Women in men toiled together at hard back breaking labor until the industrial revolution. Then women and men worked side by side in disgusting, dangerous factories. When the economy grew, women (and men who weren’t white or weren’t the right kind of white) were locked out of this prosperity through social barriers and legal restrictions.

The US government actually got rid of its incredibly successful childcare program that it set up during WWII as a way to push women out of the workforce. There was government sponsored “housewife” propaganda.

One of the reasons we have a screwed idea of how gender roles worked in the distant past was because so much culture and history is shaped and maintained by the aristocracy. Gender roles among the aristocracy were shaped by the desire for families to hold on to assets and power. If an aristocrat married a commoner, their power and wealth would diminish. Laws restricting marriage between of the aristocracy to other aristocracy required rigid definitions of class and “breeding.” Aristocrats obsessively shaped their children to fulfill a lot of bizarre ideals.