Why the gender differences of the 1950s might be a bit of a false trail

I’m thinking about gender for an upcoming talk and I’ve started reading Elaine Storkey‘s book, Created or Constructed. Early on in it, she points out that the 1950s were actually a bit of a blip in gender history, a time in which people momentarily returned to earlier conceptions of men’s and women’s roles, but which do not really reflect where things were actually up to at the time.

“Long before the 1950s, the gender issue had surfaced again and again. Yet these cameos of recent history, let alone the many different nuances of gender changes throughout the centuries in the West, were somehow forgotten in the 1950s. The post-war years were a period of unparalleled ‘traditionalism’. The men demobbed from the armed forces needed work, countries needed children, and families needed mothers. It was a time when stability was prized almost above all else. In Britain, although less so in the United States, the return to domesticity went largely uncontested. Being allowed to be homemakers, and continue as homemakers long after the children had left home, was experienced as a liberation for those who had been required to go out to work during the war. The emphasis on the male breadwinner was reinforced by the media, by schools, and by public  policies. Education programmes made some nod towards the need to equip women for dual careers of motherhood and work, but by and large, work was seen along strong lines of gender demarcation. Gender history was put on hold, and those who were Christianly inclined saw these roles as laid down by God.” (p8)

This doesn’t mean that the 1950s didn’t see anything significant about gender; but I wonder how much some Christian thinking about gender today is influenced by a sense that a traditional status quo has been abandoned only very recently, when in fact it came unstuck far earlier?