"Taking care of the household," was what a lot of people called it. The problem is, as OP pointed out, that involved a lot of stuff other than just cooking, cleaning, and caring for children.
For one, basic cleaning (as OP also pointed out) was a tedious, unending, unautomated task. You had no running water for a lot of that time, so you had to physically gather water, heat it up over a fire (or coal oven), and add the world's harshest lye soap to do something as basic as washing dishes or mopping. If the water was cold, the soap often didn't foam well. But there were other tasks.
Brewing beer and wine (required, because water was often unsafe to drink, so even kids drank watered-down wine and beer), making the harsh lye soap, dipping candles, weaving baskets, making unguents and other home healthcare remedies (because that was all most of them had), and if course, textiles - mending clothing, sewing clothing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, spinning, washing wool or other textile materials prior to making them into thread.
If it was a farm, they (daily) helped with the livestock and crops. Come harvest time, or butchering time, everyone on the farm, from kids to elders, pitched in however could.
Women often had to do the final processing of the raw materials of the farm, as well, aside from large cuts of meat. Leather-tanning, wool-washing, grain sifting, food-canning/preserving, sinew-drying (sinews are used to this day for binding things into place, fiber content, and leather-working), hoof-rendering (or preserving, if they were being sold to glue makers), etc.
Often, multiple families worked a farm, and most families were multigenerational. So grandma(s) would watch the children that were too young to help, while knitting or crocheting. Grandpa(s) would whittle bone and wood into useful things - knife handles, chair braces, etc. So the mothers could all do the things mentioned above, but often one would specialize in soap, another in weaving, another in spinning, etc. So they did have the luxury, often, of simply trading amongst the farm group, or the local village, for some things. They could even gather together to socialize while plying their craft - a "stitch and bitch," as it were. Until the industrial revolution, this was fairly common. Even in larger city centers, women usually socialized while doing their specialty chores, even if they were specialties that used the products of the farming communities.
But when the industrial revolution happened, multigenerational households started becoming less common. Husbands and wives wouldn't live with their parents, or take their ailing parents in. They had their own homes, and the husband would work in a factory and the women would do the same chores as before, only now they were more isolated. If they were lucky they had one grandparent to mind the children while they did the above things.
Honestly it's no wonder a lot of women actually preferred prostitution. It was less work. If you had a good local midwife, you had semi-accurate birth control, so you didn't even have to worry (as much) about dying in childbirth.
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