As women returned from their war duties in the late 1940s many once again subsumed the role of wives and mothers that they had prior to 1939. Others did not and went onto lead professional, independent lives fueled by their sense of ‘freedom’ that serving in various armed forces gave them. Indeed, women leaving the various Allied auxiliary services were even offered ‘Housewife Classes’ if they were to be married soon after been demobbed alongside such practical classes as typewriting, secretarial skills, and options for going to University. Read on to see how a return to domesticity, and in some cases women never left the domestic sphere, affected Irish women in the early 1950s.