Photo Credit: Gordon Parks, Courtesy LOC Prints & Photographs Division The Lanham Act, adopted in 1942, was the first and, thus far, the only universal childcare program in the U.S. Senate passed the first, and thus far only, national childcare program, voting $20 million to provide public care of children whose mothers were employed in the war effort. They did, however, become a form of de facto child care for parents employed on various WPA work-relief projects,” according to Dr. Designed as schools rather than as child care facilities, the ENS were only open for part of the day, and their enrollments were supposedly restricted to the children of the unemployed. The History of Childcare in the U.S., describes the New Deal effort: “Unlike the earlier nursery schools, which were largely private, charged fees, and served a middle-class clientele, these free, government-sponsored schools were open to children of all classes. Children would be left alone or brought along to the workplace, sometimes in hazardous conditions.įirst Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visits a WPA nursery school in Des Moines, Iowa in 1936.īetween 19, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) opened nearly 3,000 Emergency Nursery Schools (ENS), enrolling 64,000 students in 43 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. But strict eligibility requirements and inadequate funding compelled many women to find jobs. By 1930, nearly every state in the union had some form of mothers’ or widows’ pensions. Believing that mothers should stay home with their children, social reformers pushed for pensions-not childcare.
She could barely afford food, much less pay someone to care for her young family while she worked.Ĭhildcare has historically been a dilemma for poor and working mothers alike.
“She didn’t eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate.”įlorence Owens Thompson worked the fields with her children alongside her. “We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something,” Thompson’s daughter, Katherine McIntosh, recalled decades later. She is Florence Owens Thompson, the subject of Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 photograph, “Migrant Mother.” She looks out from the canvas tent where lives with her ten children, her hand cradling her haggard face. Her family is living in a migrant camp in Nipomo, California. Two children bury their heads into their mother’s shoulders. Photo Credit: Dorothea Lange, Courtesy LOC Prints & Photographs Division Florence Owens Thompson and her children.
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