At the end of the war, the Lanham nursery schools closed, helping cast women out of the workforce to open up jobs for returning soldiers. The new national consensus dictated that children be cared for in the home, not dropped off at daycare. This belief stuck even as women’s employment resumed its upward climb after the war, though it had some prominent opponents. “The closing of childcare centers throughout the country certainly is bringing to light the fact that these centers were a real need,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in a newspaper column a month after the war ended. “Many thought they were purely a war emergency measure. A few of us had an inkling that perhaps they were a need which was constantly with us, but one that we had neglected to face in the past.” America never did get around to replacing the Lanham centers, though it got remarkably close in 1971, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, only to have it vetoed by President Nixon.

Even though it disappeared, the Lanham program demonstrates what happens when childcare is viewed as a collective responsibility.

More than a half-century later, 64 percent of women with children under the age of six are in the workforce, yet America’s work-family policies don’t even come close to those that existed near the end World War II, when only about 10 percent of mothers with children of those ages were working. Now, in 31 states and the District of Columbia, the average annual cost to send an infant to daycare can exceed a year’s tuition and fees at a public university. High childcare costs do not merely strain parents’ budgets; they often pressure women to drop out of the workforce, because in many cases the price of childcare would surpass earnings from a job. A lack of affordable childcare has contributed to the yawning long-term earnings gap between women and men.

The image of Rosie with a child strapped to her back is a reminder that, though there are good reasons to applaud the women who changed norms by working in munitions factories, advocates shouldn’t focus myopically on championing women’s employment. To do so would be to ignore the things—such as high-quality, affordable childcare—that make it feasible for mothers to participate in the labor force. Today, women are still expected to forget about or scale down their careers if no decent childcare options are available.

There are signs that a Lanham-like perspective is returning today. Slowly, conversation is turning away from the individualistic question of whether women can “have it all” (a query never directed at men) toward an acknowledgment that the absence of policies such as universal childcare have constrained women’s ability to hold down employment and have children—especially in a labor system that demands long working hours, dictates high childcare fees, and pays men and women unequally. What has long been treated as a private concern for mothers is now being recognized as a matter of national policy. Public intellectuals, Nobel economists, and Democratic presidential candidates have all declared their support for affordable, high-quality childcare.

It’s hardly encouraging that it took a world war for the U.S. government to establish the nation’s only universal childcare program. Still, if it, and other policies like it, seem unattainable today, consider what Rosie herself would say: We can do it.

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