinquency -- keep centers open!" and arguing that if the centers closed, their children "will have no refuge but the streets while their mothers are working."⁽⁷³⁾ Significantly, it was the testimony of Juvenile Court Judge Charles Brown about the need to protect the children of working mothers from the dangers of juvenile delinquency that convinced the City Council to drop the motion to limit the centers to the children of servicemen. This emphasis on delinquency was another way to suggest that it was ultimately in the local government's interest to care for the children of working mothers -- for if it did not help mothers discharge their obligations to their families, it would produce a generation of criminals who might make more threatening claims on the state. 

The main arguments that were made in favor of the public day care centers -- that they prevented juvenile delinquency, provided a safe haven for children, and permitted women in dire financial straits to work rather than relying on public assistance -- were fundamentally similar to those made by the elite founders of private charitable day nurseries at the turn of the century. Women fighting for the extension of day care centers did not use some of the newer arguments in favor of women's wage work and day care that had emerged since the 1930s: that mothers' employment could raise a family's standard of living and improve the quality of children's lives, and that day care was educationally and socially beneficial to children. Apparently the mothers who organized the protests and wrote letters to Washington and to the Bulletin felt that these types of arguments would not convince politicians and taxpayers of the need to pay for day care centers; perhaps they did not feel secure enough themselves about these justifications for wage work to use them in making a case for public support of day care centers. The result of this strategy was to narrow and diminish the demand for day care by identifying it with poverty, single-mother households, and juvenile delinquency. Although they were successful in securing funding for the public day care centers, these types of arguments had the unintended consequence of distancing day care from the realm of universal social needs which might be provided without question as part of the state's responsibility to its citizens. 

Throughout the war and postwar years, day care became a matter of public attention and political debate as never before. The typically invisible work of caring for young children took on new meaning, and became part of attempts to define women's role in a war effort that demanded female labor on the home front as well as male sacrifice on the battle front. Different conceptions about mothers' obligations to their children, to their families, and to the war jostled for primacy; child welfare experts and government officials claimed the right to decide how women should serve the nation, while mothers themselves pursued their own solutions. The sense of mutual obligation between mothers and the state that the war had generated enabled women to claim an ongoing right to publicly funded day care in the postwar years. Whether they were serving the nation, serving the family, or making claims on the state, women found their citizenship inextricably linked to ideas about their maternal obligations to children. 

1. Linda Kerber coined this term in "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment--An American Perspective," American Quarterly, 28 (1976), pp. 187-205, and Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For critique of Kerber's emphasis on motherhood in the immediate post-Revolutionaryperiod, see Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly XLIV (October 1987), p. 690. 

2. Linda Kerber, "A Constitutional Right to be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship," in Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History As Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 23, 31. 

3. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Politics of Social Provision in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 23, 28. 

4. Edna Bullock, ed., Selected Articles on Mothers' Pensions (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1915), p. 28. For more on mothers' pensions and their limitations, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Joanne Goodwin, "An American Experiment in Paid Motherhood: The Implementation of Mothers' Pensions in Early Twentieth Century Chicago," Gender and History 4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 323-342; Sonya Michel, "The Limits of Maternalism: Policies Toward American Wage-Earning Mothers During the Progressive Era," in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Wendy Sarvasy, "Beyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism, Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist Welfare State," Signs 17 (Winter 1992). 

5. Grace Abbott, acceptance speech at awarding of medal by the National Institute of Social Sciences, 1931. Quoted in Kriste Lindenmeyer, "A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 175-176. 

6. Unpublished summary of conference on day care for children of working mothers, 11/14/41, Box 114, Children's Bureau records (Record Group 102), National Archives. 

7. 3/5/42 statement from Mary Anderson, Office Files of the Director, 1918-1848, Government, Box 21, "Children's Bureau" file. Records of the Women's Bureau, Department of Labor, (Record Group 86) National Archives. The quote from Perkins is found in a Children's Bureau policy statement, "Policies Regarding the Employment of Mothers of Young Children in Occupations Essential to the National Defense," 1/26/42, in the same folder. 

8. Memo from Bessie Trout to Katherine Lenroot, 8/10/44, Box 116, File 4-9-10 1941-44,Children's Bureau records (hereafter CB). Emphasis in original. 

