Interview with Stephanie Coontz, family historian,  about capitalism and families. Here are a couple of quotes that give you an idea of her ideas:

My research increasingly changed my point of view. Working with an anthropologist colleague, I began to see that the very mechanisms that initially reproduced cooperation and reciprocity in early foraging and horticultural societies also undermined both social and gender equality. Obviously, the family has long been a source of coercion and domination of women. But it’s also been a way of dominating men. First because parental control over women’s mating choices was also a way of controlling young men, and much later in history, because men’s responsibility for women has kept their shoulder to the grindstone, so to speak.

There were only a few decades that the male breadwinner family was a reality for the majority of families. It wasn’t until the early 1920s that a majority of kids grew up in a home where the mother was not either working alongside her husband on a farm or a small business or going out to work for wages, or the kids themselves weren’t going out to work for wages.