Question

How did world war 2 change the lives of women and African Americans?

Answer 1

The massive scope of World War 2 drew millions of American men into the armed services very quickly.  As a result, women had to leave the home and go to work - partly to replace the income lost when their husbands, fathers, brothers, etc. went to war, are partly to help support the war effort at home.  Suddenly, women who had never considered working outside the home were working together in factories, and businesses, learning trades and skills that had been primarily reserved for men up until that point.  By the time the war ended, an entire generation of women had come to realize that they could be more independent than they had ever imagined.  They liked earning their own money and enjoyed the mental and physical stimulation of leaving home and going to work every day.  Because of their important contributions, women were also now valuable members of the work force and employers didn't want to lose these good employees.  And since employers commonly paid women less than men to do the same job, retaining women in professional positions after the war made good business sense for business owners.  African Americans were impacted in several different ways by World War 2.  Arguably the greatest external factor on blacks was their intermingling (if not integration) with whites and others during the war.  In many, many cases whites from rural parts of the country had never interacted with blacks in any meaningful way, and they certainly had not been in the life and death struggles presented on a daily basis of being in a war.  A result of this racial mixing was the deterioration of long-held prejudices and greater acceptance of blacks by whites in normal society. This is not to say,  racial barriers ceased to exist.  In fact the civil rights movement, which led to many of those barriers being broken down didn't begin to capture the popular imagination for 20 more years and even today, almost 70 years since the end of world war 2, African Americans do not have equal status to whites in many aspects of our society and they still have fight for their rights on a daily basis.