Eh, the majority of women worked before the introduction of the pill. All four of my grandmothers (my father’s parents divorced, my mother’s father was widowed), worked. One worked on the assembly line at Chrysler, one worked in a meat packing plant, one worked as a nurse, and the last one was a farmer’s wife - which is to say she was a farmer. All did their jobs - at least off and on - during their marriage. By the way, of my four grandmothers, one had three children, one had five, and the other two never had biological kids. All were Catholic.
This is a little bit of a hijack - but many people had those change dispensers? I’m a just a couple of years younger than you, and my recollection is that only street vendor types had them - the hot dog wagon, the ice cream truck , the guy with the King Kong truck. I don’t recall people in stores having them.
Maybe I saw a lot of them living in Chicago, taking the bus/el. Bus drivers had them. So maybe I excessively extrapolated from that.
I suspect gas station attendants did. No, the grocery cashier didn’t. I think people at amusement parks and carnivals did. Or vendors at ballparks or circuses (a relative was a Shriner/Showman, so we always got free tickets to the circus, ice follies, etc.)
As a kid, I’m not sure how many people I personally exchanged cash with outside of busses. Never had much $ to spend. Never used ice cream/hot dog/King Kong trucks.
Do you not remember situations where a vendor/clerk would pull out a wad of bills, and peel off the change? Sorry that I seem to recall that, with few specifics. Like I said, I never had much money, so when I saw more than spare change, I was pretty readily impressed.
IIRC …
If the seller had a cash register, they wouldn’t need a belt-mounted change dispenser. If they were selling out of their pocket, the back of a truck, or a cart or similar they would. Vendors at street fairs, farmers markets and the like would have them. And the wad of bills to go with it.
We just had a nostalgia thread about the various deliverymen and street vendors who plyed the streets of 1950s-1960s suburbia. Of which the occasional ice cream man is the last vestigial survivor today. Most of them would have a change dispenser.
Recalling also that back in the day cash registers were huge, heavy, and expensive. Now you can buy a semi-smart portable one at Office Depot for $50.
Wow. This sounds more like the 30’s to me! Are you in the UK or Canada?
I can remember when Bankamericard came out and Master Charge. Seems like a billion years ago now.
One of my chores as a kid was doing the weekly grocery shopping. My dad would give me $60 and drop me off at the market. He’d do other errands (or kibbitiz with the waitresses at the coffee shop) and pick me up later. I started when I was 10. Really taught me the value of money. Oh, and that $60 was for a family of six.
For whatever reason that reminded me of the A&P (grocery) where the stockers would use a mechanical device to stamp the price on each can, with the price inside a little circle in purple ink. For whatever reason, when I was a little kid I found that fascinating, and always wanted that job. Either that or the guy who walked around the park w/ a big sack over his shoulder picking up trash w/ a stick with a nail on the end.
Unfortunately I was never able to achieve such lofty career aspirations, and had to settle for being a lawyer/judge! 
It’s funny the things that click with little kids.
I remember the price sticker gun that did the same basic thing as your ink stamper. They’d dial in a price, then bam bam bam whack a bunch of cans and each would have a sticker printed, dispensed, and stuck to the can’s top.
Gosh that looked like great work. When I was 4.
I have finally, at 60+, figured out what I really want to be when I grow up.
…
…
Retired.
In Louisiana, the Head and Master Law was in effect until 1979. In 1978, just after we got married and she moved to Louisiana where I was in grad school, she tried to get a check cashing card at the grocery store (remember them?) and was refused because I would have to approve it. She left all her groceries at checkout and stomped out.
One state legislator strongly objected to the repeal since he got married under the law and didn’t want his oppression of his wife to change. Though he didn’t put it quite so honestly.
You should have volunteered for an Adopt a Highway cleanup, and then you could have gotten your wish.
Most grocery stores offered credit accounts, but Safeway grocery stores were so named because they did not. Shopping the “Safeway” was to not use credit, but buy on a “cash-and-carry” basis.
(Kash N Karry was also the name of a different grocery chain where I grew up. I presume they had the same policy, and hence the name. There were no Safeway stores where I grew up.)
