What did the advent of World War II mean for womens participation in the workforce?
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS: The most immediate effect of World War II, of course, was that there was an enormous demand for labor, and that demand for labor pulled on women, and particularly on married women, to enter the wage labor force. So the numbers of women working doubled between 1940 and 1945. The most interesting part of that sort of rapid increase in labor force participation of women as that the ideology with which women went to work did not shift during the war. That is, women who had believed themselves to be wedded to their homes before the war and working only out of economic need to support their families, now transferred that ideology to their work in World War II. They weren’t working for ambition or career or satisfaction. They were working because the nation needed them or the extended family of the nation needed them to work. And the result was that when the war ended, most women gave up their jobs, not without a fight, because they had enjoyed the jobs, but because they
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