my crazy take is that you can't really understand american gender roles unless you understand that they're basically a reactionary backlash / trauma response to the events of world war 2
but then we get to the boomers
the boomers *grew up in the fantasy*
due to their demographic predominance their strangehold on politics has endured for so very long that all the rest of us are still forced to relive their childhood nostalgia for their parents trauma-fantasies