Many women worked for pay during the days of those Norman Rockwell paintings. I am sure he did portray some women at work. If you were born into a family that has been in North America for three or four generations, you probably have a good many older or deceased women relatives who worked for pay and I think it is better you do not besmirch their contributions toward keeping their families alive.
Even among rural people who had no where to go to work for someone else, women often worked extra to provide cash for things the family needed. Women like my great-grandmother (born in 1876) saved the grease from slaughtering farm animals and made it into soap, some of which she sold back in town for things they needed ---like the lye to make the better soap (lesser soap was made using wood ashes) and the alum they needed to precipitate the murkiness in their well water to make it drinkable. I would like to point out that in those days a lot of men did not go away from the home everyday in order to earn cash, either. Cash enterprises were generally from home whether men, women, or both did them. Men and women were both home to raise the children.
Women like my other great-grandmother (born in 1840) lived in town and ran a general store with her husband.
Women like a third great-grandmother lived in town and ran a floral business with her husband.
Going down to the next generation, there was my grandmother (born 1906) whose first job was as a school teacher, but she still lived on the potato farm. Potatoes were the cash crop, but she found extra money in those potatoes by extracting the starch, bagging it up and selling it as second rate laundry starch. Women like her collected pecans and shelled them every night after all the other work was done so that she could sell them in rounds around the town as Thanksgiving and Christmas neared. The money might buy fabric to make her family's Sunday clothes, or it might buy the iron he needed to make that barn door hinge, or the matches to conveniently light up the tobacco they grew. Grandma went on to run restaurants, a gas station, be a cook in someone else's restaurant, and a clerk in a department store.
My mother (born 1926) worked and it was not for baubles, fripperies, and her own sense of satisfaction (though I wish she would have been able to have some of that as a result of her work). It was to put food on the table, to help her kids go to grade school and high school, to buy clothing, and to buy a hinge to fix the damn barn door herself.
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