Gordon W. Powley's photo is of the first specifically wartime day nursery in Toronto which opened on 6 October 1942 at 95 Bellevue Avenue. Initially a provincial project, it was later brought under the terms of the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement. Shown here is a Women's Voluntary Services' volunteer who assisted at the nursery one whole day or two half-days a week. Prepared for this work by a twelve-lecture course in child care, the volunteers were eventually replaced by a staff of paid workers who had received an intensive course in the psychology and care of the child at the Institute of Child Study in Toronto.
The Women's Division of National Selective Service sponsored radio dramas to convince mothers working in war industry that day nursery care would benefit their young children. Magazines also extolled the virtues of such care. For instance, Marjorie Winspear in the National Home Monthly applauded the gentle but firm discipline used in the nurseries to get the two to six year olds to eat everything on their plates and to take afternoon naps without fuss.
Open weekdays and Saturday mornings, the nurseries supplied two full meals and a snack each day. A few nurseries were set up in houses, but more often church or community halls were converted for the purpose. Independently of the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement, some companies built day nurseries for their own employees near their factories.
The first government-supported day nursery in MontrÄal was in the Maisonneuve district close to the station where women left for work in the Cherrier shell-filling plant of Defence Industries Limited. National Selective Service officials confronted an adverse attitude toward the establishment of state nurseries in QuÄbec, but when they were closed in October 1945 there was protest from MontrÄal working mothers and social agencies just as there was in Toronto a year later.
Courtesy: Toronto Telegram Photograph Collection, York University Archives
