ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the series of ways in which wartime government policies maintained women’s position as low-paid subordinates in the labour market and as unpaid domestic workers within marriage. One indication of policy-makers’ reluctance to promote the widespread absorption of women into industry during the early stages of the war was the way in which government policy effectively removed many women from the labour force. State-recruitment policies also facilitated the temporary employment of women. There was a careful avoidance of recruiting in ways that could have given the majority of women long-term ease of access to the range of jobs normally open mainly to men. There was an acknowledged relationship between government recruitment policy and permissible hours of paid employment. The main shift that occurred in policy toward working women at the end of the Second World War was in the way married women came to be regarded by politicians as having a ‘dual role’ in the postwar world.
