Taking care of young children is a full-time job. There's a reason that when a successful woman goes to work and has to hire a nanny to actually take care of her kids, she has to pay that nanny plenty--and the nanny will earn her money. If she has to hire someone to cook two or three meals a day, clean, do laundry, and run errands, she'll pay for a second person to do that. And she'll pay another to do the yardwork. These are the jobs that one housewife will do in the course of the average week. And trust me, the nanny, housekeeper, and yard man are not going to be wiping up kids' vomit at 3 a.m, spending hours with the pediatrician, making Halloween costumes, going to PTA meetings, volunteering in the church or classroom, or teaching their children to read.
Sure, there are some lazy housewives. They'd be lazy in the workplace, too. That's not the job, it's the individual.
Try being a housewife and mommy for young kids for a few months. If you do the job properly, you will find it's rewarding, but also tiring, and it's certainly more than forty hours a week.
Oh, Pleeeze. I have parenting experience. Not daddy goes to work type experience, but vomit and doctors office and making lunch and doing laundry and a costume type experience. And it ain’t a full time job unless you have diminished capacity or are trying to re-invent the wheel. There are a couple of years when little children benefit from a parent who takes full charge of their needs. But its still not a full time job unless you want the children to grow up to be needy liberals who expect the fork to magically appear in front of their mouths whenever they are hungry.