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"OF WOMEN, BY WOMEN, AND FOR WOMEN"1: THE DAY NURSERY MOVEMENT IN THE PROGRESSIVE-ERA UNITED STATES
| By Anne Durst |
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater |
| Pauline Lyons Williamson, a young African-American woman, was widowed in the 1880s and left with a small child to raise alone. In an effort to support herself, she moved to California with her son Harry, and found employment there as a nurse. She wrote to her family back East: "Harry is a great comfort to me. And if I can only take good care of him until he is able to help himself I shall not mind the hard work."2 |
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Another wage-earning mother, a young Irish-American woman known to us only as Mrs. T., was widowed in 1909 at the age of twenty-one. She was left with two children, and a third on the way. Thrown upon her own resources, Mrs. T. struggled to earn a wage sufficient to support her young family. After the birth of her third child, she returned to the occupation she had held before her marriage, and worked as a clerk for five to six dollars a week. As this did not provide a living wage, her church gave her a small sum each week for groceries while relatives helped with her rent.3 |
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Wage-earning mothers of the Progressive-era United States, like Williamson and Mrs. T., shared a very pressing concern: securing care for their young children during their working hours. Fortunately for Mrs. T., she lived with her mother-in-law, who cared for the two older children, while the baby lived for some time with Mrs. T.'s parents.4 Indeed, most wage-earning mothers turned to relatives, friends, or neighbors in order to solve their child care problems and some studies suggest that many appeared quite content with these arrangements.5 Other women, however, did not have access to such caretakers, and found it necessary either to leave their children at home alone or to search for child care outside of their circles of friends or relatives. |
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In response to the growing numbers of wage-earning mothers, middle- and upper-class women created day nurseries in cities throughout the United States, a movement analyzed recently by Sonia Michel in Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights and by Elizabeth Rose in A Mother's Job.6 In 1902, the National Federation of Day Nurseries (founded in 1898) recognized 250 day nurseries in the country, and by 1914 that number had increased to 618.7 Nurseries of this era ranged in size, some of them caring for 50–60 children.8 The day nursery movement was part of the Progressive era impetus to confront the difficulties brought on by rapid industrial and urban growth.9 An important part of this endeavor involved creating public (or extra-familial) institutions like the day nurseries that were responsible for the satisfaction of what had long been viewed as domestic or private needs.10 |
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