Rosie the Riveter.

Opportunity.

Tradition.

Raised Expectations.

Realities.

Women and the Peacetime Military.

Return to Tradition.

After the war, woman's proper place was again defined as the home. In 1946 Frieda Miller, chief of the Women's Bureau in the U.S. Labor Department, noted a change in public attitude from "excessive admiration for women's capacity to do anything, over to the idea . . . that women ought to be delighted to give up any job and return to their proper sphere — the kitchen." Experts such as anthropologist Margaret Mead and sociologist Willard Waller suggested that the independent woman had gotten "out of hand." Fears that the absence of mothers from home would lead to a rise in juvenile delinquency were increasingly voiced in newspapers and magazines. Psychologists stressed that the anxieties of returning veterans and the uncertainties created by the Cold War were best...