Rapid economic growth went a long way toward creating a new society in Europe after the Second World War.
2.
A new breed of managers and experts—so-called white-collar workers—replaced traditional property owners as the leaders of the middle class.
3.
Rapid industrial and technological expansion created in large corporations and government agencies a powerful demand for technologists and managers.
4.
In the communist states of the East Bloc, the forced nationalization of industry, the expropriation of property, and aggressive attempts to open employment opportunities to workers and equalize wage structures effectively reduced class differences.
5.
The structure of the lower classes also became more flexible and open, as the population of one of the most traditional and least mobile groups in European society—the farmer—drastically declined.
6.
A decline in the number of industrial workers in western Europe, just as new jobs for white-collar and service employees grew rapidly, marked a significant transition in the world of labor.
7.
In general, better-educated and more-specialized European workers bore a greater resemblance to the growing middle class of salaried specialists than to traditional industrial workers.
B. Patterns of Postwar Migration
1.
From the 1850s to the 1930s countless European immigrants left the continent seeking economic opportunity or freedom from political or religious persecution, but the migration pattern reversed in the 1950s and 1960s, when Europeans began to experience an influx of migrants.
2.
Some migration was intranational, as declining job prospects in Europe’s rural areas encouraged many peasants and small farmers to seek better prospects in the city.
3.
In the Soviet bloc, the forced collectivization of agriculture and state subsidies for heavy industry opened opportunities in urban areas.
4.
Many other Europeans moved across national borders seeking work; the general pattern was south to north, as workers from less developed countries like Italy, Spain, and socialist Yugoslavia moved to the industrialized nations of the north.
5.
In the 1950s and 1960s West Germany and other prosperous countries implemented a series of guest worker programs that were designed to recruit much-needed labor for the booming economy.
6.
Most guest workers were young, unskilled single men who worked for low wages in entry-level jobs and sent much of their pay to their families at home.
7.
Governments had planned for these guest workers to return to their home countries after a specified period, but many chose to live permanently in their adoptive countries.
8.
Europe was also changed by postcolonial migration, in which migrants, who could often claim citizenship rights from their former colonizers, moved spontaneously to the former imperial powers.
9.
Though immigrant labor fueled economic recovery, and growing ethnic diversity changed the face of Europe and enriched the cultural life of the continent, the new immigrants were not always welcome.
10.
Migrants found adaptation to European lifestyles difficult, and they often held on to their own languages and lived in separate communities, even as they faced employment and housing discrimination and were targeted by the anti-immigration policies of xenophobic politicians.
C. New Roles for Women
1.
The postwar culmination of a one-hundred-year-long trend toward early marriage, early childbearing, and small family size in wealthy urban societies had revolutionary implications for women.
2.
Pregnancy and child care occupied a much smaller portion of a woman’s life than in earlier times; by the early 1970s about half of Western women were having their last baby by the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven.
3.
Women’s roles in the workforce also changed after World War II, as the ever-greater complexity of the modern economy meant that many women had to go outside the home to find cash income.
4.
The economy boomed from about 1950 to 1973, creating a strong demand for labor even as it gradually shifted away from male-dominated heavy industries to more dynamic white-collar service industries such as government, education, trade, and health care.
5.
Young Western women also shared fully in the postwar education revolution and could take advantage of the growing need for office workers and well-trained professionals.
6.
Communist leaders asserted that they had opened up numerous jobs to women, and in large part they were correct, as many women made their way into previously male professions, such as medicine and engineering.
7.
In western Europe and North America, the percentage of married women in the workforce rose from roughly 20–25 percent in 1950 to 30–60 percent in the 1970s.
8.
Married women entering (or re-entering) the labor force faced widespread and long-established discrimination in pay, advancement, and occupational choice in comparison to men.
9.
Even in the best of circumstances, married working women still bore most of the child-raising and housekeeping responsibilities; women working full-time exhausted themselves trying to live up to society’s seemingly contradictory ideals.
10.
When in the 1960s a powerful feminist movement arose in the United States and western Europe to challenge sexism and discrimination in the workplace, it found widespread support among working women.
D. Youth Culture and the Generation Gap