to clarify, perhaps "befuddled" and "emasculated" would be more precise than "schlubby"
How about a little class warfare to go along with your Sexism Wheaties?
The "man played for a fool by his (usually adulterous) wife" storyline, of course, probably goes back as far as you want it to. Stick with me here; yes, I'm about to make a point about 1950s television sitcoms using...late medieval poetry.
A perfect example to draw on is the fabliau (ribald poem) Berenger au lonc cul, which in its preserved Old French versions is a simple story about a husband and wife. He's a knight, but not a good one--in fact, not really one at all, preferring to lie around and spend money instead of doing knightly things. He's finally shamed into action by his wife--but that "action" consists of going into the forest, beating up his armour, and returning to his wife talking of his fantastic feats of chivalry. But she twigs very quickly to the fact that while his armour may be grievously wounded, he's unscathed.
So the next time he heads out to make war on his breastplate, she disguises herself as a knight, follows him, and reveals herself in the heat of his "battle." Altering her voice, she tells him he has shamed chivalry as well as himself, and offers him a chance at redemption. He can either joust this mysterious challenger to prove once and for all he's a Real Knight...or he can kiss her ass. Literally.
The fabliau is called "Berengier of the Long Ass," so you know what happens next. During his humiliation, he notices that something is maybe not quite right with the anatomy (from the back, remember); she tells him that's why she is called of the Long Ass. And it wouldn't be medieval lit without the final coup de grace: the shame-faced husband arrives back at home with his head low...only to find his wife in bed with her very real paramour, Berengier.
But there's another version of this story. When Nuremberg barber-surgeon Hans Folz gets his hands on it, as we know from a fragmentary straightforward rendition, he makes some critical changes. It's not the wife versus her husband; it's the wife versus a poor artisan she catches on her property gathering wood so he can do his job. The same humiliation ensues. But in this case, the baker does realize, as Folz says, the difference between a pipe and a hole and two holes. And so this version of the plot ends with the baker paying his own visit to the wife, and restoring power to himself by raping her.
We've gone down this road for a reason. The difference between the French original and Folz's new version highlights the source of uncomfortable humor in the first which led to the 15th century need for the second. It's a classic "world upside down" trope. In Berengier au lonc cul, the knight is not a knight, the wife is not a wife--things are topsy-turvy, and to drive the point home she comes out on top. Der arme Bäcker on the other hand, is doing what is right: he's a baker, his ovens need wood, he's working hard for it himself to get the job done. Folz, whose career as a poet was rooted in his economic position as a barber (...it's a thing), is absolutely moralizing here.
The knight fails as a knight and that story punishes him by inverting the medieval gender hierarchy to the point of his being cuckolded; Folz's baker is succeeding as a tradesman and the story rewards him by restoring the rule of men over women even to the point of violating her body.
I'm making the point with medieval examples because I think the use of sexual power and violence to relate the stories' moral drives home the core point: the Schlubby Man/Competent Women trope is about men's failure to be men.
It's no wonder, then, that the real flourishing of this trope in American pop culture is 1950s sitcoms: pretty much our go-to period for "evangelizing a sexist gender hierarchy in mass media." Ralph in The Honeymooners or Chester in The Life of Riley don't just fail in the face of successful women, they fail--according to gender standards of the time--as men. Ralph's biggest failure is his inability to provide his wife with a "proper" life. Notably for an audience watching the show on television, Ralph can't even afford to buy Alice a TV. He schemes and fails to the relentless chorus of "I told you so." In the face of his failures, he promises that next time will be different, next time he'll get that promotion, next time he'll make them rich, and then his promises lead into the next episode and the next failed effort.
Or take Chester (who was actually originated on TV by Jackie Gleason, too, for a short bit before Honeymooners; the role was more famously and successfully played later by William Bendix), or the other favorite example of gender studies scholars here, Fred Flinstone. Their failures as husbands/fathers turns their wives into the real head of the household cleaning up their messes, so to speak.
For more recent examples, I'll point to The Simpsons and its massive influence especially in animation, visually shorting "incompetent man" with "overweight." One of the key things about Simpsons that is sometimes lost today is that the earlier marketing push and focus of the show was actually on Bart! But when the focus switched Homer, the schlub to end all schlubs--that was when the show really became a success. Homer's constant failures to measure up as a man, not just a person, undergird some of the show's appeal.
What do our 1950s and modern archetypes of the failed man surrounded by competent women have in common? With due nods to exceptions--they are working class.
This isn't just a trope about random men failing at being men. It is specifically about working-class men not living up to the proper standard, and more importantly, failing through their own faults. It's the flip side of the moral preached by Leave It to Beaver or Family Ties or you might say especially Full House. Competent as successful middle-class men, they are rewarded narratively with competence in the ultimate proving ground of gender norms: the family.
I want to cut off the discussion and examples in the early 1990s as later developments, I think, will inevitably stray us too far into modern politics. /r/AskSocialScience might be a good place to discuss Everybody Loves Raymond or Malcolm in the Middle or, my favorite personal example, the cartoon FoxTrot.
Thus, while gender-role play is a stock tool of the World Upside Down, as the medieval examples show, it absolutely took on specifically modern manifestations in 20th century American pop culture, and the 1950s in particular. Though substantial numbers of American women had always worked, out of force or necessity, the visibility of women "who should be housewives" working--and being forced back out of the workforce after World War II--was rising. Restlessness over the gender norms on which the trope runs made it all the more powerful, but also all the more anxiety-provoking for some people. Men, who might feel targeted for emasculation by proxy; women, who might worry that no matter how beautiful and awesome they are, this could be their fate?
Drawing what were initially fairly rigid though not unbreakable class boundaries around the Failed Man (and in contrast, the Successful Man) served two purposes. First, for the people (men) watching Ralph not buy Alice a television on the television sets they owned, it separated them from feeling like a target. Second, it reinforced the "work hard and you will be successful" ideal of postwar upwardly-mobile society. As scholars have argued, family-based programming in 1950s television actually helped coalesce and propagate a new sense of American identity as white, middle-class, suburban.
It's not an accident that the 1950s, and not earlier eras with similar social traits, became the go-to nostalgia decade of "a simpler time" in all its euphemistic glory.
Further Reading: