As women continue to fight for gender equity in the workplace, a new paper co-authored by Nobel Prize economist Claudia Goldin on a World War II-era act used to support working mothers reveals what can be done with political will.

In "Mobilizing the Manpower of Mothers: Childcare under the Lanham Act in World War II," currently available in the NBER Working Paper Series, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics examined the impact of this 1940 legislation, which was initially passed to finance infrastructure, but later funded childcare for working mothers.

As the working paper explains, the Lanham Act created and supported both nurseries for preschool-age children and extended-hour services for schoolchildren. "This was a national, practically universal, federally funded preschool program," said Goldin, the 2023 Noble laureate. "It is, to this day, the only one." (The well-known Head Start program, she noted, is federally funded but focuses on low-income children and families so is much more limited in scope.)

Conceived as a way to free additional labor that might be needed for the war effort, many of the so-called "Lanham nurseries" repurposed some Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) nurseries for young children, utilizing an Emergency Relief Appropriation Act that authorized "not less than $6 million" for this purpose. (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt added an additional $400,000 from another emergency fund, with more appropriations approved in 1943, putting the overall federal outlay at nearly $52 million from 1943–46.)

But while the WPA nurseries were designed to help children of low-income and unemployed parents, the Lanham nurseries aimed at helping working mothers with children ages 2 to 11.

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