Women, including married women and mothers, have been in the (paid) workforce for millennia, doing all sorts of jobs. Common paid jobs outside the home include

Women, including married women and mothers, have been in the (paid) workforce for millennia, doing all sorts of jobs. Common paid jobs outside the home included: housekeeping; laundry (which btw 150+ years ago was heavy manual labor); childcare; factory work; tending shops and market stalls; beauty services; entertainment; and more recently (since it's become more common for women to be educated), clerical work and teaching. The only people to whom a single-earner household outside the upper and upper middle classes was ever considered a default were the inhabitants of certain developed countries for a few decades in the middle of the 20th century; and even then it was more of a norm than a universal fact. The only things that changed recently are a) women now can also have "careers" and prestigious occupations instead of just jobs; and b) working outside the home has become normal for upper middle class women as well as working class women (and for some even a status symbol rather than a symbol of poverty).