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Notes -
My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.
But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?
Why limit yourself to the workplace? Women's rights were limited in multiple ways. The workplace has been where I have encountered the most bumps, but my mom and grandmothers ran into serious problems with financial independence and access to education.
In the workplace, as others have said poor women always worked. My grandmother was from a wealthier class and when her dad abandoned the family and she was left without an "appropriate" introduction to a spouse, one of her brothers fortunately paid for her to train to be a librarian so she could support herself in her spinsterhood. (WW2 also meant marriageable men were in short supply for women who had been raised to be pliant and pretty.) She worked as a librarian until she met my grandfather after he got home from the war. Once married she had to leave her job (she was now to make a home and babies, who cares if she also loved her job?). Society and men exercised a great deal of control even over the relatively privileged women. If my grandmother's brother had not stepped in to rescue her she would have had no resources and extremely limited agency to establish herself. The plural of anecdote is not data but you might be surprised at the stories of your older female relatives. My mother (silent gen) was not able to establish her own financial life outside of my father until after I was born (genx). Sure, my dad could co-sign but why should that have been required? When she was in high school her parents had to assure the school she was allowed to take advanced academic courses, because she was going to go to college - and not to get her Mrs. In HS my parents had to pressure the school to let me take advanced shop classes because girls weren't allowed. Notably neither my father nor brother have similar stories. I am aging out of the carefully asked questions in job interviews about whether I was going to have or already had children, without breaking the law. My husband and I work in the same field and comparing this stuff has been interesting. Somehow there's never been a concern about any family obligations or expectations, errrr, I mean anything that might interfere with his ability to do a job. I tend to think my not wearing a wedding ring (assuming no kids) and having a gender neutral name (getting past the girl cooties resume rejection) helped me get more than one position.
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