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Social changes in the 1950s Gender World War II had an important impact on gender norms in the United States. Many white, married, middle class women took jobs outside the home for the first time during the war and a majority of them wanted to keep their jobs and their economic independence after the war. Women of color had somewhat increased access to a wider range of employment during the war as well. At the …

…from huge electric calculators into high-speed computing machines. The development of these machines was critical to the development of the fusion bomb - the first military computer ENIAC did its first calculations in December of 1945 at Los Alamos. The introduction of electronic technology made calculations faster and more portable. Journalist David Halberstam, in his book on the fifties, describes the advances in technology as "...like going from the Wright brother's airplane to a mach-three jet."