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Notes -
One thing that you're missing is that the old life-script involved people doing a lot of things themselves that today we assume have to be done by others. That phrase "If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife" covered a lot of tasks that took a lot more time than they would today: making and repairing clothes from scratch; managing household expenses in an era where everyone was objectively a lot poorer; cooking when the vast majority of all meals were home affairs, including making such basic staples as bread from scratch; cleaning without the use of labor-saving devices like washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners; and other types of home production.
Similarly, the male role involved doing things like building one's own house, as well as general mechanical and skilled labor competency. And for the things you didn't do yourself, you were expected to have sufficient ties to the local community that others could come and assist you (mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, etc.). Having these sorts of skills and making/repairing almost all of your consumable goods drastically lowers the cost of living (at the expense of requiring a lot of effort).
Of course, mechanization got rid of most of these tasks from ordinary daily life. It's a truism that domestic appliances, drive thrus, and the supermarket, by trivializing the important household tasks that women had historically provided, did a lot to bring about second-wave feminist unrest. As for the rest of us, we also have been substituting capital goods and machinery for skilled labor as fast as we can. This simultaneously makes it more expensive to "grow up" and make your own life, and makes the average individual less skilled and thus less capable of handling the various problems they're likely to encounter in the world.
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