An online friend did her PhD dissertation on women, work, and WW2, and her conclusion was that, despite what we'd hope to find, the majority of women were glad to move back into homemaking roles after the war and weren't particularly upset to be displaced by men returning home to work at their old jobs.
While there were obviously going to be exceptions to the rule, and I know I would have been really unhappy in 1950s suburbia, the Ozzie and Harriet family suburban structure in the 1950s was actually a pretty comfortable arrangement for the (usually white) families that lived it, especially compared to the pre-war 1930s when the country was still trying to pull itself out of the Great Depression.
But I wonder if the relative comfort of post-WW2 suburbia was what actually gave people enough breathing room for large numbers of people to step back, move up a couple steps on Maslov's hierarchy of needs, and start to think a little bit deeper about themselves and how they wanted society to be, and that played into both the Civil Rights movement and more equal opportunity for women.
