Minding Children or Minding Machines... Women's Labour and Child Care during World War II

Davis, Lynne

doi:10.2307/27508862

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…During World War I there were isolated calls for 'creches, where the little ones could be minded while the mothers are at work; also restaurants and lodging houses' to be attached to factories (Woman Voter, 1915) but, as female mobilisation was minimal, there was no pressure on government to confront the issue. The entry of the Commonwealth Government into child care came with the Lady Gowrie Centres established in each capital city in 1939 to 1940 as 'demonstration centres', designed to establish norms against which the health of the child population could be measured (Brennan, 1994;Davis, 1988). These centres, Michel claims, are evidence of 'the universalistic tone of public support [in Australia], which emphasized the health benefits of child care … [and] served to destigmatize child care and inscribe a role for the state in this policy arena' (Michel, 1999, p. 291).…”

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Economists argued that the cost of paying for the unwaged work that married women performed in the home would far outweigh the benefits of engaging them as workers, and, most importantly, voluntary organisations representing women and children were implacably opposed (Davis, 1988).…”

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mothers, however, had been working in munitions factories since the outbreak of hostilities and had protested against the occasional attempts to deny them this opportunity (Davis, 1988). As the threat to Australia intensified, the drive to keep mothers of preschool children out of the workforce proved impossible to sustain.…”

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The advertisements recommended that women should use child care in order to free themselves for work. Given the limited child care available at the time, Davis (1988) suggests that this can be read as a ploy by at least one government department to seed a campaign for increased child care while deflecting the opprobrium that such a move would arouse onto the campaigners. Married women's participation rates rose dramatically, but the struggle for child care was to follow a more tortured course.…”

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While insisting that women with young children should be employed only in the most exceptional circumstances, they argued that funding should be used to extend the hours of existing kindergartens, creches and nursery schools. This, they hoped, would ensure that day care was seen as an extraordinary service, a reaction to the national emergency that would end when the threat of invasion had passed (Davis, 1988). The economy and efficiency of this view proved particularly attractive to senior male bureaucrats.…”

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In Whose Interest? Voluntarism and Child Care, 1880–1980

Swain

2004

Australasian Journal of Early Childhood

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This paper examines three periods in the history of child care: nineteenth-century creches, World War II day nurseries, and the 1970s Community Child Care movement. It argues that, in each of these periods, the services were shaped by three sets of competing interests: those of the mothers who needed or wanted to work; their children; and the volunteer committees or collectives anxious to 'rescue' children from forms of care they considered unsuitable. The final resolution, in each case, reflected not simply a response to the needs of working women and their children but rather a more complex process that often owed at least as much to the values of the service providers as those of the mothers and children in their care. A u s t r a l i a n J o u r n a l o f E a r l y C h i l d h o o d Speaking in Melbourne in 1952, mother and wartime childcare activist Marjorie Coppel reflected on the voluntary effort that underlay early childhood services. Voluntarism, she noted, may not be as efficient as government provision, but it was more innovative. 'The enthusiasm, the combining of people in a commonsense empirical sort of way, to achieve a service which no-one else would give them, these are the good worthwhile things about voluntary effort.' But, she warned, 'those who do voluntary work undertake it less for the sake of helping others in need than to help themselves' (Coppel, 1952, pp. 8-9). Where the selfinterest of the volunteers conflicted with the wider aims of the organisation, 'deep strains' were likely to arise. While not decrying the claims to innovation, this paper focuses on the self-interest inherent in voluntary action and the impact this has had on childcare provision in Australia. Child care is a contested terrain, the site at which the competing demands of the working mother and the preschool child are negotiated and perhaps resolved. Australian debates about the merits of private and public/community provision proceed from an uneasy consensus that child care is an essential service: on the one hand both a right and a social good, but also central to the functioning of the national economy. Jones (1996) has identified a tendency in historical debate to polarise and then construct chronologies which move from the bad past to a better present. Deborah Brennan's (1994) history of child care in Australia, The politics of Australian child care: From philanthropy to feminism, fits this pattern, confining the history of pre-1970s developments to two chapters, before moving on to celebrate second-wave feminism's role in shaping the pattern of provision in which 'community' and government work in partnership. So persuasive is this account that it has been taken up by American writer Sonia Michel (1999) as a model that the US could, but did not, follow.

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Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wartime Provisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In Whose Interest? Voluntarism and Child Care, 1880–1980

Swain

2004

Australasian Journal of Early Childhood

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Neutrino Astrophysics

Burrows¹

1994

Trends in Astroparticle-Physics

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The Development of the Victorian Municipal Preschool Association

O’Toole

1999

Australasian Journal of Early Childhood

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The Victorian Municipal preschool Association (VMPSA) was established in 1948 as an outcome of the expansion of kindergarten services into local government in Victoria. A significant player in this process was Dr Vera Scantlebury Brown, the then Director of the Maternal and Infant Welfare Branch of the Health Department. She had argued for many years that the best way to organise preschool activities was through local government, and she devised a municipal plan that recast preschool activity as a normal function of the state rather than a philanthropic activity. The rapid expansion of kindergartens in local government in Victoria after the Second World War echoed this shift of emphasis from philanthropy to education, in the establishment of the VMPSA, and, while it was short-lived in its initial inception, the VMPSA did lay the groundwork for a significant local government involvement in the state's kindergartens.

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Minding Children or Minding Machines... Women's Labour and Child Care during World War II

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

In Whose Interest? Voluntarism and Child Care, 1880–1980

In Whose Interest? Voluntarism and Child Care, 1880–1980

Neutrino Astrophysics

The Development of the Victorian Municipal Preschool Association

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