This varied from family to family. Both my mother and her mother were the keepers of the family budget, large expenses were discussed with the spouse. My father grew up with the opposite and expected to do the same when he married my mother.
Except.
Dad was a CPA, so good with money, right? But he was a finance director for a large community and wasn’t used to writing small checks. In his world, you paid bills monthly, or even quarterly, if they were small bills. So about those “tiny” bills for heat and electric at home? He didn’t pay them on time because they weren’t big enough yet. So Mom, an equally parsimonious individual, took over the household accounts and Dad was left to purchase the city’s fire engines, police cars, and oversee municipal expenses. It worked very well for them.
And, of course, the bank worked well with my mother. There was never any question. If there was, my dad might have withdrawn the city accounts. Not that it was ever stated that way.
My wife is a now-retired banking attorney. When you can waltz into the CEO’s office without an appointment and say “Hi Bob!” you know any “misunderstandings” won’t take long to fix. Knowing all the department heads was useful when the inevitable occasional SNAFUs happen.
I guess it doesn’t matter what your job is, there’s a hidden perk somewhere if you look carefully enough.
As to the historical reminiscences …
My Dad traveled for work and was an early adopter (late 50s) of Diner’s Club and AmEx. Mom ran the checkbook. I was the first kid and by the time I came along they were past the stage of having to mind the pennies else there’d be no food until next payday. They seemed to share decision-making pretty well.
By the mid-60s Mom was working too, they had a bunch of store & gasoline company credit cards, and being in California, were early adopters of BankAmeriCard. All the income and outflow ran through the one checkbook. I never heard any talk of “allowances” for either of them.
We can forget how recent all of that was. Its why so many women are terrified by young women thinking feminism doesn’t matter. And its all still there systemically, we’ve just legislated equality (in most places) - that doesn’t mean its been achieved.
I’m reminded of a coworker who joked, “I make all of the big decisions – should we recognize the current regime in China, should we invade Russia – while my wife makes all the small decisions – where we’re going to live, which family we spent Christmas with.”
At least he could laugh about it. Dad and Mom were very in line with each other - usually and they discussed budgeting out of our hearing. But I do know that Mom was quite relieved for her sister when finally, women could get credit cars. Auntie’s husband had died and it seriously stressed her out talking about it to anonymous bank clerks and customer service folks. It wasn’t any of their business and it took time out of her very busy single-mom-with-job days.
The first thing my brother wanted to be when he grew up was that guy who washes your windows at the gas station.
By the time he entered the workforce a decade later, gas stations had almost all transitioned to self-service.
Better the stations had made the transition before rather than after bro had finished his degree and residency in windshield washing. 
Driving the garbage dumpster truck looked fun when I was a little older, maybe 6. Flinging all that crap over my truck’s shoulders all day. What fun. Wheeee!
Kids!
The birth control pill became widely available in the early Sixties. While it was certainly one factor in married women entering the workforce, cultural norms and a dearth of jobs available to women (Help Wanted ads were typically divided into Help Wanted–Men and Help Wanted–Women, and the women’s ads were typically for secretarial, nursing, teaching, and retail sales positions.) continued to limit the number of women in the work force. The women’s liberation movement and changing cultural norms and expectations were largely responsible for the changes.
I’m not sure I understand the significance of this. Most married couples had checks with both names on them simply because they had joint checking accounts. The checks didn’t require the husband’s signature. Or am I missing your point?
The other punchline to the joke that begins with the husband saying he makes all the big decisions is : “We haven’t had a big decision come up yet.”
In the pre-email era, a now-retired local columnist did a piece where he wondered why city garbagemen made more money than schoolteachers, and he got a LOT of mail explaining why, and one of them was from a married couple, she a teacher and he a garbageman - who had a master’s degree. They moved to this area for her job, and he was having difficulty finding a job in his field, so he took the garbageman job just because they needed the money, and was shocked to discover that he loved it! He was performing a valuable public service, on top of the job being outdoors and keeping him physically active, and said there’s a lot more to know about it than most people might think.