How did traditional womens roles changed after WW2?
An increase in prosperity after WW2 meant that people were able to get married earlier, and live more easily on a single salary. Since people were getting married younger, girls were working for shorter periods, and sometimes not working at all, in America especially a lot of girls got married while still in college. A lot of women were working, but not necessarily enthusiastic about it. In ‘America’s Women’ Gail Collins writes: ‘Within a few years of the end of hostilities in 1945, employment of women was just about back to it wartime peak, and still climbing. However, the jobs they were holding down were not, for the most part, careers. Women were typists and sales clerks and telephone operators and receptionists, doing the low-paid and unglamorous work no returning veteran would want to snatch.’ Most married women did not go out to work, and most did not particularly want to. Those who had had experience of having to work and look after a family knew how exhuasting combining the two
