The increased economic activity during the war led to a sustained period of prosperity. However, this, rather in the same way as early industrial and urban growth had before the Civil War, led to the greater domestication of women.
The period of campaigning for rights seen in the progressive era from the 1870s to the 1900s seemed like another age when the growth of suburbs led to greater emphasis on women in the home, away from the public sphere and public issues.
- Great prosperity after the war led to a reduction of social issues which women campaigned for.
- The Cold War brought about a period of conservatism in which it was all too easy to see campaigning for equal rights as somehow subversive or supportive of communism.
- If women were rewarded for their war work in 1917-18 by the right to vote, the rewards for the huge efforts made in the war of 1941-45 were not political as such, but rather to offer prosperity, labour-saving technology, and to be entrusted with bringing up children to respect American values of prosperity and freedom.
Idea of ‘suburbia’, nuclear family.
The post-war period can be seen as a period of stagnation, even regression.
By the end of 1946, 2 million women had been fired from heavy industry and 800,000 lost their jobs within two months of the end of the war against Japan in 1945.
Whatever political gains had been made since 1920, the right to political participation could not prevent wholesale discrimination against women workers.
- Women workers did not all return home, but they did have to accept lower pay and lower status and exclusion from key jobs,
- which were now considered too heavy for them.
- The gap between men’s pay and women’s pay increased in the period from 1945 to 1960.
- Sexual exploitation increased as new consumerism tried to take advantage of women’s sex appeal and coy flirtatiousness was often
- the only way to get some jobs.
- On the other hand, women were also expected to combine work with domestic responsibilities.
- There was still a concentration of women in the traditional caring roles of nursing, teaching and social work.
- Women’s public political roles mirrored this in a way that was not very different from the post-Civil War period.
In 1960 women made 60% of the average male’s wage