But it took a bloody global war, and its production demands on the country’s workforce, for the United States to make such meaningful provisions for working parents.

[The problem persists today: 20 percent of parents are going into debt for child care.]

It is difficult to read this today, when it is widely acknowledged that American parents and caregivers are living through a child care crisis. Ours is an economy in which wages have stagnated and the cost of child care has soared — and, paradoxically, child care providers remain underpaid. In the face of this untenable situation come periodic public callbacks to World War II, when federal funds and partnerships, like the one with Kaiser, provided subsidized child care for hundreds of thousands of working women .

We had universal child care once, the line goes — why not again? I think of the office where I once worked, the mad dash to get to the day care in time to pick up my firstborn: What if I had gone to work knowing she was next door, that she was socializing, that she was fed, that she was surrounded by festive painted walls? And crucially, that I could afford it.

As with any moment in United States history, a closer look reveals a more complex reality. We did not have “universal child care”: we had a gesture toward it — one that benefited a select group of people, and was bitterly contested along the way. But for the families that it helped, it was an incredible, once-in-a-century boon.