An interesting take

Dorothy Sayers, in an address titled "Are Women Human?", which she gave to a Women's Society in 1938, gave an answer to the chauvinist objection that women were "taking men's jobs" by listing a number of female occupations in medieval times that had since then been taken over by men:

It is a formidable list of jobs:  the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry.  The whole catering industry and...the whole of the nation's brewing and distilling.  All the preserving, pickling and bottling industry, all the bacon-curing.  And (since in those days a man was often absent from home for months together on war or business) a very large share in the management of landed estates.... Even the dairy-maid in her simple bonnet has gone....

Sayers believed that work should be done by those who are best fitted for it, whether male or female, and that the work should be not only well done, but also worth doing well. Since industrialization had taken over much of women's traditional work, then women should be allowed to take on other kinds of work.

The more modern book Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes, similarly chronicles the shift of industry out of and away from the home, and suggests ways to bring some of it back in. It has been a number of years since I read this book, but it is safe to say that she wasn't a conservative Christian when she wrote it. More like an anti-capitalist feminist.

Neither of these authors concerned themselves much, if I remember rightly, with the idea of home being the place for the production of new people. That is another thing has largely been outsourced, over the last few decades, in this case to other countries. In her speech, Sayers did mention the impossibility of housing a family with a dozen children in "a small flat", but she was perhaps forgetting the small size of many medieval peasant dwellings. Even my father-in-law grew up in a house that was under 450 square feet, and they weren't so far from having a dozen children.

There is a book that I used to own, The Structures of Everyday Life:  The Limits of the Possible, that goes deeply into the economics of European life, a few centuries after the Medieval period. Most families owned only a few pieces of furniture. France at one point instituted a prize for families that reached twelve children, although it was not able to feed the population that it already had; the book said that there were many French families at that time with twenty children or more.