There are a whole number of details from education history that I find delightful. One is that during the decades following the Civil War, more Massachusetts women worked as school teachers than didn't. Basically, it was a rite of passage for a young woman to graduate from grammar or high school, get a teaching certificate, and teach for a year or two - sometimes longer. Another is that during the spread of common - later public schools - across the West and South, thousands of young women left their homes and traveled to communities often different than their own to open schools. Finally, at no one point in American education history has the distribution of teachers been close to 50/50 men/women. The closest was during the 1970s when the percentage of women teachers dropped to 66% and the percentage of men teachers rose to 34%.

Which is to say, the ultra conservative guy is blowing smoke. In effect, he's using the word "traditional" as a verbal shortcut to his listeners as a way to imply things used to be better, back when men were breadwinners and women were helpmates. The historical record, though, provides overwhelming evidence it's never really been that way, especially in America. (To be sure, there is a whole bunch to be said about how women's work is valued but that's for a different subreddit.)

Another example from education history can be found in "dame schools." In colonial America, long before the rise of common schools, communities often had a woman who ran what we can think of a colonial pre-school out of her home. These "dame schools" - so called because the woman was typically a widow with children of her own - took place in her home and most importantly as it relates to your question, while the woman was doing other work. Teaching wasn't her primary job - in all of the instances where someone has described attending or running a dame school, the woman was primarily occupied with doing what she needed to do to earn money (there are anecdotes about children sitting around the woman's spinning wheel when reciting from a text or getting thwapped on the forehead with a thimble or knitting needle when they made a mistake.)

This notion that "women's work" isn't as real as men's work isn't new. One of my favorite books about education is a rambling text from 1938 by Frances Donovan called "The Schoolma'am." She creates a taxonomy of sorts of different kinds of school teachers and offers her thoughts on things she's read or heard about teaching and teachers. In one section, "To Be or Not To Be A Schoolma'am", she expresses her frustration at the implication teaching is an easy job and not "real" work. She wrote:

The author of an article which appeared in a recent issue of one of our "quality" magazines stated that teaching is the only satisfactory part-time job now open to women. I wonder if this author has ever been a teacher!

The actual teaching hours in the classroom are scheduled from eight or nine in the morning to three or four in the afternoon, but the teacher, like the banker who remains at his desk long after the closing hours announced to the public, often discovers that after her last class has been dismissed, her working day has only just begun. Conferences with ... pupils, faculty or departmental meetings, sponsorship of the Girl Scout Troop, or activities of a similar nature, usually prolong her working day until its hours approximate, or even exceed, those of other workers. In fact, during the three years I spent in this "part-time" job I was forced to conclude that any teacher who left school before five in the afternoon was either lacking in conscience or devoid of that versatility which keeps the successful teacher in constant demand after her hours of work are supposed to be over.

And the evenings! Surely even an unthinking public will grant that a teacher's evenings ought to be her own. I spent my evenings in a review of the next day's assignments, in the correction of hundreds of papers, or in supervising community activities. An endless succession of evenings spent in this way did not prove either stimulating or refreshing.

So, to reiterate: women have always worked.

(For more on the specific topic of the division of labor as it relates to teaching, I would recommend John L. Rury's "Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930")

In addition to the excellent summary by /u/EdHistory101 with regards to women as educators, perhaps a broader answer might be, "Women have always worked", to borrow from the book of the same name (Kessler-Harris 2018). For the purposes of this answer I'm also defining "work" as labor done for compensation.

The idea of a stay-at-home mom as a "traditional" role for women is a bit of arbitration of that developed in the United States following the post-World War II prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s allowing for a single income household to be viable. However, even then, stay-at-home mothers wasn't universal with only about 50% of women fulfilling the role (Pew Research Center). When when stay-at-home mothers were more common, it didn't imply that women simply gave up all employment and part time employment (partially clerical work) was common (U.S. Department of Labor 1962). Likewise, labor records reflect an increase in women working as part of the labor force that is consistent with returning to work after children no longer need extensive care.

Broadening to a larger historical scale requires nuance due to the nature of the economies at the time. Returning to the definition that work is labor that is compensated for by others, things become muddled since self-employment (e.g., farmers, blacksmiths, etc.) becomes more common and fewer people worked for wages. However, the fact remains that women still worked in a diverse number of roles, although gendered career paths existed (ex., laundresses). Likewise, while you mention work outside of the home, work from inside the home in the form of piece work (fixed rate production of goods) was a common form of employment for women up to the Industrial Revolution, and many women moved from piece work in the home to working in textile factories.

In summary, women have always worked, and the idea that they didn't at any point is a "romanticized" view of stay-at-home moms from the 1950's to 1960's, which is in turn wildly inaccurate (see Coontz 2016).

​

Kessler-Harris, A. (2018). Women have always worked: a concise history. University of Illinois Press.

Rawcliffe, C. (2009). A marginal occupation? The medieval laundress and her work. Gender & History, 21(1), 147-169. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01539.x

Coontz, S. (2016). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. Hachette UK.

U.S. Department of Labor. (1962). Women Workers in 1960: Geographical Differences. (Women's Bureau Bulletin 284). U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/women/b0284_dolwb_1962.pdf

I’m going to talk about family farms in 19th century rural Scottish Gaelic immigrant communities in Atlantic Canada. These are mainly subsistence farms where food, fuel and clothing necessary to sustain the family are produced from the land itself, with very little cash involved.

The family is often more complex than we might think: it may consist of a husband and wife, their ten children, both of the husband’s grandmothers, the wife’s unmarried brother, and a child of the wife’s deceased sister, for example. Unmarried children often stayed with their parents well into adulthood.

The amount of labour that goes into creating food, fuel and clothing is intensive. In the communities we’re looking at, the fuel is usually firewood. The food is, roughly in order from most to least important, dairy, oats, root vegetables, fish, berries, wild game, beef, eggs, poultry, apples, green vegetables, barley, wheat, nuts and pork. The clothing is wool from sheep and linen from flax.

Most tasks are gendered, though the gendering isn’t always what we might expect. Milking the cows is women’s work, as are all the elements of cheese and butter production. Chickens and egg management was allocated to women. Textile production from washing fleeces to spinning to weaving to fulling cloth was all done by women(I am unsure about the preparation of flax, some of that may have been men’s work.) Women helped with harvesting grains, gardening, picking berries and fruit, and did most of the preserving of fruits and vegetables. They also ground grains into flour on stone hand querns when mills weren’t available, as well as handling meal preparation and childcare.

Men were responsible for most of the work involving horses: ploughing, planting, haymaking, hauling logs out of the forest. There’s a saying to the effect that a woman hates the cows her husband bought before marriage and a man loathes the horses his wife bought before marriage, i.e. let the expert handle it. Men did all the cutting of trees, fencing, fishing, hunting, butchering and preparation of firewood.

A lot of animal herding was done by children/teens, both girls and boys. They also helped out the adults with many tasks.

Both men and women could earn cash (or more likely store credit) by selling excess butter, cheese, eggs, produce, carpentry work like axe handles, etc. to a local store. They would buy things like sugar, tea, tobacco, glass jars, molasses and cotton fabric.

Both the men’s and women’s work are vitally important to the livelihood and well being of the family. Many of the women’s tasks are physical: grinding grain, churning butter, doing laundry, milking cows, feeding animals, harvesting produce, fulling cloth. Women in this place and time absolutely did work and even earned money.

In addition to the other wonderful answers, I'd like to bring attention to the figure of the wet nurse, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries in France as I think this will give you a good window into the urban/rural divide when it came to female labor as well as what must be necessary for the western modern woman to "work".

Maternity leave isn't a new problem in the 21st century. In fact, the problem of what to do with nursing infants while women worked goes back centuries. In 18th and definitely by 19th century France, women working in the urban areas were subjected to intense demands and working conditions and were unable to take the time from work and a paycheque to nurse their children. It was also simply unfashionable for the bourgeois and upper classes to nurse their own children.

