Looking Back: When women found that they could actually have it all. Well nearly!

Marriage always signified woman’s withdrawal from the labour market apart from a period during the war years when women took on what were hitherto men’s occupations in factories and transport. But they soon returned back to their domestic duties when the war was over.

But, by the 1960s women were starting to realise that maybe they could have it all. Well, at least a ‘little job’ and a marriage. Weekly magazine’s like ‘Woman’s Own’ were introducing the rather innovative idea that it could be possible. Although careers in prestigious occupations like law, academia and business were largely the preserve of men.

Husbands were slow to embrace the advantages of having another wage coming in. But they soon realised that the only jobs available for women anyway were part-time and so didn’t seem to affect their homelife with their wives still managing to fit their homemaking duties and childcare into domestic life. Some husbands even lent a hand with the washing up and childcare!

The postwar woman wanted much more than her mother’s generation had ever been able to achieve but her daughters wanted even more.

There became the realisation that they could enter further education when they left school, not look for a husband and start a family, and in 1962 there were 26,000 girls at university in the UK. Feminism began to find a voice. There was a boom in job opportunities and financial independence became achievable, which was not something that their mothers had ever known.

In 1961, the Birth Control Pill, which was its original name, became available on the NHS to married women. Not without its problems, it did pave the way for women to have control over their bodies and was called the most significant scientific invention of the 20th century.

It caused some controversy with many faith groups who called the pill artificial birth control and a form of abortion, but by 1974 there were Family Planning Clinics and even the pill being prescribed to single women!

Female emancipation had at last arrived!