One of the time periods I'm most interested in with American history is the 1950's and the sheer amount of conformity that society bred as a result of fear. Part of this conformity was that the role of women didn't change and they were still expected to be housewives despite their contributions in WWII. My question is, were women much more oppressed after WWII than before, or was the oppression they faced basically the same as always and things just sort of reached a boiling point?
I have a few past answers that you may be interested in:
What might happen to an average woman who dressed in pinup attire in public during WW2? (mainly my follow-up comment about performative femininity in WWII)
What happened to female skilled labor, like Rosie the Riveter, after the conclusion of WWII?
I am glad that there's a narrative taught about the lead-up to the second wave of feminism, but the narrative is too simplistic: WWII jobs -> forced to conform -> explosion of feminist protest. In reality, women were expected to adhere to norms and continue conforming to ideals of femininity throughout the war, as you can see in my answers above. They were often freed from having a man literally take money they earned (if they were married), but they still were broadly perceived as secondary to men and as objects for male desire or interest; they had to balance providing for themselves with calming the ire of boyfriends and husbands in the military who didn't want to see them out in the world. And while they were forced out of work after the war - in many cases, unwillingly - after the initial flurry of rehiring men who'd gone off to fight, married women came right back. From my second answer above:
Almost immediately following the end of the war, they were dropped flat: 4.6 of the 6.5 million women [who'd gotten a job in the early years of the war in response to the worker shortage] were gone by February 1946 - but contrary to the stereotype that all were forced to become housewives, by 1947 there were again more married women than single ones in the workforce (first older housewives with little work experience, and then younger mothers who left their children with sitters), and that would keep on. A certain barrier had broken down, and would not be put back even though some women didn't to keep working.
(That's almost full third of women who started working in the war that remained in their jobs after it ended, by the way.)
The 1950s were not really a boiling point for women as a class or a time when great oppression was suddenly forced on them. Among middle-class and upper-working-class women, there was a lot to grapple with in that the position of the housewife - despite being idealized on tv and in advertising - had been declining since the late nineteenth century: the continual rise in the number of technological improvements that took the skill out of housework led to the housewife being seen by others as kind of a freeloader. There was also less possibility for personal satisfaction, since pretty much everyone could do the same work with the press of a button or opening of a can or mix, and a lot more time to kill. I discuss this more in this previous answer as well:
I'd be happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have.