There's No Place Like the Childcare Center: A Feminist Analysis of <Home> in the World War II Era

Abstract

During World War II, government and individual industries opened childcare centers across the country to support working mothers entering the war plant. At war's end, leaders moved to close these centers, prompting great debate. This essay explores the wartime discussion and postwar debate over the WWII childcare center by analyzing how the gendered ideograph <home> was deployed in ways that both praised and blamed not only the childcare center but also working mothers. While the primary work of the essay is to mine ideographic uses of <home>, it also aims to elaborate on feminist engagements with rhetorical historiography.

Notes

1I deeply appreciate the revision suggestions of the RR reviewers of this essay, Edward Schiappa and Maureen Goggin. I also thank Lindsey Bailet, undergraduate research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, for her help with the primary research that undergirds this analysis. Finally, I am grateful for a grant from the Women's Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh that supported my research for this project.

2As Maureen Honey writes, government and popular literature focused on the idea that working women were young, white, and middle-class women who “entered the labor force out of patriotic motives.” The actual demographics of working women during wartime were “working class wives, widows, divorcees, and students who needed money to achieve a reasonable standard of living” (19). Many of these women had previous work experience but had lost their jobs or left the workforce during the Depression. Complicating the picture even further, the wartime worker was not always a white woman. Since black women's involvement in the workforce was already high before the war, their numbers did not increase as much as white women, moving from thirty-three percent to forty percent (Hartmann 78). Black women's occupational status did change during the war years, however, with many leaving domestic and agricultural work to take white-collar, industrial, manufacturing, and health-related jobs.

3The format <home> follows the standard scholarly practice used to designate ideographic usage.

4For additional ideographic analyses, see Condit and Lucaites, Hayden, Kuypers and Althouse, and Palczewski.

5It is important to note the age range of the children admitted to these childcare centers. At first, many centers hesitated to care for infants and focused their care on children over the age of two. However, due to the demands of working mothers, many of these centers did away with this rule and admitted infants (Kerr 164). Childcare programming also extended to the public schools in which “extended school services” were established for school-age children between the hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. (See Kellogg).

6The creation and management of these centers were not untouched by racial prejudice. See Stoltzfus for an extended analysis of the segregation of childcare centers.

7The Kaiser Child Service Centers at the Swan Island (Vancouver, Washington) and Oregon Ship (Portland, Oregon) plants were the most inventive and renowned wartime childcare centers. These centers were open twenty-four hours a day, 364 days a year, and they serviced 1,125 children a day, 375 children per shift (“Child Service Centers” 1). The centers employed 292 teachers, supervisors, and administrators who were led by such experts in the field of childcare as Lois Meek Stolz (PhD, Education), Miriam Lowenberg (PhD, Nutrition), and James Hymes (assistant state supervisor of nursery schools in New York state). The childcare center itself was replete with fifteen playrooms, eight exam rooms, an infirmary, a kitchen, a wading pool, and an interior play yard (“Designed”).

8See the Kaiser centers' Bo's'n's Whistle, for example.

9I greatly appreciate the recommendation of reviewer Edward Schiappa for suggesting the use of the term unspoken ideograph to describe the work of childcare advocates during this period.

10This quotation refers to Dorothy Hutchinson's article “Spotlight on Day Nurseries.”

11Retaining wartime jobs was difficult indeed since many working mothers' positions were cancelled because they were war-related or reassigned to returning soldiers. These women did, though, often find other employment in “low-wage ‘female' jobs, especially clerical, sales, and service work—all of which expanded enormously in the postwar decades” (Milkman 100). In their new positions, these women continued to rely on the childcare center.

12Childcare advocates did achieve some small victories. At the federal level, they persuaded the government to extend funding from October 1945 to February 1946. At local levels, activists in California and Massachusetts as well as in New York City, Denver, Washington DC, Detroit, and Philadelphia successfully argued for centers to stay open and continue supporting working mothers and their families (Stolzfus 37). These victories were also short-lived, however, as few remained in operation by 1960.

13See Jarratt, Ryan, Tasker and Holt-Underwood.

14For recovery projects, see Glenn; for projects that take up gendered rereading, see Mountford.

15See Enoch for an extended discussion of how feminist scholars are pushing the boundaries of feminist historiographic research.

16For feminist scholarship that pursues gendered ideographs, see Cloud, Hayden, and Palczewski.