Jesus. First feminists glamorized divorce. Then they glamorized single mothers. And now they're glamorizing becoming a porn star to feed your kid you got from fucking your teacher?! I mean, if the patriarchy ever did this to women, they would be howling from the rafters and jailing every man in sight. I guess telling women to find a man, stay home, and raise some kids is oppression, but telling them to sell pics of your butthole to random dudes in India and Saudi Arabia in order to afford diapers is liberation. It seems that being a feminist means never having to acknowledge hitting rock bottom.

Roger Ebert had a movie term to describe movies whose premises or central conflict were so weak that in the real world, they'd be solved in 5 minutes (like horror movies where the kids just had to turn on the light, or run away from the forest instead of into it, or a romcom where if the two characters just talked for 5 minutes, everything would be cleared up). In this case, in the real world, her problem would be solved in 5 minutes: McDonald's is hiring, they pay above minimum wage these days, and certainly far more than the average onlyfans girl makes.

But a movie about a single mother trying to make ends meet by working 2 jobs at McDonalds and WalMart wouldn't land on AppleTV with glamorous stars portraying her life. At best a documentary to be quickly forgotten in some obscure film festival. No, to be worthy of millions of dollars spent to glorify you as a liberated hero, you need to really fuck up. You can't just be a single mother living with her parents. You need to further annihilate your future chances of a decent life by permanently placing pictures of your vag in the ether, forever available for future college admissions officers, employers, and romantic partners (not to mention your kid's future classmates) to find and recoil from.

That's what it takes to get a feminist to endorse your life as a shining example worth glamorizing. Got it.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, a while ago, I wrote about those supposed golden years of the 50s: https://www.forums.red/p/whereallthegoodmenare/268190/what_feminism_forgot_the_glass_floor_is_far_more_important_t

tl;dr: that golden era was very, very short-lived, a product of a unique set of circumstances (namely the destruction of most of the industrial world outside of the US by WWII, as you mentioned, the rise of unions, and household technology), and even in those days, plenty of women had to work (~30% of all women). This was the era, after all, of female schoolteachers, nurses, secretaries, etc.

Outside of those so-called golden years, women worked their asses off just like men (albeit in different tasks). What we're seeing now is basically a reversion to historical norms, and pining for that brief historical outlier isn't going to bring it back.

That said, part of why it will never come back is because women's expectations of what a "housewife" life will be have also expanded. Men expect that if they marry a housewife, she will raise the kids, cook, keep a tidy home, etc. That is, she will still be spending time working, but those tasks will be unpaid work like childcare, household stuff, etc. while he brings the money for the family.

But a modern woman doesn't feel that way. A lot of these modern women expect that being a "housewife" means the man brings home enough money for an expanded life (expensive cars, vacations to europe, a mansion, designer clothes) and enough to outsource domestic duties to an army of nannies, house keepers, cooks, etc.

IOW, ask these women who pine to be a housewife if she's planning on scrubbing the kitchen floors, like the housewives of the 50s did. What you'll usually find is that their expectations aren't to live like a 50s era housewife, but rather a 50s era lady of the manor. That class of the idle rich still exists, but it is now, and has always been, exceedingly small.

That linked image of the lamentations of a newly minted 30s female doctor is doing a lot of work in what is left unsaid: female doctors are leaving the field in droves, or drastically reducing their hours. Of course, the only way they can do this is by marrying a rich husband (either a doctor in a more lucrative specialty like surgery, or an entirely different field altogether like tech or finance). But because they're a doctor, they're not looking to retire to a plumber who can provide a small house (average house in the 50s was < 1000sq ft, and they would raise 4 kids in it) (https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.html) that she'll have to clean and maintain while taking care of the kids. She expects a large house in an expensive neighborhood, private school for the kids, nannies and house cleaners for her, expensive cars, vacations, and clothes, and of course, enough left over to pay her school debts and fund a retirement. Even if she intends to stay in fulltime medicine, that's a lot of burden on a man, doubly so if she wants to become a "housewife".

And of course, if you're a man who can actually provide that life without needing your wife to contribute, then why would you be interested in a 30-something woman (who will likely still demand to be treated like an equal due to her degree, regardless of the fact that she explicitly sought to marry someone better than her) when you will have hot 20-somethings scratching each others' eyes out to get to you?