these new moms also became wage earners, without the benefits Wyatt enjoyed, the stresses of the
“double day” became commonplace, and women wanted relief from what was now becoming the new
normal.
For women were not only having babies after the war ended. More than in previous generations,
postwar women combined marriage, child rearing, and employment. They were having more children and
spending more time in paid jobs. Stay-at-Home Mom was giving way to Working Mom and Working Wife.
Employers preferred women as the postwar service economy soared, and more children and more
consumer goods required more breadwinners. Fewer women quit working once they married; young
mothers left their children sooner to take full- and part-time jobs; and as life expectancies increased, more
middle-aged women sought employment once their children were grown. The dual responsibilities of
home and job were now long-term realities for masses of women. Yet employers (and society too)
seemed in denial about the changes in women’s lives and the burdens of working two jobs: one inside the
home, one outside.
Women’s wartime experiences, the baby boom, and rising female labor force participation—all
spurred a desire for change among women, particularly wage-earning women. Employed women in
postwar America were indignant: they wanted better pay and more respect on the job; they wanted their
family work acknowledged, valued, and accommodated. They believed things could and should be
different, and many, like Addie Wyatt, chose to act on those beliefs in the war’s aftermath. As the war
drew to a close, the social justice feminist movement emerged even stronger than before.
A National Movement Crystallizes
The postwar social justice women’s movement differed organizationally from its predecessors. All-
female reform organizations like the WTUL continued to be active, but their memberships were smaller,
and they were no longer the driving force of the movement politically or intellectually. Instead, the key
leaders came largely from mixed-sex groups, primarily unions affiliated with the CIO-inspired labor
movement. The U.S. Women’s Bureau also remained a principal player, closely connected to women’s
movement activists outside government. At the war’s end, it brought labor women together into a
powerful national network and linked them with older women’s organizations like the National
Consumers’ League, the League of Women Voters, and the National Council of Negro Women.
In 1944, Frieda Miller returned from England, where she had observed firsthand the gathering British
support for new social welfare policies, to head the U.S. Women’s Bureau. In one of her first acts, she set
up a national advisory committee of labor women to formulate new gender and social policies for the
postwar world and serve as an important pressure group to secure them nationally. The labor women’s
committee met frequently between 1945 and 1953 under Miller’s leadership. When Miller lost the
directorship after Eisenhower’s election, the committee regrouped outside the auspices of the Women’s
Bureau, reconstituting itself as the National Committee on Equal Pay and other ad hoc coalitions. Its
oldest committee members—like Miller’s partner, Pauline Newman—were veterans of the suffrage,
labor, and internationalist campaigns of the early twentieth century. But most were the young enthusiasts of
the 1930s labor upsurge and the now rapidly expanding civil rights movement.
The women’s movement of the 1940s broke new ground intellectually as well as organizationally. It
still concerned itself with the full range of women’s problems and sought the economic, political, and
social rights of all women, but its sense of women’s relationship to the family and to motherhood differed
from what earlier women reformers had espoused. Heterosexual family roles remained central to most