ABSTRACT
The conclusion of the Second World War took place over a protracted period and although some women feared that their employment prospects would end as abruptly as they had at the end of the previous war, the reality was more complex. The lay-offs in munitions factories began quite a while before the end of the war and, even then, women were re-directed into other work, such as aircraft construction where production was still increasing.1 However, again, the general expectation was that married women would want to return to the domestic sphere and that young single women would return to ‘women’s work’ in the interlude before marriage and starting a family. Many women expected only to be employed in the particular work they were undertaking for the duration of the war. They remembered what had happened at the end of the First World War to them or to their mother’s generation and had few illusions that anything had changed, although some did not necessarily want to lose their wartime work. Braybon and Summerfield cite a woman in a M-O survey undertaken in 1942:
Look at the last war. Those hundreds of women ran our trams and did a wonderfully good job. When the war was over the Transport Department snarled at them, “You’re doing a man out of a job” and they were flung into the streets without a word of thanks.2
