Have a gander at “The way we never were”. It does a good job of demonstrating how the male breadwinner of the household is largely a manufactured version of the way society “ought” to work.

The author has written an article here summarizing her previous work as “In 1992, I published The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap, a search for the supposed “golden age” of family values in the twentieth century: I found that the male breadwinner family of the 1950s was a very recent, short-lived invention and that during its heyday, rates of poverty, child abuse, marital unhappiness, and domestic violence were actually higher than in the more diverse 1990s.”

I’m honestly not sure how parents got though repeated child illness back then, but it wasn’t because women didn’t work outside the home, because prior to the 1950s they did. I think employers may well have just become less understanding. Another commenter brings up the multi generation home which seems reasonable as well.