ABSTRACT
Did women finally gain the ‘right to work’ after 1945? During the long postwar boom, which continued until the early 1970s, employment policies certainly shifted to the extent that the Ministry of Labour and National Service actively recruited married women into certain branches of paid employment. In these circumstances the rate of labour force participation by women rose markedly. Between 1951 and 1968 the total number of women in paid employment increased by 1.6 million,3 and the number of married women in paid work rose from 2.25 million in 1947 to 3.75 million.4 However, it has been an overstatement to suggest that there were radically changed attitudes among policymakers towards working women,5 or that wives finally gained the ‘right to work’ (Wilson, 1980, p. 208) or emancipation and equality of opportunity (Robertson, 1979, p. 35). In fact, in many ways, despite superficial changes, employment policies during the postwar labour shortage continued to reinforce gender inequality in paid and unpaid work. Governments and the ‘free market’ continued to discriminate in employment and related policies on the grounds of gender. Policies nevertheless did diverge from those of the interwar period, which had been typified by the marriage bar. Instead, wives from the end of the Second World War were seen as having a dual role. This chapter looks in more detail at what the dual role entailed.
