What was significant about the role of women during the early to mid 2oth century?

Question

..anything particular about Catholic women?

Answer 1

Women attained the right to vote and took on a significant role in supporting fighting men and industrial machine during two world wars, which opened up opportunities in the workplace. All big colleges became integrated and encourage women admissions. Catholic women continued to be denigrated and treated as second-class citizens by their evil oppressors, led by the Pope.

Answer 2

IMHO, what was most significant is that it was in transition as never before. Remember, until 1920 women in the United States could not vote in national elections (they could vote in all local and state elections in Colorado some years before that).
Besides suffrage, women's most profound act was to leave home and enter the workforce in the tens of thousands at the outbreak of World War Two, when more than ten million American men entered the Armed Services and went off to war. Who d'you suppose built the heavy trucks, airplanes and tanks the men needed to fight with? The woman left behind, that's who! And although the women mostly left those factory and office jobs to the men and returned home when the men came home from the war, that exotic and erotic taste of real independence and accomplishment proved irresistable to women. From then on, their response to the attitude that women should be kept in the home, barefoot and pregnant has been "The h.e.l.l. with that!" And humankind has benefitted immensely as a result!

Answer 3

The new recognition that women were equal to men instead of (heretofore) less important, subservient, less qualified in everything.