This paper examines three periods in the history of child care: nineteenth-century creches, World War II day nurseries, and the 1970s Community Child Care movement. It argues that, in each of these periods, the services were shaped by three sets of competing interests: those of the mothers who needed or wanted to work; their children; and the volunteer committees or collectives anxious to ‘rescue’ children from forms of care they considered unsuitable. The final resolution, in each case, reflected not simply a response to the needs of working women and their children but rather a more complex process that often owed at least as much to the values of the service providers as those of the mothers and children in their care.
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