Fort Worth was on the front lines of the childcare crisis — and the solution — in 1941

Childcare for working parents is such a hot-button issue today, it is hard to realize just how long this has been a national concern. It started when women began entering the work force in large numbers, many of them mothers. Childcare today a multi-billion-dollar industry wrestling with issues of government regulations, rising costs, and a shortage of workers.

The modern issue began with World War II. As the nation’s men went off to war – 446,000 “fathers” entered service in 1943 alone — women took their places on the assembly lines and factory floors. Immortalized in government propaganda as “Rosie the Riveter,” many of those poster women were married with small children. The nation needed their labor, and they needed the money because the government allotment checks they received while their husbands were away, were not enough. The challenge was what to do with the children while mother worked an eight-hour shift, which might be the swing shift or even night shift. (Most defense plants ran 24 hours a day.) Too many “Rosies” did not have a near relative to care for her children.

The childcare issue landed on Fort Worth’s doorstep when the city became an aircraft manufacturing center. The Consolidated Vultee bomber plant opened in 1942, the same year Globe Aircraft got a contract to build AT-10 trainers for the Army Air Force. Employment at the bomber plant peaked two years later at 30,000, more than half of whom were women. Globe Aircraft employed additional hundreds of women. The bomber plant’s female workers famously included the seven Thompson sisters – Dell, Freda, Ruby, Marie, Daphne, Dorothy, and Jewel — who made history as the nation’s only family of sisters all working at the same plant.

The problem was Fort Worth’s existing private nurseries and foster homes were totally unprepared to handle the large numbers of children needing care 24/7. The city’s Council of Social Agencies headed by Mrs. Herbert Beavers took up the problem in March 1942, but a lack of funding and facilities kept them from making any progress solving the problem. More than a year into the war, the County Health Center created a 35-hour course to train women volunteers for childcare jobs.

Meanwhile, there were reports of children being left in cars on parking lots all day, spending the day (or night) alone at home, and even roaming the streets. The familiar social problems of child neglect and juvenile delinquency were compounded by complaints of chronic absenteeism at defense plants when mothers had to take time off from work to care for their children. That affected efficiency, which hurt the war effort, and nobody wanted that. Defense manufacturers all over the country begged the government to do something.

Congress got involved when it passed the Lanham Act in 1941, named for Fort Worth’s own Frederick Garland “Fritz” Lanham, a Democratic House member (Twelfth District) since 1919. The Federal Works Administration, created under this act, addressed the problem of day care for women working in defense plants and government offices. It was estimated that nationwide one-third of the women in the work force needed such help, making it not a government give-away but a “wartime necessity.”

At the end of June 1943 Congress created the first national childcare program, appropriating $20 million under the Lanham Act for that purpose. This did not mean free childcare, only subsidized childcare. A mother working in a defense plant or government office would still have to pay $3 to $3.50 a week for the service. The same act also provided funds to public schools in “defense communities” like Fort Worth, enabling them to take on additional children belonging to mothers who had moved to town to work at Consolidated Vultee or Globe Aircraft.

Absent federal money, Fort Worth had been doing what it could since early 1942 when the Chamber of Commerce appointed a “child welfare committee” to determine “whether the community is meeting the childcare problem with adequate facilities, and if not find out where more facilities are needed.” Initially, the committee focused on handling the possibility of a “massive coastal evacuation of children” should the enemy bombard the Texas coast, but it soon became evident the problem was more immediate. The Chamber opened a Child Care Information Center in its downtown offices to point Fort Worth mothers toward existing facilities. At the time, those facilities included the Fort Worth Day Care Nursery on South Adams and six other “nursery schools” subsidized by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, but that number was inadequate to meet the urgent demand.

Enter the Lanham Act. Under its provisions, Consolidated Vultee received a federal appropriation of $800,000 to set up a childcare center just inside the front gate. Soon, it became “a common sight to see a mother, tin hat on her head with a lunch bucket in one hand and a child’s hand in the other” walking across the parking lot. The facility cared for youngsters from 18 months to 6 years of age with a trained staff. Facilities like this all over the country provided children with supervised care, hot meals, and “directed play periods,” which allowed the mothers to focus their full attention on their jobs. At the height of World War II, the Consolidated Vultee center was open around the clock to serve mothers working swing shifts and night shifts. Older children were enrolled in programs run by the FWISD.

As soon as the war ended in August 1945, Congress stopped funding childcare facilities, taking the position that women should leave the factories and return home to care for their children as they had done in the past. All over the city, wartime “nurseries” were forced to close. Thousands of letters and petitions poured into Washington begging for the program to continue, pointing out that many servicemen were still overseas, and it might be months before they came home. In the meantime, defense plants might be cutting back, but women still had to work to support themselves and their children. Even if they could find space in one of the few private nurseries still operating, they would have to pay the going rate of $7 to $15 a week.

Congress responded by continuing the funding until February 1946. By that time, it figured the nation would be back on a peacetime footing. Unlike childcare, the Lanham Act continued to subsidize “emergency wartime housing” until 1948, benefiting college students on the G.I. Bill at both TCU and Texas Wesleyan. Fritz Lanham, judging by the amount of fan mail he received, was the most popular man in Congress just after the war.

Once the men reclaimed the factory floor and assembly line and their wives returned to the home, childcare became less of an issue for an affluent America over the next 30 years. Only as a new generation of women entered the workforce did it come up again in national discussion. Today, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have government-subsidized childcare. What a difference a world war makes.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.