The discouraged women workers story, understood to mean that millions of women left the labor force involuntarily as the armed services demobilized at the end of WWII, doesn’t bear scrutiny

See The New Deal and Recovery, Part 20, Coda: The Fate of Rosie the Riveter by George Selgin. Excerpts:

"And yet, despite all these indisputable truths, the discouraged women workers story, understood to mean that millions of women left the labor force involuntarily as the armed services demobilized, doesn’t bear scrutiny.

To understand why, it helps, first of all, to appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which the government went to coax extra women into the labor force during the war. In mid‐​1943, the War Manpower Commission concluded that keeping the war industries working at full capacity would take another 4 million women workers, and that, with most single women already working, many married women would somehow have to be lured into the workforce. By appealing to non‐​working women’s patriotism (Lepp 1978, chapter 6), but mostly by offering them extraordinarily high pay (Schweitzer 1980), the Commission managed to attract even more new women workers than it tried for. The vast majority only intended at first to work “for the duration,” on the understanding that the end of the war would restore the labor‐​market status quo ante. As the war wore on, some changed their minds. But on the whole they remained far less intent on continuing to work when peace returned than women who had already been working before Pearl Harbor.

It’s seldom possible to say for certain whether women who leave the labor force have done so voluntarily or not; and that was especially so before 1967, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first started asking non‐​working women why they weren’t working or seeking work in its monthly Current Population Survey.[2] It so happens, however, that in 1944 and 1945 two separate Labor Department bureaus conducted special surveys that, when taken together, come as close to supplying an answer as one could dare to hope.

One of those surveys, by the Woman’s Bureau, found that, of over 13,000 women workers surveyed in 10 major “war production centers” during 1944 and early 1945, 25 percent, including many of the married “Rosies” who entered the labor force during the war, didn’t wish to continue working after it. Those who wanted to stay employed, in contrast, were for the most part “not those who had been swept into the labor force during its wartime expansion.” The other survey, conducted by the BLS, was based on interviews of 5,100 women working in the spring of 1945, 3,600 of whom were resurveyed that winter. By then almost all of the War Department’s contracts had been terminated, most war factories and shipyards had either permanently shut down or were undergoing reconversion, and more than 2 million women war workers had been laid‐​off (Ballard 1983, pp. 135–6). Like its Women’s Bureau counterpart, the spring BLS survey found that 25 percent of surveyed war‐​industry workers including, once again, a disproportionate number of married ones, planned to leave the labor market when the war ended. The winter follow‐​up discovered in turn that 29 percent of those resurveyed had actually left, and that most were married.[3] In contrast, the BLS found that only 5 percent of non‐​war industry women workers surveyed in the spring were planning on leaving the labor market after the war, and that precisely that share had in fact left it by October.

Assuming that the war‐​industry women surveyed by the Women’s Bureau were representative of the 4.6 million women employed in 1945 as “operatives and kindred workers,” meaning most semi‐​skilled factory workers, many of whom were then producing munitions, aircraft, ships, and other war materiel, some 1.15 million women operatives were planning to leave the labor force months before any mass layoffs occurred.

In fact, between 1945 and 1947 the number of women operatives fell by 1.2 million, implying, once again, that just 4 percent were let go who hadn’t planned to leave the workforce. Allowing that nearly 14.6 million women were working in non‐​war‐​related industries in the spring of 1945, and that 5 percent of those women also planned to leave the labor force when the war ended, that brings the total planned women’s labor‐​force reduction to just under 2 million. According to The Eighth Report of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, (1946, p. 59), between August 1945 and February 1946, total non‐​farm employment of women actually fell by 2,210,000, half a million of whom were among those counted as unemployed at the end of that stretch.[4] Provided one trusts them, while assuming that women who were planning to leave the labor force months before V‑J Day left voluntarily, these numbers leave no room at all for any discouraged women workers!

Furthermore, quite a few unplanned labor‐​market departures were themselves voluntary: the extraordinary number of spur‐​of‐​the‐​moment engagements that took place as soon as troops started coming home caused almost as many formerly working single women to become housewives—and mothers. According to Cynthia Harrison (1989, p. 25), “No one had to force women into marriage and motherhood. The marriage rate, 84.5 per thousand women in 1945, shot up to 120.7 in 1946 and 106.8 in 1947; fluctuating between 78 and 98 per thousand for the next ten years.” 1946, the first year of the “baby boom,” witnessed 1,340,504 first births—a record number (Federal Security Agency 1949, p. xxiv). [5]" 

"it’s possible that at least some of the women who were planning to quit working months before the war ended planned to do so only because they knew that discrimination would make their postwar job prospects extremely dim. I say that it’s possible. But it’s not very likely, for in general would‐​be workers become discouraged only after losing their jobs. Furthermore, most do so only after being (officially) unemployed for some time, and particularly after they become ineligible for unemployment compensation. As the Bureau of Employment Security’s Olga Halsey (1946, p. 7) put it in June 1946, “unemployment is the winnowing process by which many ultimate withdrawals from the labor force will be accomplished”:

Many of those who find they cannot get the type of work they want or for which they are qualified by their wartime experience, at wages which compare favorably with wartime earnings, will give up the effort sooner or later. …As the length of unemployment increases, more marginal workers will withdraw."

"the women’s labor force started growing again. Sometime in 1951, it was back at its wartime peak, which it went on to surpass."