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Nornagest comments on Some thoughts on having children - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sexual division of labor is historically common (approaching ubiquitous), but a strict breadwinner/housekeeper model isn't a particularly good description of it in most of the times and places I'm familiar with. In forager societies, for example, it's common for both sexes to work as breadwinners, albeit targeting different food sources. Subsistence farmers (who make up a vast majority of the population in pretty much every preindustrial agrarian society) tend to work similarly; in a free 10th-century Scandinavian farmer's household, for example, you might see the adult men (it likely wouldn't have been a nuclear family) plowing fields and felling trees, while the adult women wove cloth, churned butter, tended animals and brewed beer.
I'm not terribly familiar with the evolution of the housewife institution, but I'd hazard a guess that it's an aspirational outgrowth of the division of labor in the upper classes of early modern societies (where "breadwinner" in the modern sense wouldn't have applied terribly well to either sex).
That's an interesting comment, thank you. Wikipedia says the divide is not ancient vs modern, but rather rural vs urban:
Few people mean forager values when use the term traditional values. I also not claim that the model has universal usage for everyone. I'm mainly saying that it should be considered, when it fulfills the utility functions of the involved persons.
When people in modern Western culture talk about traditional values, they usually mean the reputed values of the middle classes circa 1950 or so. The point I'm trying to make is that those values aren't necessarily reflective of the conditions most people lived under for most of history (never mind prehistory), and thus that they aren't necessarily a good guide to what people will "naturally" be happy with.