9. Angelo Patri, "Children Look for Mother's Affection," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin 10/18/43. This advice column was placed strategically next to a story about how mothers were making ends meet through part-time work and other strategies when their husbands were serving in the military. For more on Patri, a nationally syndicated columnist whose parenting advice was popular, see Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 

10. Quoted in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 74. Emphasis in original. 

11. Sonya Michel, "American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars , ed. Margaret Higgonet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 155-157. 

12. Children's Bureau, A Children's Charter in Wartime (Bureau Publication No. 283), p. 1. 

13. Susan B. Anthony II, Out of the Kitchen -- And Into the War: Women's Winning Role in the Nation's Drama (New York: Stephen Daye, 1943), p. 130. 

14. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 124. The Women's Bureau Advisory Committee policy statement, 1/22/42, in Children's Bureau, "Policies Regarding the Employment of Mothers of Young Children," Children's Bureau folder, Box 21, Office Files of the Director, 1918-1948, Women's Bureau records. 

15. Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), p. 58. 

16. For more on specific policies and their impact, see Elizabeth Rose, A Mother's Job: The History of Day Care, 1890-1960 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1998), chapter 6. 

17. Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 111. 

18. Employer-sponsored day care does not seem to have existed in Philadelphia; no mention of any industry-sponsored day care center was made in any records of the PADN, reports of the public day care program, or newspaper articles about day care during the war. Frieda Miller of the Women's Bureau explained in a 1951 letter that there were only a handful of employer-run child care facilities in the country during the war, although employers sometimes contributed financially to the operating costs of community-run day care centers. Frieda Miller to Margaret Ackroyd (Rhode Island Department of Labor), 2/16/51. Folder 3-1-2-4-2, Box 28, General Correspondence, Office of the Director, Women's Bureau Records. 

19. Ethel Beer, "Help Mothers Win the War," The Trained Nurse and Hospital Review Vol CVIII, No. 3, (March 1942), CB files. 

20. Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 89-91. 

21. Robert Westbrook, "Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Political Obligation in World War II," The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 203 and passim. Robert Griswold makes a similar argument in Fatherhood in America, p. 164. For examples of how women's war work was cast as an obligation to their men, see Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 126-128. 

22. Revere Copper advertisement, quoted in Westbrook, "Fighting for the American Family," p. 213. 

23. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 49-50, 78-79. 

24. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 130-137. Government directives specifically instructed magazine writers to focus on recruiting women with children over the age of 14 for war work. 

25. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 54-55. 

26. For the argument that most women workers would have entered the work force even without the war, and that most went to work to seize opportunities rather than out of patriotism, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 276-279. 

27. Fanny Christina Hill, quoted in Sherna Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, The War, and Social Change (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 23. 

28. "Mothers, Ready for Jobs, Welcome First 'War Nursery,'" Philadelphia Evening Bulletin 2/7/42. 

29. Howard Dratch, "The Politics of Child Care in the 1940s," Science and Society 38 (Summer 1974), p. 197. 

30. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, p. 81. 

31. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 191. 

32. FSDN Board meeting minutes 3/8/43; annual meeting minutes 1943. First Family Day Care Association collection, Urban Archives, Temple University Library. 

33. Press release from the United War Chest, n.d. Philadelphia Bulletin clipping collection, Urban Archives, Temple University Library. 

34. Dratch, "Politics of Child Care," p. 185. 

35. The auxiliary women also demanded that nurseries serve nutritious meals and operate for long hours to accommodate working women's schedules. Congress of Women's Auxiliaries of the CIO, Third Annual Conference, 11/4/43, in CB Box 114. Unions represented at this conference included the United Auto Workers, The United Federal Workers of America, the United Electrical Workers, and National Miners' Union, and the Textile Workers' Union; the auxiliary women were not themselves workers. 

36. Dratch, "Politics of Child Care," p. 185. 

37. Susan Hartmann, "Women's Organizations During World War II: The Interaction of Class, Race and Feminism," in Women's Being, Woman's Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History, ed. Mary Kelly (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), p. 321. 

38. Michel, "American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family," p. 166. 

39. Anthony, Out of the Kitchen, p. 3. Italics added. 

40. Anthony, Out of the Kitchen, pp. 130-131. Italics in original. 

41. Dratch, "Politics of Child Care," p. 177. 

42. Wharton case 19210/639. Wharton Centre collection, Urban Archives, Temple University Library. Names of clients in case records have been changed to preserve confidentiality. 

43. Wharton case 19308/650. 19% of the mothers in the Wharton case records from these years were employed in defense industries, while 29% were employed in other factories and 30% worked as domestics. 

