As women continue to fight for gender equality in the workplace, a new article co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin about a World War II-era law supporting working mothers shows what can be achieved with political will.

In “Mobilizing the Manpower of Mothers: Childcare under the Lanham Act in World War II,” the Henry Lee Professor of Economics examined the impact of this 1940 law, which was originally passed to fund infrastructure but later funded child care for working mothers.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, the Lanham Act created and supported both preschool-age kindergarten and expanded childcare for school-age children. “This was a national, virtually universal, federally funded preschool program,” said Goldin, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize. “To date, it is the only one.” (The well-known Head Start program, she noted, is federally funded but focuses on low-income children and families and is therefore much more limited in scope.)

Conceived as a way to free up additional labor that might be needed for the war effort, many of the so-called “Lanham Kindergartens” were repurposed for the purposes of Depression-era infant kindergartens, using an emergency relief appropriation law that authorized “at least $6 million” for that purpose. (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided an additional $400,000 from another emergency fund, and more funds were authorized in 1943, bringing the total federal government expenditure from 1943 to 1946 to nearly $52 million.)

But while the WPA kindergartens were designed to serve children of low-income and unemployed parents, the Lanham kindergartens aimed to serve working mothers with children between the ages of 2 and 11.

In these kindergartens and the extended care, in addition to year-round care, educational activities are also offered and, in most kindergartens, the preparation of meals based on nutritional science.

“We know from Gallup polls that virtually no one thought it was a good idea to hire women with preschool-age children,” Goldin said. “There was a lot of negative sentiment about it.”

But as the war continued to progress with no end in sight, mothers were seen as an essential resource to keep many industries running and to contribute directly to the war effort while the men went off to war. These efforts included producing supplies and manufacturing munitions and armor.

“The number of contracts for goods and services increased enormously” when the law took effect, said Goldin, who analyzed about 191,000 federal contracts from that period.

Goldin and her co-authors, Joseph Ferrie of Northwestern University and Claudia Olivetti of Dartmouth College, found that while the law did free up labor, most of its benefits went to women who were already working.

After the Great Depression, Goldin said, women sought better-paying jobs in the defense industry and textile factories of the South, which at the time were primarily reserved for white women.

Women, Goldin said, “were very pleased with the sudden wage increase.”

The law, she said, undoubtedly increased the labor force. However, “it was quite clear that women were entering the labor force whether they had children or not and whether they had preschool-age children or not,” she said. “Some of the kindergartens were established in 1942, but the majority were established in 1943 and 1944, and by that time the employment levels in those places were quite high.”

“We have data on federal contracts by city, and we also know where the Lanham money went in some of the early years, broken down by city,” Goldin said.

Compared with the 1940 census, these data show that the money distributed to 685 towns by 1945 went primarily to areas where many women were already working. “We can see that the Lanham kindergartens were opened there. Not necessarily in the places with the greatest need, but in the places where women actually had a desire to find additional work.”

While this paper examines “how this program evolved and why it evolved the way it did,” that wasn’t the original impetus for the research, Goldin says.

The Nobel Prize winner’s original idea was to study the program’s impact on the children in kindergarten as adults, but this proved difficult because there were insufficient federal records detailing the exact locations of the kindergartens.

“We probably already have the addresses of about half of them.” In the course of this research, however, Goldin and her co-authors came across information that could be used in the other project.

“I love being an economic historian. I’m a detective,” she said.

Although she notes that research on the Lanham Act is ongoing, she continues to gain new insights into the impact of that 1940 law. “It was actually a very small program,” Goldin said. “But it had a big impact in some small towns.”

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