Marvelous for Terry?

Curtiss-Wright Corp., frankly out to get young mothers as war workers, is willing to sit with the baby. Last week it was doubling the size of the well-equipped, well-run nursery school on its Buffalo plane-factory grounds. Mothers working at Curtiss-Wright were more pleased than welfare authorities.

Each morning company guards pluck children from mothers' sides as they pass the plant gates. Eight and a half hours daily the moppets play, snooze, ingest assorted vitamins, watch test planes zoom by. Mothers pay 50-c- a day for food, Curtiss-Wright pays the overhead. Beamed one mother recently: "It's marvelous for Terry.. He eats his squash and tomato now without trouble and can even tie his shoes."

Diapers Must Go On. A steady campaign against industrial nurseries is carried on by most U.S. welfare workers and by Government agencies. They resent the widespread notion that women who stay home to care for children are slackers. "Education is a lifelong affair, but, especially for the very young, that does not mean scrapping a mother's care," says Acting Secretary Edna M. Geissler of the Child Care Section of New York City's Welfare Council. "I wish we could convince mothers of youngsters that their job at home is as patriotic as any in a factory."

"A mother in a plant," says Miss Geissler, "is only a fraction of a work unit because she puts a new strain on laundries, shops, nurses, hospitals and other services. A New York planebuilder recently complained that when he hired 5,800 women, he had to get 1,800 men to replace them when they stayed home to wash diapers."

In seeming agreement, the War Manpower Commission recently declared home care of young children "the first responsibility of women ... in war as in peace." When such women are employed, the WMC policy states, community projects should sit with the baby, "and not . . . individual employers or employer groups."

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