First, World War II—in so many ways a driving social force—changed the lives of millions of women, bringing them into the marketplace in record numbers and into new and sometimes better-paying kinds of jobs. Second, demobilization drove many of these women from such jobs, but it only briefly slowed what was already a powerful long-range trend toward greater female participation in the market. Third, neither during the war nor afterward did most women think they were making an either-or choice between family and work. The majority gradually came to need both, at least for stretches of their
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