This is a very interesting question and can be answered in a lot of different ways. My area of expertise is Britain (apologies if that’s not what you wanted!) so I shall be focusing on that and hopefully others can provide information on other countries.

I think women's war life can be broken down into two main categories – work and social life and so I will try to explain what my research suggests are the main differences in these areas. I’ll finish with a short explanation of something slightly outside the terms of your question, but something that I think will really help contextualise the whole issue – the extent to which the changes that occurred during wartime persisted into the post-war periods.

First work. During both WWI and WWII, the proportion of women engaged in work significantly increased: it rose from 24% in 1914 to 37% by 1918; and from 34% in 1937 to 51% in 1943. Obviously tells us that employment opportunities increased significantly during both wars as women were required to step into the jobs vacated by men who had been called up. However, the key difference between the wars in this aspect is that women were not formally conscripted during WWI but during WWII women between the ages of 20 and 30 were conscripted. This usually entailed being compelled to work in a factory, in the Armed Forces or on a farm, but the voluntary principle was applied and most women in this age bracket chose to work in a particular area. The entry of women into areas where they had previously been excluded was seen as a huge step forward by many. Stephanie Bathstone, who joined the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in WWII: ‘We had entered the only real democracy. We weren’t pretending to be equal, we were equal, and we might have to go on being equal for years and years’. Millicent Fawcett, the famous Suffragette campaigner, suggests something similar about WWI: 'The war revolutionised the industrial position of women - it found them serfs and left them free.'

To facilitate this increase in the female workforce, a huge expansion of nursery provision was implemented by the government – from 14 in 1939 to 1345 in 1943 (and a similar trend can be seen during WWI but I do not have the specific figures to hand). An increased female workforce also led to an increase in female membership of Trade Unions – from around 400 000 in 1914 to 1.1 million in 1918 and from 1 million in 1939 to 1.8 million in 1943. This increase led to some campaigns to win greater rights for women in the workplace but to a significant extent, Trade Unions remained male-dominated and often misogynistic.

The most interesting area of change is probably wages – the gender pay gap definitely decreased during both wars, but this is arguably due to the changing nature of the work that women did. Further, statistics on this question can be very complex as due to the extreme changes in employment there is a challenge to compare like with like. During WWII, women in the services were paid around 2/3 of men’s wages, which was a significant increase while obviously still being a significant difference. The main difficulty for women achieving pay equality in both wars came from the policy of dilution – the breaking up of complex work into simpler stages – this meant that two or three semi-skilled women were often doing the work of one man. This meant women were paid significantly less, and also easily replaced when the war ended. As Juliet Gardiner says: ‘Though popular propaganda spoke of women “doing a man’s job”, the job – and the pay – was often not the same at all’.

Returning to pre-war ‘normalcy’ once the war ended was seen by many British people as being extremely desirable. Martin Pugh: ‘by the end of the war men and women were anxious to return to a settled family life.’ Further, when both wars ended, state funded nursery provision was significantly cut suggesting that this provision was seen as a purely wartime necessity and not a social improvement. Also of note is the writings of the psychologist Kenneth Howard who produced a guide for servicemen in 1945 that offered advice on how to resume their 'rightful place as the breadwinner of the household.'

Second, social life. Prior to both wars, women’s lives were controlled by laws, convention and social mores. Richard Titmuss (Official Historian of the Social Life of Britain during the war), writing just after the end of WWII, gives a clear insight into popular attitudes towards women: “The life of the working-class mother begins, ends and has its being in the setting of husband, children, home.” To some extent, WWI and WWII eroded many of these mores and undid many of the laws.

Pubs were the main social meeting place in Britain, especially for the working classes and in the pre-war and inter-war period were seen as male-only spaces. The wars changed this for perhaps two reasons: first, women were associating with men in work and thus also felt entitled to share their spaces out of work and second, women now had much greater access to their own sources of money and thus felt a greater willingness to spend this money on their own entertainment. Wartime surveys suggest that during WWI around 1/2 of women admitted to visiting pubs and during WWII this figure rose to 3/5.

Greater access to money also led to a large growth in women-focused consumer goods. Prior to WWI, makeup was largely the preserve of stage actresses and prostitutes. However, the war changed this. Women working in traditionally male industries were encouraged to wear makeup in order to maintain gender norms and this established a trend that would not be undone. By 1945, 2/3 of women stated that they wore makeup, and this rose to 90% of women under 30. Interestingly, makeup was often difficult to obtain but munition workers in both wars were given extra access to it – due to the skin problems that came with working with explosives. Makeup obviously remains an ideological battleground in some areas of current feminist discourse and the extent to which the greater use of it can be seen as an example of female empowerment is not an argument for this piece. However, it is notable that advertising campaigns of both WWI and WWII portrayed makeup as something ostensibly for men rather than women. For example during WWI Royal Vinolia Cream ran a campaign that suggested ‘Beauty on Duty has a Duty to Beauty.’ A Vogue editorial from 1941 suggested something very similar: ‘the good spirits of the fighting men depend on the civilians and more particularly the female of the species…this business of looking beautiful is largely a duty.’

Finally to the question of sex. Unsurprisingly, pregnancies outside of marriage and through adultery rose significantly during both wars. Again statistics are very hard to come by due to the unwillingness of some to report this, but what were termed ‘irregularly conceived children’ – illegitimate births possibly accounted for 100 000 of the 255 000 births that occurred between 1940 and 1945. In Birmingham, where records the best records were kept, illegitimate births tripled during the war. Statistics for WWI are more difficult to precisely measure, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that a significant increase also occurred between 1914-1918. When discussing this, Angus Calder suggests that: ‘The increasing enlightenment of women in sexual matters meant that there was more “sin”, but fewer women suffered for it.’ Which is probably true to some extent, but it must also be remembered that if they became pregnant while not married, service women were discharged and those in factory billets were often thrown out.

Post-War Periods

Both wars saw significant improvements in gender equality in almost all aspects of life. However, many of these advances were almost completely eroded. The removal of nursery provision, the return to pre-war employment levels and the continuation of the idea that a woman’s place is in the home tells us that the gains were fleeting in practice. This was not true of every aspect of course. The 1918 Representation of the People Act granted some women the vote (with equal suffrage being granted in 1928). Many reforms inspired by the Beveridge Report also massively improved the lot of women. However, welfare reforms, in particular the 1944 Family Allowance Act, monetised “women’s” work to some extent – by introducing child benefit the government in a sense made being a mother a salaried position. The benefit of this has been much debated – did it recognise the value of women, or pigeonhole them? In summing up post-war changes, Angus Calder suggests: ‘The First World War had prompted a grateful nation to give women the vote. No such large step towards equality resulted from the Second.’ However, he later goes on to clarify: ‘In its effects on the attitudes of women themselves, the Second World War was more significant than the first.’ I would suggest that the Second World War created a society of parents who brought up daughters and sons who went on to take the fight for gender equality forward in the 1950s and 1960s. These parents had experienced some form of gender equality during the war and were able to reflect on their experiences and pass on their knowledge to their children who then sought to create a more equal society.