How do strict gender roles expand the working class? Strict gender roles such as the woman stays home to raise their kids and the man goes off to make the bacon most certainly did not expand the worker class except via making babies, which is a good thing. It was the tearing down of that paradigm, that caused a mass influx of women in the workforce and arguably is causing a steep decline in dual-parent households and all the social ills that come with that breakdown.
But then again the nuclear family is representative of heteronormativity and whiteness I suppose.
To a certain extent, strict gender roles do expand the working class... literally. The paradigm of "men work, women stay home and have lots and lots and
lots of babies" creates an endless renewable workforce. And strict gender roles embrace and encourage that dominant paradigm with rules like "women love babies and cleaning and belong in the home" and "men are strong and tough and excel at work and support their family by earning money" and so on. Compulsory heterosexuality is tied up in all of this, with the idea that women are weak and need a strong man to support them, that men are hopeless in the home and need a woman to clean their house and cook their dinner, etc.
Also, not to get all Liberal up in here, but I wouldn't say that women entering the workforce is what broke down the system. The massive inflation, rise in prices, corporate exploitation, etc. that
force both members of a given couple to work outside of the home in order to survive and support their family is what broke down the system. It is possible to have a functional system where one person can support a family without excluding women from a huge facet of public life, our societies just by and large aren't interested in making it happen because making everyone into docile, exhausted workers who are too tired from their jobs to protest societal problems is in the best interests of corporations and governments alike.
Remember how, back in the civil rights era, people who worked would often chip in and pay the rent for full-time protesters who put their efforts towards changing society, and it worked? Yeah, the government and especially the big corporations would like to make sure you don't have the time or money to do any of that - rent is too high, you work too many hours, you don't have enough time outside your job to even meet a revolutionary, etc.
