All very true.
However, throughout this period the wife not working was very much an ideal, and was the norm in upper middle class and wealthy families.
So when a man could afford to support his wife without her working it was a move upward in status for both of them. Working class to middle class. Conspicuous idleness, if you will, as opposed to conspicuous consumption.
As others have pointed out, this is not a Biblical notion. The virtuous wife of Proverbs may not have worked in the fields as such, but she was industrious, did handicrafts, planted gardens and vineyards, and was an entrepeneur.
No sitting around. She quite literally burned the midnight oil.
In fact, the biblical account focuses much more on her economic activity than any other aspect of her virtue.
See Proverbs 31.
You are correct, I would only differ in one respect, and that is that, while proverbs extols the virtues of the industrious wife, it is in the overall context of the woman being the primary caregiver to the children until they were old enough to begin becoming industrious themselves, a trait learned in the laps of their mothers.
I would suspect that most housewives of the fifties and prior were not so conspicuously idle as you seem to suggest. Being a wealthy, or even of moderate means, in prior gererations meant employing a number of people to “run your household”. The wives and mothers who had the ability in this country to stay home often did the work that would have been required of several others only 100 years earlier.
I dare anyone to suggest to my mother that she didn’t work as hard as anyone in the workforce (as good a Christian woman as ever walked this earth) ‘cause she’d show you what a switch was for!