I was thinking about the way history is taught, and even the way feminism is taught, and how it erases the work of working class women from the story. The narrative seems to go that women first got exposed to the world of work during the two world wars and then the sexual revolution of the 1960s was the first time women got to go out into the world of work. What is really meant is that women started to work in the middle-class professions and skilled working-class trades that they had been disbarred from prior to the twentieth century.
I've read that women do the majority of the world's work today because the majority of that work was gruntwork. It was ever thus. Not only have women done domestic work and service but they worked down mines, they worked in mills and factories, they worked as street hawkers, they nursed plague victims, they gutted fish, they picked crops, they sifted brick-dust, they collected street manure, they worked as bouncers ... all back-breaking, hard, physical, unpleasant labour.
I think the 'women started working in the twentieth century' narrative gives rise to the idea that women were delicate, sheltered, maternal creatures kept by chivalrous, bread-winning men and maybe it would be better for women if things went back that way. It also gives rise to the idea that all society's ills are caused by working women either stealing men's jobs or neglecting the family home when, in reality, not many women could afford to be just housewives. You also get men like Billy Connolly moaning about how manhole covers should never be called personhole covers because women's libbers never want to do the dirty jobs like working down a sewer, ignoring the fact that women have always done and still do a lot of the dirty work.
Any other examples of the jobs women have done in history that break down the myth of the delicate, cushy life of kept women?