Except that until about the 1940s, women were also doing a lot of farm labor, a lot of helping out in running the family small business, and otherwise doing a huge amount of tough physical labor too - and then having to also cook and clean, and care for children on top of that.
“The wife’s job was to work, honor, and obey, concluded Delphy. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that “when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife.” Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labor so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labor was seen to belong to her husband.”
— The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality by Angela Saini
We can confirm that a wife’s work was not viewed as worthless, since in the Medieval world, a divorcing woman was seen as entitled to the fruits of her labors — often including sheep, flax, wool, milking vessels, cheese, etc., but while married, she was firmly under the thumb of her husband, and her labor was for his benefit, both in contributing to his farm or small business, but also in the keeping of his home and the raising of his children.
Pioneers often went through 2 or 3 wives, because they essentially worked the other ones to death - chopping wood, hauling water, growing vegetables and tending livestock, etc. on top of also cooking, cleaning, birthing and raising children.
All but the very rich (whose husbands were not doing hard physical labor) were working alongside their men. There's never been a time, except for from about 1950-1970 that women were homemakers and men were breadwinners - and even then, it only applied to about 65% of families. This myth that women haven't always done hard physical labor on top of the hard physical labor of cooking and cleaning without modern conveniences (first widely available in the 1950s) needs to get exposed for the story that it is.
But yes, the rest of what you've said here is absolutely true.
