Why the women were sent home in 1945

Carol Sarler, in today's Daily Mail, suggests that the BBC Radio 4 staple Woman's Hour has no real purpose now that women's issues, such as the weight one sometimes puts on after a pregnancy (her example), are headline news rather than being shoved into Woman's Hour or the women's pages in the papers. The BBC now claim that Woman's Hour is designed "to celebrate, entertain and inform women"; in the beginning, it had a quite different purpose according to Sarler:

Its mission was, in fact, to oppress a generation of women who had, frankly, become rather too uppity for the chaps’ liking.
The war years, hardship and heartache aside, had been good to women.
They came out of the home to work the farms, drive the buses and run the munitions factories, they found new strengths and, yes, fun in their jobs — and then, just when they had got really skilled at it, the plug was pulled.
It was as if someone had said: "the war is over — let the battle commence."

Woman's Hour was part of a male propaganda exercise, which also included various "little-lady magazines designed to put women back into their pinnies", but women, says Sarler, were able to use it for their own ends as a "platform for women to rally and campaign and fight their corner; nothing was sacrosanct in the heady mix of demands for rights, exposés of injustice and appalling jokes at the expense of men".

The problem is that Sarler's analysis of women being "sent home" after the end of World War II misses important facts about the situation as was then. The jobs women did belonged to the men who, through no fault of their own, had to go away and fight. The women were basically temps, and if you are a temp you know that the job will end. Perhaps not when, but you know that your job is not yours in perpetuity. The same was true of the women who worked in hitherto male jobs during the War. It was a national effort in which fit young men went away to fight and their jobs were filled by the next best thing: women.

When the war was over, with huge loss of life, what needed to be done was for the population to be replenished, and this was best done with the men back in their own jobs putting food on the table for their families. As difficult as this may have been for some of the women who had to adjust to the man who may have been absent for a few years and the worse for wear mentally as a result of what he had experienced, it was what had to be done. And how kind was the war to women anyway? The fact that some of them were, for a while, able to play the part of man of the house hardly compensates for the fact that many of them lived with the threat of having their houses bombed and their children killed or orphaned. Some of these women worked in munitions and lost hands or eyes in their work.

And don't forget that the post-war years brought the various laws which instituted the welfare state and National Health Service we now know of. It was these institutions which allowed their daughters (and some of them) to progress in ways they had not. I wonder if any of this would have been viable had we had thousands of war veterans knocking around with nothing to do because the factories which could have employed them were employing women instead?