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I have personally not seen it, but will defer to it being the sort of thing that mothers are aware of(maybe it’s something moms judge each other for in a group of only moms?).
It seems potentially relevant that the cost of low-skilled labor skyrocketed shortly before second wave feminism.
I honestly thought what you're describing was an urban legend to make AWFL's look ridiculous. Like McDonald's is shitty food for poor people and it's not even priced to match, but really?
Sure. First wave feminism was mostly not interested in ending female domesticity- it was interested in raising the status of women outside the household(women's ed, women's suffrage, etc) and in protecting women's status in domesticity(more protections during divorce, temperance). You can claim(and I do) that a lot of this stuff led to de-domesticization of women beginning with the first sexual revolution in the 20's-30's, but it really wasn't the intent.
In contrast the second wave came after the WWII-induced societal changes had time to settle, and one of those changes was the effects of a drastic increase in the price of low-skill labor. Domestic servants are an effect of high income inequality and not an effect of societal expectations- when low skill labor is more expensive, domestic servants are harder to get, either because poor women work less due to their husband's higher earnings(as was the case in the 50's- when factory wages are enough to support a family, women married to factory workers have no incentive to do a richer family's housework in addition to their own), or because poor women have other things to do that pay better(remember, the price for domestic servants needs to be an acceptable fraction of an upper middle class salary for upper middle class people to employ them, and this applies generally to fixed expenses that are lifestyle expectations rather than strictly necessary- witness the recent declines in teen driving, or young adults living on their own, both driven by rises in the cost relative to salaries, for examples within our lifetimes). So when the post-WWII economic boomtime(and in parts of the USA, desegregation) raised low-skill wages, you had lots of upper middle class families needing to do things for themselves which their parents would have hired someone to do, and labor saving devices penetrated households slowly, so lots of upper middle class women felt like they were engaged in drudgery by doing their own laundry(which would have been the first chore outsourced to domestic servants before washing machines and wrinkle-free fabrics), even though, well, someone has to do it, has always done it, and that person was not about to be a man(and I have a strong prior that, then as now, a wife who objects to doing laundry can choose between complaining about her husband not doing it and complaining about her husband doing it wrongly, regardless of how her husband actually does laundry. I have never found anyone, male or female, able to disagree with this argument). Because, factually, they were compared to their mothers and grandmothers engaging in quite a lot of drudgery. And that must have felt like downward social mobility even if it wasn't.
I think so, although I’d point to labor saving devices(washing machines, dishwashers, disposable diapers, vacuum cleaners) as the main substitute for the household labor of upper middle class women in the 2nd wave feminist era because income inequality didn’t rise enough for most of them to hire maids until the late eighties early nineties, and factually this was the era when all those things I mentioned became more common.
Of course I do agree with you in broad strokes; the eighties stereotype of a yuppie mother poked fun at sending her children to preschool for a reason.
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