Luckily, there was a solution - the wet nurse. Wet nursing is a long tradition; in France, we have documentation going back to the 13th century showing that royal children were all nursed by hired women. "Sending out" children to be nursed by an employed rural woman grew in popularity, until by 1772, only 1000 of the 21,000 infants born in Paris were nursed by their mothers. Paris became, as Emmanuelle Romanet puts it, a city without infants. This number varied over the decades, and the French Revolution re-popularized nursing and women's commitment to the family, but maternal nursing rates remained low. By the mid 19th century, Gal Ventura, in Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art (2018), lists an estimate that 60% of Parisian women breastfed in the 1860s and 50% in the 1880s. George Sussman and Fanny Fay-Sallois give lower estimates of breastfeeding rates in the mid 1800s - it's hard to say with any certainty until 1874, which I'll get to later.

Those wealthy enough to do so (ie, the bourgeoise) hired their own wet nurses to stay with them in the city. These wet nurses would be paid handsomely. Fanny Fay-Sallois writes in her 1980 study of wet nursing in Paris, that in 1880 a nurse would be paid between 60-80 francs a month; far higher than the 16 francs average income of a rural woman. For 18 months of labor, a woman could earn 1200-1800 francs in addition to gifts of clothing and other objects she could use or sell. However, her movements would be quite curtailed (she could go to the garden or park with baby, and that was about it) and she would have to leave her own child with one of those other, cheaper, rural wet nurses. So even a woman who wasn't working and maintained a fashionable place in society and in her family relied on the paid labor of another woman to maintain and project this role.

Scandals regarding the treatment of nurses and the high mortality rate of infants placed in their care eventually led, in 1874, to the passing of the Roussel Law, which demanded the formation of a central bureau through which wet nursing placements would be arranged and tracked. From then to the first world war, an average of 80,000 infants a year were placed with wet nurses, and 15.1% died. (As an aside, I'm sure there are more specific numbers available if I were to peruse the original French government documents, but unfortunately I don't have access to those and must rely on George Sussman's summary of the numbers.)

Romanet, Emmanuelle. December 2013. "La mise en nourrice, une pratique repandue en France au XIXe siecele". Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Journal of Global Cultural Studies.

Fay-Sallois, Fanny. 1980. Les Nourrices à Paris au XIXème siècle. Payot.

Sussman, George D. 1982. Selling Mothers' Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715–1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Ventura, Gal. 2018. Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

I was listening to some ultra conservative guy talking about traditional gender roles and how women should not go out to work and it made me wonder, how traditional is that really?

If by work this guy meant "activity that receives a salary or payment", then not even most slaves worked and that would be historically inaccurate to say the least. Or does he mean 'work' as activities that only men were allowed to do? We may never know. Assuming he meant any kind of paid job outside of someone's household, then it is another story, as it depends on multiple factors, like culture, place and time. He possibly had in mind a middle class family in modern capitalism, within the era of food subsidies, some sort of stable economy and peace. Even for the past century, there are many testimonies of people that lived that kind of life this guy idealises, but were devastated by the crash of '29 - and that episode forced many women to do what they could when the man's salary became nonexistent or lighter. It is not like men from the past were immortal nor they did not have 'erratic behaviour' (like alcoholism and gambling) as well, so why should low and middle class women accept death from starvation or see their children die when there was no 'breadwinner'? If this guy at least tried to search basic key words like 'women' + 'factory'/'textiles'/'farm'+ modern (or medieval), he would be able to find many illustrations from the wished period, photographs when applicable, documents and testimonies... but people like him with such bold statements, more often than not, avoid doing that.

When I first saw your question, it immediately reminded me of a small part of an ancient comedy, where it shows a possible Athenian example (~411 b.C.) of the existence of women that worked outside of their households without being part of the "adult entertainment business" (which definitively existed on most of the Ancient World):

(...) you market women who sell grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, and those who run our bakeries and taverns, to the attack! [Ian Johnston's translation]

(...)[Come out here, all of you!] All you sellers of seed, of pumpkin, of peas and beans; of garlic and wine, of hotel beds and flour and bread! [George Theodoridis' translation]

(...) Forward, you spawn of the marketplace, you soup and vegetable mongers! Forward, you landladies, you hawkers of garlic and bread! [Jefrey Henderson's translation]
Aristophanes' Lysistrata, v. 456-458

As it is noticeable, the nuance of translation can make a difference on the image passed by those activities, but still shows that it was not impossible to the period that women could work on them. All that assuming that the guy's definition of 'work' is 'paid job outside of household'. If we were to use the modern definition, then women probably worked as long as men, mostly in other activities.