‘Women are in the war as much as their men.’ So opened a documentary film, directed by Donald Alexander in 1941, which explored the various childcare options available to working mothers during the Second World War. Five and Under, which was created by Alexander with the Ministry of Information for the Department of Health, explored the different places that women could turn for care for their preschool children: childminders, nursery schools, and day nurseries. The topic was of key interest to the Ministry of Information and the Department of Health because, although some childcare had been available to women in the pre-war years, it was only during wartime that the government had properly recognised the necessity of childcare provision to enable women to work. Once women’s labour had been re-labelled as a contribution to the war effort, and particularly once the conscription of women had been introduced by Ernest Bevin’s Ministry of Labour in 1942, childcare too became part of the mobilisation of the Home Front. Although women who had dependent children were exempt from conscription, many wished to do their bit by engaging in ‘war work’; many, too, needed to provide a stable income with their husbands away at war.

In Five and Under (1941), childminders, one of the few jobs reliably available for women without qualifications, were denigrated in favour of day nurseries. These were not entirely a wartime invention. A small number of day nurseries (provided by the government for babies from very young) and nursery schools (provided by local authorities for 2-5-year-olds) had been available pre-war. Still, they were often very difficult to access, expensive, or had places withheld only for women who were, for example, widows and therefore ‘needed’ to work. (Women had entered the workforce in the First World War but had largely returned to the home in the interwar years, not least because it was considered unpatriotic for a woman to take a job from a returning soldier). But it was only in the war — and only after protests from women and lobbying from groups such as the TUC’s Women’s Conference — that the government really applied itself to the provision of childcare. Government day nurseries sprang up, funded by the Ministry of Health, providing subsidised (1 shilling per child per week), wraparound (often 7am–7pm) childcare for women doing ‘essential’ war work.

In order to convince women that they should trust childcare, and in the context of research being conducted into child development in this period, the Ministry of Health emphasised the benefits of day nurseries beyond their role as safe and convenient childcare that would enable women to work. The idea of day nurseries as crucial for children’s psychosocial and educational development was pushed by the government, not only for poor families and uneducated mothers — who might also benefit themselves by learning ‘mothercraft’ — but also for other, more middle-class children that might benefit from being looked after by trained professionals rather than their parents. The idea of childcare as being better provided by professionals had of course always been popular among the privileged classes in Britain, who had long hired nursery nurses and governesses to raise their children at home. The propaganda around day nurseries extended these ideas; in a 1945 debate in the House of Commons, one MP pointed to a report by the medical officer which praised ‘the remarkable development, not of the semi-neglected child, but the average child in these nurseries.’

For a short time, it seemed that childcare might be understood as critical, not only to mothers, or to children, but to families — the same parliamentary debate also posited that childcare might also lead to fewer separations and divorces, many of which might be traced to couples drifting apart under the pressure of women providing 24/7 childcare. The film Five and Under closed with the female narrator looking forward to the end of wartime, and the health and education centres which would be ‘part of the new Britain which we women must help build for our children’ in a post-war world. And much of the welfare state, laid out in the Beveridge Report and built by the Attlee government, did make lives better for Britain’s children: universal healthcare, family allowances, new school buildings, and better education provision.

But childcare was not part of this new welfare state. In fact, the Attlee government’s approach to mothers was rather regressive. The famous ‘Labour For…’ series of posters featured few women, with one featured notably on the Labour for Homes poster with the tagline ‘She can’t make a home until she gets one’; mothers were treated very much as domestic beings, positioned in the welfare state as providers and carers without much sense that they might enjoy any agency of their own. At the war’s end, the Department of Health grant that enabled day nurseries to subsidise provision was ended; a hotchpotch of public and private childcare places sprang up, and their legacy is the eye-watering expense of privatised childcare in Britain today. The war, briefly, showed a moment when the state cared about what else mothers might want to do with their lives; the Attlee government, and subsequent British governments, shut down those possibilities for many women.