These were baby boom years. Women in the 1940s were marrying younger, having more children, buying an ever-greater variety of consumer goods, and looking for ways to supplement household income. Once their youngest child was in school, millions went to work to help with the bills. This is not to argue that women considered "feminist" reasons and rejected them; motives are not so easily disentangled. It is rather to say that most women continued, as they normally had done throughout American history, to place family concerns first.
