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I read this, and think of my parents, who don't really match the picture you've drawn here. Mom was pretty much fresh out of high school when she married Dad — who was about as far from "well-off" as you'd expect a functionally-illiterate high-school-dropout handyman to be. Mom didn't homeschool me and my younger brothers, and yet she still found ways to fill her day — and, in fact, be frustrated by time pressures getting things done — that weren't "spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day" (being as she had little in the way of money or friends), and only went out into workforce once my youngest brother was off to college. Part of this, I suppose, comes down to a standard element of living on the poorer end of the socio-economic scale (to which I can also attest personally) — that is, doing yourself what others pay to have done, those with more money substituting said money for time. I remember Mom, particularly when we were younger, doing a fair bit of sewing. Lots of cooking. Smoking or canning salmon. Thursdays and Fridays spent packing for weekend trips out of town — hunting, fishing, or just spending weekends at the cabin (and Mondays spent putting everything back). Gardening, once we were no longer in apartments. Shopping trips to Costco. Laundry (lots and lots of laundry). And, of course, plenty of cleaning up after three messy boys and a man with ADD and no ability to organize his collection of work tools and spare parts.
Much of this sort of thing — the "idle 50's housewife" and such — seems to be dependent on class, and not so much a thing down at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Growing up, my family was a good bit more suburban and less rural. Gardening for fun more than sustenance. Sewing to mend the odd item rather than maintain everything. Dad had a somewhat more technical job, and if we were ever desperate for money, they were able to hide it.
With that in mind, like you, I can't think of my mother as idle. Cooking for a family of six is the obvious time-sink. Cleaning, too, even once we were old enough to be useful. She managed most of the groceries, but also all of the clothes, furniture, Christmas presents, road trips, and other intermittent expenses. Not to mention the actual bills. Somehow she also juggled four kids' worth of extracurriculars and social groups while (apparently) managing to bond with her peers.
It's not like Dad was checked out. He loved us and took on his fair share. But the minutiae of raising kids was always Mom's full-time job.
Go back a generation, and both my parents had extremely rural upbringings. I can't imagine their day was any less full.
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That makes sense, closer to a preindustrial household economy, where cooking, cleaning, and textiles/crafting were much more important and harder to replace. I think it was CanIHaveaSong who used to write sometimes about (her?) mother hand washing everything and growing up without running water.
On the other hand, the original context was about the kind of woman who might get a degree in psychology but not take her eventual career path too seriously, since ultimately she's more interested in meeting a future husband at college, which to some degree higher status than I am. My grandmother was of the Mrs Degree class, and went to university to get a BA in stage or something before settling down to raise her four children in the 50s and 60s, and even when she lost her husband and became the head of household, I'm not entirely sure what she did, actually. Which isn't judgment on her as a person, and seems to have been appropriate to her class.
So I suppose I was thinking of a socioeconomic situation somewhere between my grandmother's and your mother's, the kind of lower middle class woman who's certified as a teacher or nurse or something. I personally get summers off and spend the time going on road trips with my family, reading Motte posts, and painting in the garden, and would absolutely be a poor candidate for an actually useful stay at home mom. This is related to why old female novels make such a huge deal of women, especially, dropping classes -- they won't necessarily know what to do or have any useful instincts for it, having been trained mostly to read books and paint (or whatever) for their entire childhood.
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