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Notes -
Automation is part of it, but what everyone seems to forget is that women and children did work down mines alongside men and much of the reforms were passed because it was felt that this was not fitting with women's social role (not alone to be homemakers but to be modest, chaste, etc.) Women and children then moved on, as you point out, to the factories.
The social driver for feminism was capitalism. While the suffragettes and others were looking for votes for women, and for women to have equal rights with men (and I think we tend to forget the great imbalance legally as regards women and men within marriage and other spheres), there was a limited source of employment for women. Women were dependent on marriage to keep them out of poverty. So broadening the type of work that women could have access to was both a feminist project, to give women economic independence, and an employers' project, to have access to a greater labour force than men alone.
Employing women meant that jobs could be less skilled and more importantly paid less. Now we have modern society where it is expected that you will be a two-income family if you want a mortgage or any other rung on the ladder of achievement (unless you are in a very well-paying job where one person can be the sole breadwinner). Alongside the usual stuff about equality and opportunity and the rest of it, is the admission that having women working helps to grow the economy. I think we're at a point where we're dependent on constant growth or else the bubble will burst and there will be a lot of fallout.
Buried down in this piece is another reference to this:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/female-labor-force-participation-gender-gap-pandemic/
So once all the talk about "gender wage gaps" and so forth is stripped away, the underlying skeleton is that every warm body that can work is needed in order to keep the plates of the economy spinning. Taking time out to have children is a career-killer, if you have a career, and hurts your income if you're working jobs (not employed in a career) since you're more likely to have to work part-time hours in order to run the home as well.
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