In the old days, it was understood as the division of responsibility - one of the spouse, mostly the male, would be responsibile to earn and provide for the family, while the other would be in charge of managing the finance and other household responsibilities.
My point is that it is a modern perspective to paint the "house wife" / "home maker" (mostly the wife due to tradition) as someone who just does menial chores and as an "unproductive" member of society - just because she doesn't earn capital. Where as if you see it from the perspectibe of a family member, she / he as a home maker has different but equally important responsibilities too and plays a vital role in a family unit / society.
Depends where and when "old days" means, but half the population not working was pretty rare. Farms had lots and lots of different kinds of labor, in and outside the house, in different seasons, but everybody worked hard. Victorian mining and mill towns had huge "putting-out" industries, sometimes bigger than the visible ones, organised work for cash but physically distributed. And (as you said) cooking & cleaning was massively more labor-intensive, as well as being much more important before antibiotics etc.
That's very true - I was speaking more from the upper middle class urban perspective I grew up in, where most married women who opted to stay at home only managed the household finance and day to day chores of looking after the needs of their family members. (Which, in India at that time, was no easy task even with maids, as we are talking about joint families living together.)
My grandparents fom my father's side were rural farmers however, and yes, like you rightly pointed, these women really had more responsibilities. I recall that my grandmother, at one point had to manage a household of around 40 people (including the labourers who worked in their farm)!
My point is that it is a modern perspective to paint the "house wife" / "home maker" (mostly the wife due to tradition) as someone who just does menial chores and as an "unproductive" member of society - just because she doesn't earn capital. Where as if you see it from the perspectibe of a family member, she / he as a home maker has different but equally important responsibilities too and plays a vital role in a family unit / society.