I suspect that it was the clothing industry that figured they could sell more by hooking different product to genders earlier on, and marketing basically facili

I suspect that it was the clothing industry that figured they could sell more by hooking different product to genders earlier on, and marketing basically facilitated that push. Particularly after WW1 various industries that had massively scaled up to feed the war needed an outlet for their excess production capacity. This lead to a marketing push to get people to think in terms of desires rather than needs. Adam Curtis goes over this during his documentary series, The Century of the Self.