Intriguing premise

I found a show called Bletchley Circle on Amazon Prime video.  And I have to say that while the show is good, the premise is what grabbed me, and its really has stuck with me.

So here's the underlying story: while the men were off fighting the second world war, a few were left to oversee the operation of intelligence gathering, codebreaking, and determining how to best counter German actions.  But the grunt work of actually breaking the codes and understanding what was in the messages was left to a group of gifted women.  They were good at recognizing patterns, looking at threads, and generally following up on leads as they sat behind desks in Bletchley or worked with Turing on his enigma machine.

And then the war ended.  Turing was outed as being gay and ostracized and shunned for the rest of his life (before committing suicide).  And the women went back to doing the mundane chores that were allotted to women in England.  Everyone that worked on codebreaking or intelligence was required to sign documents that they would never reveal what they did during the war, under penalty of treason. 

A group of these women, upon whom the story revolves, had agreed to "never be ordinary..." and yet here we are 9 years after the war, and one is a librarian, one is married with two children, one is married with an abusive husband, and one has been anything but ordinary.  

But the bug to follow their passion and be creative and use those skills still lives in them, and they wind up chasing down a serial killer.

Its the nature of this utilizing women when they were needed, and yet putting them back into "traditional roles" after the war that got me.  Its kind of sad in a way.  They were never given their due, well perhaps until recently.  And the work they did mostly remained secret.

I wonder how much further ahead England (or society in general) would have been if they had been encouraged to continue being clever along the way?