I'm going to do this in Two Parts. (It was going to be three but Reddit didn't like that. I reorganized it into 2)

This is a great question that needs to be broken down quite a bit. The first thing you need to think about is what "does it mean to work?" The second thing you ask is "which women?" We also have to situate the question in western history, it gets even trickier if you start looking at other countries.

So if you go back before the industrial revolution and early capitalism everyone worked (except perhaps for the most elite groups in a society who lived a life of leisure, but even they had to oversee their lands and estates and attend to politics and economics and war in various ways). So whether you are talking about hunter-gathers, nomadic groups, small scale horticultural or large scale agricultural societies everyone worked to collect and grow and store food, make clothes and tools, build and maintain shelter, etc. The difference is, for most people there was little to no distinction between home and workplace, and certainly very little concept of sustaining yourself or your family solely through wage labor except as a live-in servant. You might sell things at market, or produce crafted items for income but these were largely family affairs where everyone participated in some way in the family economy which included things like spinning yarn and making cloth, etc.

In other words, if you went back in time before there was a large scale wage labor economy and asked people, "do women work" they would laugh at how absurd the question was -- of course women work! So do children and men and horses.

So its not until the rise of merchant capitalism and the vast extension of wage labor in industrialized urban areas that we begin to see people distinguish "paid work" from "domestic labor." Feminists going all the way back to the 1800's wrote about how women's labor became devalued when wage labor became dominant -- the money men, women and children brought home to buy food and supplies and pay rent was valued over the work women and children were doing to raise other children, to clean clothes, to process food for consumption and so on.

But it is important to remember that in the period of early industrialization everyone in the family would work for wages, even very young children. This seems kind of horrifying to us now, but you have to remember, that they were all working on the farm so it was not strange to think everyone should have to work once the wage economy is in place. Of course no one liked the idea that their children were working in deadly and hazardous conditions. But families had no choice if they wanted to survive they all had to work. There were few minimum wages, workplace safety laws, or social programs.

But already I have oversimplified the story tremendously because from the period of about 1600/1700-1900 we see a drastic transformation in the class structure of industrializing societies, we see the rise and expansion of the merchant and factory owning middle class. Don't let the word middle fool you -- these were rich folks. They were only "middle" because they were neither peasants nor royalty.

Among the royalty they tried as long as possible to stay a leisure class -- that is no one worked -- they oversaw the work of others. But family fortunes could go bad and then men might go into investments to raise money, but women were often kept in the leisure class, although not always. The rising middle class wanted to act more and more like the old money families and so women were eventually forbidden from any outside work. Suddenly Over time you have the gender division of labor where men go out and make money and women stay home to oversee the household. These women might volunteer or do charitable acts (a left over of the old feudal concept of noblesse oblige -- that is the responsibility of the rich to take care of the less fortunate), but the cultural mythology became that the "public realm" of business and politics was a competitive, rough, manly environment that was too much for the fragile, delicate middle and upper class women who needed to stay home and be protected by their husbands. The irony being that these same husbands went to work overseeing factories full of women and children working themselves to death to create the profit that allowed the factory owner to keep his women and children safe.

So by the 1800's you have 2 things going on: the middle class is developing this narrative of home as a safe space for women and children who need to be protected from the world; and the plight of the poor is becoming more and more obvious as middle and upper class society women are doing volunteer work to help the poor. You also have a rise in the education of middle class women -- not public education, but education at home so that they can read and write and speak languages and play instruments -- to make them more like royalty (and maybe even marry them into those families). And you know what happens when you educate a woman? She suddenly gets opinions! These middle class women (and others including labor organizers) start arguing for the protection of poor women and children in the factories. This culminates in the British Factory Acts of 1833 which provide some protections to women and children in factories. More Factory Acts will follow in Britain and elsewhere eventually leading to the exclusion of children from labor, the rise of public schools, and the movement of women out of labor even in among the working classes.

So yea, you have a period of time when working class women were happy to get out of the workforce as long as the wages of their husbands were going up. They could then do more work at home and taking care of the children. Remember, this is before birth control and at a time when paid labor was incredibly dangerous. Who wouldn't want to get out?