44. Wharton case 20303/737 

45. Wharton case 19421/677. Ultimately the mother decided to go on Mothers' Assistance and stay home from work. 

46. Wharton case 22003/829. 

47. NC case 1397. Neighborhood Centre collection, Philadelphia Jewish Archives. Neighborhood Centre was a settlement house serving a mostly Jewish immigrant neighborhood in South Philadelphia; by the 1940s, many of its clients were small business owners. 

48. Wharton case 19802/687. 

49. Wharton case 20503/752. 

50. Wharton case 22410/886. 

51. Wharton case 22302/868. 

52. Wharton case 21908/820. 

53. Wharton case 23002/934. 

54. NC case 1284. 

55. "What About Day Nurseries?" Philadelphia Bulletin, 6/2/48. 

56. California was the only state that continued a sizable program, with 288 centers operated as of February 1949; Massachusetts only had four state-funded centers in 1948; New York City had 91 centers as of August 1949, and Washington, D.C. and Detroit were each operating six centers. Evelyn Smith to Mrs. Felix Gentile, CB Box 407. In Philadelphia, twelve centers, ten in public school buildings and two in housing projects, seem to have continued on quietly after protests subsided, serving between 800 and 1200 children and charging fees set on a sliding scale according to family income. Preference was still given to the children of employed mothers, but the centers also took families who were referred by social agencies because of illness in the home or special needs of the child. After a temporary decrease in enrollments in 1946, when federal funding and the number of centers were cut, enrollment in the centers rose steadily; from 1952 on, the number of children attending the thirteen centers was higher than in 1945 when there had been twenty centers. Wharton Centre Day Nursery Auxiliary Committee, 11/2/49, Box 27, Folder 180. Enrollment was 1085 in 1945 and reached 1111 in 1952, growing to 1188 by 1963. School District of Philadelphia, "Child Care Centers: Report of Twenty Years of Operation, 1944 to 1964," Urban Archives, p. 19. 

57. NC case 1501. Parents did organize and protest when the Nursery School was being shut down in 1942 in order to reestablish a Day Nursery at the settlement. Perhaps parents were more likely to protest the replacement of an educational program with a custodial one than to demand the continuation of a custodial program. 

58. Mrs. Bernard Sutow to Katherine Lenroot, 9/1/45, CB. 

59. Rose Bloomfield to Katherine Lenroot, 8/31/45, CB. 

60. Daisy Glass to Katherine Lenroot, 9/5/45, CB. 

61. Michael Weintraub to CB, 9/6/45, CB. 

62. Mrs. Max Weintraub to CB, 9/7/45, CB. 

63. "Care Center Funds Voted for Vets' Children Only," Philadelphia Bulletin 11/16/45. 

64. "Child Care Center Plan Expanded," Philadelphia Bulletin 12/28/43. 

65. "Readers Favor Continuing City's Child Day Care Centers," Philadelphia Bulletin, 6/13/48. 

66. Mrs. Albert Nalle to Frederic Garman, City Council, 11/30/45, Wharton Collection. Emphasis in original. 

67. "Readers Favor Continuing City's Child Day Care Centers," Philadelphia Bulletin, 6/13/48. 

68. "Readers Favor Continuing City's Child Day Care Centers," Philadelphia Bulletin, 6/13/48. 

69. Wharton case 23003/935. 

70. Wharton case 22802/920. 

71. Wharton case 21901/814. 

72. "Readers Favor Continuing City's Child Day Care Centers," Philadelphia Bulletin, 6/13/48. 

73. "150 Mothers Besiege City Hall To Win Child Care Fund Pledge," Philadelphia Bulletin, 4/22/48. 

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

6. 

7. 

8. 

9. 

10. 

11. 

12. 

13. 

14. 

15. 

16. 

17. 

18. 

19. 

20. 

21. 

22. 

23. 

24. 

25. 

26. 

27. 

28. 

29. 

30. 

31. 

32. 

33. 

34. 

35. 

36. 

37. 

38. 

39. 

40. 

41. 

42. 

43. 

44. 

45. 

46. 

47. 

48. 

49. 

50. 

51. 

52. 

53. 

54. 

55. 

56. 

57. 

58. 

59. 

60. 

61. 

62. 

63. 

64. 

65. 

66. 

67. 

68. 

69. 

70. 

71. 

72. 

73.