Your perception is either off base or limited to your particular social group.
My own observation is that up to and including the WWII generation, family labor was shared but divided by sex roles. Husbands did indeed perform the strenuous tasks, leaving the domestic chores to their wives. That arrangement has greatly diminished, beginning with the Boomers, and among those couples who are better off financially, pretty much all domestic labor has been outsourced.
Well in farm families (great grandparents were farmers) everyone did everything with great grandmother doing the cooking and working out in the fields with the men. Military family grandparents, same thing, you did what needed doing. It was with the hippy dippy parents where all that went out the window (briefly, before it all went kaput), and in jobs with suburban types where I began to be cautioned not to lift 25 pound objects for fear that my uterus would fall out!