So now I am going to shift the US context because this is what I know better. By the 1850's you have the development of what we call First Wave Feminism. It lasts up until the Civil War, but continues in some sense through 1920's. In 1848 there is a big meeting called the Seneca Falls Meeting made up of political progressives, suffragists (wanted the right to vote for women) and abolitionists (wanted to end slavery). The wrote a Declaration of the Sentiments of Women that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

First wave feminists were a pretty diverse group and included black and white men and women. Of course with our selective history and due to some of the later debates within the group we tend to focus on the white women in first wave feminism. The were unified at first around the ideas of votes for women and ending slavery. But each had different ideas about what else should be accomplished, and eventually some white women were sadly willing to give up on ending slavery if they could get the vote. Some abolition were willing to give up votes for women in exchange for ending slavery. While I wish the coalition had held, in hindsight clearly ending slavery was the more pressing matter.

Part 2

But the point is that many first wave feminists did critique the gendered division of wage labor and domestic labor. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps the best known of these writers and she argues that capitalism is built on the unpaid labor of women. More frequently than demanding entry to the wage labor market, the first wave feminists focused on entry into the political sphere. Jane Addams (an early sociologist, social worker, and Nobel Peace Prize winner) argued for what she called "social housekeeping." That women needed a voice in social and government policy because they knew best how to care for members of the family and by extension, the members of the nation.

This isn't to say that there weren't women demanding more entry into previously male workplaces. Many were -- but the movement was mainly made up of very well off women and so they wanted to be doctors and lawyers and authors and politicians -- very few were asking to get factory work. But it would also be incorrect to say that women at this period did not work. First of all, black women were enslaved along with men, doing the same work as men. Poor white women and poor free black women were working as domestic laborers, migrant farm workers, and doing other jobs allowed to women at the time.

So the notion that "women didn't work" was ALWAYS false. Women have always worked in the US -- as paid or unpaid domestic workers, agricultural labor, teachers, nannies, nurses, etc. Before WWII the majority of women in the US were poor or working class and they worked.

The next big shake up of gender and labor happens in WWII when the men are all sent overseas to fight. The US create a massive campaign to get women into factory work making war machines, boats, vehicles and ammunition. They advertise subsidized child care (but rarely come through). So for the first time, large number of poor white women and poor women of color can get decent jobs with high pay, and middle class women can go into the workforce. Women embraced the opportunity. Women also went into the military in various capacities. When the war was over, there was a big campaign to get women out of the workforce and back into the home -- many of them wanted to stay employed.

Now here is where we get to the first time in the history of humanity that most women in a society do not work (although that excludes all the work of unpaid domestic labor). After WWII the US enters a phase of completely rebuilding and changing society. We go from being a nation of farmers to a nation of workers -- we create the modern American middle class. We do this by building suburbs, massively re-tooling war industries into peacetime production plants -- autos, refrigerators, etc, building an entire set of public schools and parks and highways, creating the current system of state college and universities, developing the military industrial complex and sending GI's to college and job training. Everything you think of as classic 1950's was engineered through government-business partnerships and social planning. We decided that a single male income earner should make enough to have a family, buy a house, own a car, and have barbecues. We created the working middle class -- now not only elite middle class women would stay home, but most American women could stay home. (as long as they were white, this was a period of redlining and denying non-white folks entrance to the American dream).

So the post war boom and the building of the modern American middle class led to the baby boomers, and they went off to college in the 60's and 70's. And like I said earlier, you know what happens when you educate a woman? The second wave of feminism is in this period. The primary focuses of second wave feminism are equal access to work (to allow women to be economically independent) and control over child-bearing (also required for independence).

Second wave feminism coincides with a global economic crisis in the 1970's that causes the US to shift away from its earlier model of a "family wage." Outcome of the 1970's crisis have been: the rise in Neo-liberal economics which says that we should tax low and spend less on government programs. Let rich people invest in society instead of having the government invest in society. We have shipped our working middle class jobs overseas so that we no longer have a very large working middle class. The only way to be middle class in the US now is to get a "white collar" or professional job. That's why so many more students are trying to go to college. Unfortunately there are not enough good stable middle class jobs for everyone who wants to be middle class. More and more people are working multiple jobs with flexible schedules and few benefits (insurance and retirement). Every family needs 2 income earners to stay middle class.

So scholars are split on how much the entry of women into the workplace in the 1980's-today was based on feminism and women's desires for freedom, and how much is an outcome of the economy pushing women to work. Like most of these debates, it probably comes down to both things. Turns out women do like independence and being able to be free from domination by men, but they don't love being exploited in the capitalism workplace. So yea, some women hate having to work for wages. And of course motherhood and whether or not we have family leave policies is going to impact whether or not women work, so I am not sure what that Washington Times article is trying to say except that they don't like feminism.

