In 1960, four hundred people gathered in Washington for a national conference on
day care--the first such gathering ever to be held in peacetime. The conference,
which was organized by the Children's Bureau and the Women's Bureau at the urging
of a new group, the National Committee for the Day Care of Children, sought to
communicate to the public "what a tremendous force for national well-being a full
program of day-care services for children could be." ¹ Speakers at the conference ex-
plained that the numbers of mothers working had doubled in the last decade and
were expected to continue growing, and proclaimed that the public needed to stop
stigmatizing working mothers; that working mothers could be better mothers than
those who stayed home feeling frustrated by being "nothing more exciting than a
housewife"; that day care advocates needed to stop apologizing for day care and in-
stead start "selling" it to the public; and that funding for day care needed to be dra-
matically expanded.

Such arguments reflected the new understanding of day care that had emerged dur-
ing the 1950s: an educational, beneficial experience for children of various social classes
whose mothers and fathers both worked outside the home, and a public service for
which the government might take responsibility. This new definition stood uneasily
next to, and often clashed with, the older understanding of day care as a private chari-
table enterprise, offering custodial care under less-than-ideal circumstances for the chil-
dren of poor families disrupted by a mother's need to go out to work.

Throughout the time period covered in this book, day care was transformed from a
charity for desperately poor single mothers to a widespread need of many families, and a
legitimate public responsibility. From its origins as an elite women's effort to bring ne-
glected children off the streets, day care had become a way for ordinary families to get
help raising their children. By 1960, working mothers were no longer objects of pity, but
simply members of society whose needs had to be addressed. Day care was no longer
just a gift bestowed on the poor by benevolent philanthropists, but a service that moth-
ers and child welfare advocates insisted the government had an obligation to provide.
Day care programs themselves were no longer seen as day-time orphanages, but as a
type of school, providing enriching experiences that would nurture children's emo-

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