I agree with your analysis up to here. Below this point, you begin to go into normative theorizing and I'm not surprised to disagree with you about the results.
I disagree on a number of counts here, but first of all I separate myself from 'feminists' who encourage the single-parent home. Personally I have never encountered anyone who would encourage such an arrangement, I have only heard from others that there are those who do. So forgive me if I call myself a feminist while supporting the father-and-mother two parent situation.
1. The essence of feminism is equal rights regardless of gender, and everything about feminism can be boiled down to that one basic principle; every question about a feminist position can be explained by going back to that one value.
2. Feminists by no means support the idea that women should be singlehandedly raising their children. In fact, they deplore the unequal expectations placed on women that demand from them all the responsibilities of rearing children while demanding nothing from the father, and blame them whenever a problem with a child comes up while absolving the father. They seek to re-connect the father with the family and even through the notion of the stay-at-home dad being an option.
3. Rather than "glamourizing" the workplace, feminists analyzed the power structure of society and correctly identified, among many, many, other things, the value of financial independence. Without such independence on the part of one partner, the other partner is entirely dominant in the relationship because the woman cannot possibly detach herself without losing financial support. Now, I am no supporter of alimony, but financial self-determination is essential in the modern world for any person to be safe from coercion.
4. As for "making any real provision for how the work women did in the home" would be done, you've already explained this quite well. After the agricultural era but especially during the 1950s, the amount of work demand to women in the home dropped precipitously, to the extent that women were essentially a labor force without a task (Meanwhile, the nature of the work outside the home became much less back-breaking or labor intensive). This was time that needed to be filled, and feminist theory came along at a propitious moment to fill it. Doing so meant no difference in the amount of mother-child contact compared to the original agricultural age.
If you were talking about single-parent homes, I think that applies equally to those headed by men and women and have nothing to do with gender. But as you are talking about gender, the experience of millions would indicate that women are happier having a choice of what to do with their lives without undue burdens or expectations from society, which are unreasonable except perhaps in the very stages of infancy, and that the equal ability of women within a working family to find careers has helped them a great deal. And I think the vast majority of women would agree.
Overall Dazzleman, these are very insightful comments. We agree on the same basic conclusions, even though we have different normative reactions to feminism. As for the latter, great strides have been made, but these are vulnerable strides, and there is still a societal disadvantage to being a woman in society overall. Given the strides that have been made in the past, it is not impossible that with some period of societal push towards equality, feminism will no longer be needed as substantive equality has been reached. While we are closer to that point, we are not there yet, and progress seems to have stalled of late.