We have not equalized domestic labor -- it is still primarily done by women. If you add up the number of hours women and men work both for wages and in domestic labor, women work 2/3 more hours per week than men. There are a lot of women with children who wish they could spend more time devoted to their kids and still be able to get back into the workforce later. There are lots of men who would like to spend more time with their families but can not if they want to stay on track for raises and promotions. And poor and working class families are still working harder than middle class families. Women who clean houses for a living are more likely to want to stay home than women who are college professors.

Of the other sources you link to all I can say is that Angry Harry is neither a historian, an economist, or a gender studies person. He is clearly interested in proving his ideas are right regardless of history (and his history is bad).

Edit: TL;DR Women have always worked. From the beginning of human history. But a bizarre thing happened because of the rise of industrial capitalism and we decided to only count as work the work that people did for wages. Then we decided if a man had enough money to support his wife without her working for wages, he should do so. Thus poor women have always worked even when we said women shouldn't work. Today women are responsible not only for paid labor, but also for all the unpaid labor of the household. So women work 2/3 more hours/week than men. And this is a gross generalization based on the history of the US and Britain.

Sorry, I don't know why Part 2 got swallowed, but here it is:

Part 2

So now I am going to shift the US context because this is what I know better. By the 1850's you have the development of what we call First Wave Feminism. It lasts up until the Civil War, but continues in some sense through 1920's. In 1848 there is a big meeting called the Seneca Falls Meeting made up of political progressives, suffragists (wanted the right to vote for women) and abolitionists (wanted to end slavery). The wrote a Declaration of the Sentiments of Women that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

First wave feminists were a pretty diverse group and included black and white men and women. Of course with our selective history and due to some of the later debates within the group we tend to focus on the white women in first wave feminism. The were unified at first around the ideas of votes for women and ending slavery. But each had different ideas about what else should be accomplished, and eventually some white women were sadly willing to give up on ending slavery if they could get the vote. Some abolition were willing to give up votes for women in exchange for ending slavery. While I wish the coalition had held, in hindsight clearly ending slavery was the more pressing matter.

But the point is that many first wave feminists did critique the gendered division of wage labor and domestic labor. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps the best known of these writers and she argues that capitalism is built on the unpaid labor of women. More frequently than demanding entry to the wage labor market, the first wave feminists focused on entry into the political sphere. Jane Addams (an early sociologist, social worker, and Nobel Peace Prize winner) argued for what she called "social housekeeping." That women needed a voice in social and government policy because they knew best how to care for members of the family and by extension, the members of the nation.

This isn't to say that there weren't women demanding more entry into previously male workplaces. Many were -- but the movement was mainly made up of very well off women and so they wanted to be doctors and lawyers and authors and politicians -- very few were asking to get factory work. But it would also be incorrect to say that women at this period did not work. First of all, black women were enslaved along with men, doing the same work as men. Poor white women and poor free black women were working as domestic laborers, migrant farm workers, and doing other jobs allowed to women at the time.

So the notion that "women didn't work" was ALWAYS false. Women have always worked in the US -- as paid or unpaid domestic workers, agricultural labor, teachers, nannies, nurses, etc. Before WWII the majority of women in the US were poor or working class and they worked.

The next big shake up of gender and labor happens in WWII when the men are all sent overseas to fight. The US create a massive campaign to get women into factory work making war machines, boats, vehicles and ammunition. They advertise subsidized child care (but rarely come through). So for the first time, large number of poor white women and poor women of color can get decent jobs with high pay, and middle class women can go into the workforce. Women embraced the opportunity. Women also went into the military in various capacities. When the war was over, there was a big campaign to get women out of the workforce and back into the home -- many of them wanted to stay employed.

Now here is where we get to the first time in the history of humanity that most women in a society do not work (although that excludes all the work of unpaid domestic labor). After WWII the US enters a phase of completely rebuilding and changing society. We go from being a nation of farmers to a nation of workers -- we create the modern American middle class. We do this by building suburbs, massively re-tooling war industries into peacetime production plants -- autos, refrigerators, etc, building an entire set of public schools and parks and highways, creating the current system of state college and universities, developing the military industrial complex and sending GI's to college and job training. Everything you think of as classic 1950's was engineered through government-business partnerships and social planning. We decided that a single male income earner should make enough to have a family, buy a house, own a car, and have barbecues. We created the working middle class -- now not only elite middle class women would stay home, but most American women could stay home. (as long as they were white, this was a period of redlining and denying non-white folks entrance to the American dream).

I am actually going to have to make this 3 parts...