The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

As surely as World War II had advanced the integration of blacks into the mainstream of American academic and work life, it had reversed the integration of women. The war done, women were shunted from the jobs they had filled, to make way for the returning heroes. Between 1920 and 1958, women went from a third of college students to a quarter. The GI Bill put universities at the service of millions of demobilized veterans. However storied its contribution to the smooth reintegration of American fighting men, the bill was one of the greatest impediments to working women ever erected. The boom of the 1950s wound up affecting the sexes in different ways. Men became titans of, or at least soldiers in, the industrial economy. Their women were left stranded in empty houses full of high-powered cleaning machinery. This had never been their lot before.