The way they did it was through income. A man goes to work and earns money. A woman stays home and earns no money. Without income, it was easy to convince women they were “unappreciated”. But that was an emotional argument. These feminists never asked, “If women are expecting to be paid to stay at home and raise their kids, who are they expecting to pay them?” It’s not that men got together and decided to make women raise kids for no money to “undervalue” them, it’s that there was/is no business model to make that happen.

Then Hollywood jumped on board and started pushing sitcoms at women of all the fun adventures men were having at work. And they showed women going to work and having fun adventures. Even a sitcom like The Office, which shows work as tedious, is also subtly pushing this fun/adventure narrative. It makes sense that housewives sitting at home watching this would be convinced their husband was having a grand ol’ time at the office. And I don’t even think it was totally evil that Hollywood did this - from a writing perspective, it probably is easier to dramatize the workplace (being out in the world) than it is a stay-at-home mom. They could have done some shows where a neighborhood of housewives got into fun adventures while their husbands went off to work each day, and women probably would have felt more content staying home, and that might have been coordinated, but it’s also possible the workplace simply offered more story opportunities too.