"the kind of society I grew up in, which was a wonderful place for both children and the elderly, and for a lot of women too, is not possible without large numbers of unemployed women."
You mean it was wonderful for kids and old people because they had mom/the daughter/daughter-in-law at their beck and call 24/7? You think that this is wonderful for these women? Where do you think the stereotype of the mother-in-law from Hell comes from?
"I am a pampered unemployed wife, and I don’t even have children :) I have met with a great deal of social disapproval for not working, but that is why I don’t work: hell will freeze over before I will take orders from feminists."
Nobody expects you to take orders from anybody; people just expect someone with a working brain to consider reasonable advice, but I can see where that assumption may be mistaken in your case.
"I will say this, though: my husband works from home, which means that he and I are almost always together. Because of this, I don’t have to grapple with the kind of social isolation that most housewives face: I don’t think I could deal with that."
So you acknowledge that your case isn't typical, and that being a housewife has serious built-in problems. My mother was a housewife from the time I was born until my youngest brother started going to school: we all saw how happier and more stable she got once she started working again. And at least she managed to avoid becoming one of these alcoholic/pills-popping housewives...
And as others have said, having your husband/wife around all the time can get pretty annoying/stressful too. One of the major reasons my parents divorced was that even while they still both worked, my father often drove my mother up the wall (unwittingly/in all innocence, but he has several personality traits that border on disorders and can get pretty exhausting/infuriating, such as his well-meaning micromanaging) Living together once they'd both be retired probably would have resulted in a murder, a suicide or a murder-suicide, so since the passion was long gone anyway they decided to at least preserve the friendship by divorcing.
"Anyway, the point is, housewives are not and were not an upper class or even a middle class thing: for a period of time, at least, in America, it was a near universal thing, and it could be argued that life was a lot better for a lot of people including a lot of women during that time."
In your alternate reality, perhaps, but not in this universe.
OP reminds me of a Japanese phenomenon I read about: "traditionally" (ie, since the Japanese economy recovered enough from WWII to allow this model, so it is a pretty recent tradition), women would work a few years until they managed to land a husband, then drop out of the workforce to have kids and focus on the education of said kids and housework until the kids reach college age, often starting to work part-time after that or becoming the primary caretaker of aging parents/in-laws.
In recent years, there apparently has been a rising number of young women who want to have their cake and eat it too: they do want to stop working once they find a husband, but they have no intention of having children, or even doing more than the bare minimum of housekeeping, basically treating their husband like a living wallet. This trend, coupled with unrealistic expectations about their prospective husband's income among these women, has been blamed as an important factor in the falling marriage rate of Japan (along with the insane cost of raising and educating even a single child in Japan, of course)
