In 1945 the British public sector abandoned the marriage bar, which required female teachers and civil servants to stay single or resign in favour of male breadwinners. In the 60 years since, women’s lives have been transformed and, with them, the family and community.

You might not think it, given the focus on pay gaps and glass ceilings, but for the first time women, at least in developed societies, have virtually no career or occupation barred to them. Women used to enter the elite as daughters, mothers and wives. Now they do so as individuals.

This has brought enormous benefits to many women, but its repercussions are not all positive: we need to understand what the new female labour market means for all our lives.

Gender politics still encourages us to talk about women as a group with common interests and demands. Yet this is far less true today than when, as Kipling observed, the “Colonel’s lady an’ Judy O’Grady” really were sisters under the skin.

Only in a tiny number of very wealthy homes did servants free wives and mothers from the running of a household, in which the vast bulk of food and clothing was prepared from scratch.

Today the best educated go back to work the moment maternity leave is over (or before). Of course, a few highly educated women opt for full-time motherhood. But the norm is that educated women work in the same way, and increasingly in the same jobs, as men.

About 13% of women of working age can be classified as professionals, managers or employers, and nearly 70% are in full-time work.

A majority of trainee barristers and almost two-thirds of medical students are now female (up from 29% in the early 1960s), and the majority of doctors will be women by 2012 on current trends.

Upper-middle-class professional women may choose “mommy-track” jobs to allow somewhat more time with their children. But a human resources manager who leaves work at 5.30pm to relieve the nanny is just as representative of the death of sisterhood as a 9am to 9pm female fund manager. Both have chosen careers around which to fit family life, not family life punctuated by jobs.

On the women’s pages of newspapers, arguments over whether or not mothers should stay at home with small children usually attract a large and emotional postbag. What gets far less attention is the impact of recent change on other parts of society beyond the family. Welcome to the end of “female altruism”.

THE period from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was a golden age for the “caring” sector in one major respect. It had the pick of the country’s most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in it as paid employees, but who also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither.

Here, too, the changes are most obvious among the elite. By the 17th and 18th centuries, upper and middle-class women were educated, cultured and well read. They also had no career open to them other than marriage. Paid employment for an impecunious female member of this class, in so far as it existed at all, was restricted to the education of the young as a governess, or the care of the old as a companion. But in the 19th century education was transformed and with it women’s careers.

A network of schools for all classes developed, schools whose workforce was rapidly feminised as the century progressed. In 1851 the British census counted 42,000 schoolmistresses, plus 21,000 governesses, but not a single female physician or surgeon. By the 1891 census, the “professional occupations” group contained a remarkable 313,000 women compared with 342,000 men. But among the women, 217,000 were teachers and 53,000 were nurses. There was a grand total of 101 female physicians or surgeons, 345 dentists and two vets. In 1891, then, as in 1851, a female middle-class professional was pretty much synonymous with a teacher.