Reverting to the norm means most of us die as infants and toddlers or in childbirth, while a wealthy handful live lives of immense privilege.

I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.

Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.

Good point.

Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.

Following your argument we should just outright reject progress because, for the most part, humanity has been really really shitty. Also, how much thought did you put into it before writing that this type of society isn't sustainable? Can't the things that happened since (mostly, a massive wealth consolidation) be undone? Why?

And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.

Surely you're not suggesting...

And it wasn't as good as it's often mythologised to be. Back in the 60s (in Australia) people weren't going on holidays overseas, they lived in houses under half the size of modern builds, they had worse healthcare and lived 13 years less, they had relatively monotonous diets (growing up, my mother's staple food was bread with dripping), they weren't buying new clothes, furniture, knickknacks all the time.

And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.

That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.

It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.