I'm thinking about my dad's mom raising children in the 1940s. Her husband worked on the railroad, so the family was perhaps not technically poor, but Dad and his siblings told a lot of stories about poverty.

Grandma worked her ass off to alleviate it. She took in laundry, sewed for other families, grew a large kitchen garden, and canned fruits and vegetables to last the winter. She sold any excess, often with some of the kids staffing a roadside stand.

By the end of the 50s, the family moved to town, where Grandma became more of a traditional housewife. But she never stopped working hard, in some entrepreneurial way or another.

She sure never experienced the Leave it to Beaver existence of a house kept miraculously immaculate while she wore lovely dresses and pearls.

All but one of her daughters went on to have serious careers, at her urging. Not one of her daughters became a "housewife."

All of them believe they led more fulfilling lives than she did. They perhaps don't all understand they had feminist principles to thank for it, but they did.

Grandma didn't take in laundry and work her fingers to the bone hustling at home because she wanted to. She did that because it was all she had available to feed her children during an era where working women were rare and badly paid, by societal expectation.